Leah Greenblatt

Barring any greater lessons on motivation or forgiveness, the movie becomes little more than an endurance test; one far easier — at least for the viewer — to fall away from than to stay.

It feels like an actor's film: a delicate, melancholy study in black and white, nearly every scene filled with careful silences and subtext.

Black Messiah's center of gravity has to be a Hampton you can't look away from, and Kaluuya — alternately raw, tender, and incendiary — duly electrifies every scene he's in. Righteous as the road may be, his Fred hasn't been flattened to fit the broad Wikipedia-worn contours of a martyr or a hero; he lives and breathes, down to the last indelible frame.

The movie settles into the blackest kind of buddy comedy — a lacerating slice of nihilism rooted in real despair, and real I-love-you-man tenderness too.

Mass, as maddening as it can be, still feels like an urgent and necessary movie, if not at all an easy one — and an exceptional opportunity too to watch four great character actors, finally called up from the sidelines to center stage, do what they do.

Jones — who trained intensively in voice work and American Sign Language for the role — has the gift of coming off like a genuine teenager, and more particularly a girl torn between her unique obligations to the people she's always loved and known and the bigger dreams she holds for herself.

The interviews are their own historical document, though it's the visceral thrill of being inside all those archival clips — the flick of Simone's wrist, an ecstatic face in the crowd — that makes Summer of Soul comes most fully alive, somehow both as fresh as yesterday and as far away as the moon.

In the larger sense of whatever a movie like this promises to be — that you will laugh (in a properly low-key English way) and cry (but not too outrageously), and feel the sudden, urgent need to drink milky tea and own a pair of dungarees — The Dig more than fulfills its destiny.

It's the combined incandescence of the stars at the center of the screen, not the ones meant to be gazed at through telescopes, that carries the movie; its best and truest source of light.

In the absence of a clean ending, then, what's left is the familiar intrigue of smart men squinting dolefully at distant horizons and bloodied crime scenes, an ocean of bottled-up feeling, and a movie that takes a good half of its secrets to the grave.

If Hathaway and Ejiofor are sometimes saddled with talky theatrical monologues that sound far more like a screenwriter's fever dream than the words of any ordinary human, they also commit in a way that manages to makes the leaps in tone and logic work, probably better than they should.

Gourav is frankly devastating, his face a cracked mask of pain and disbelief. In others he's ruthless, calculating, even cruel. It's the kind of performance that can either make or break a movie like this, and the broad sweep of Tiger, with its cavalcade of outsize themes and incidents, sometimes threatens to overtake him. But through his eyes, Balram's singular story — in all its wild, exuberant improbability — roars to life

Though an overwrought final hour dissipates the power of the first and its soft-focus end notes feel unearned, the film still leaves a bruising kind of mark.

Love’s most radical act may be the simple fact of its Blackness — that the faces at the center of the screen are ones that for so many decades we’d mostly see only in the margins of a movie like this, or not at all.

Like the best moments in Up or Wall-E or Inside Out, the alchemy of Soul's final scenes find Pixar at its most stirring and enduring, a marshmallow puff of surreal whimsy that somehow lightly touches the profound.

The movie offers few surprises and even less alacrity; and yet there's a cumulative weight to World that feels, if hardly new, still worth sitting through.

It almost seems churlish to single out one aspect of the film for unreality, when the whole thing is essentially one Riverdancing leprechaun short of a fairy tale. And when so many dangerous drinking games can be invented to accompany the rise and fall of Christopher Walken’s mystery brogue.

There are several arresting visual set pieces . . . And there's the more ordinary pleasure, too, of seeing this many good actors, snug and earnest in their jumpsuits, go to work. But the film often feels less like its own distinct narrative than a sort of greatest-hits amalgam of movies like The Martian, Gravity, Interstellar, Ad Astra, and all the others that came before.

There’s a loose, jazzy verve to the production, a sort of sonic and visual razzmatazz that gives the film a fanciful Oceans 11-style gloss. Mostly, though, Talk is just a chance to spend two hours watching Streep & Co. make the most of Deborah Eisenberg’s deliciously salty script, while Soderbergh — who also serves as cinematographer — shoots it all in ruthless, radiant light.

Mikkelsen has become perhaps Denmark’s most familiar face Stateside over the past decade. But he still feels most in his skin in roles like these, and in Round’s final ecstatic scene, the actor does what only true stars seem able to: Take the silly or messy or improbable, and make it fly.

There's an intimately lived-in quality to the film that feels almost documentary.

If Davis hadn't already taken home Oscar gold so recently, she'd almost certainly claim another prize here for the raw transformative verve of her performance; it's more than possible she still might. It's Boseman, though, in his final appearance on screen, who makes both the bitter and the sweet of the story sing: a pointed arrow of hurt and hope and untapped fury, heartbreakingly alive in every scene.

If the plot tends to outline its intentions in Sharpie — and veer into pure silliness by the final third — their presence pulls all that ridiculosity over the finish line: hardly a home run, but still a brittle, nasty bit of fun.

And for all the absurdist laughs (and not a few cringes) both men wring from it, their interplay feels both inherently ridiculous and entirely true to life; a bittersweet bromance writ in whiskey and spandex.

It's the smaller moments shared by the movie's flawed, humble characters — Loren twirling to old samba records in magic-hour sunlight; Karimi's Hamil teaching Momo how to reweave a rug — and its immersive Italian setting that make Life worth its sweet, meandering time.

In a year short on so many of those things, Jangle feels like finding something sweetly familiar but also new, finally, under the tree.

There's a better, weirder story in here somewhere — about teenage desire and social Darwinism, gender and perception — but the movie seems happy enough to settle for familiar, goofy jokes and jump scares; a freak flag half-flown.

The story then becomes less a forensic accounting of a masterpiece than a bittersweet ode to a certain slice of old Hollywood: part love letter, part cautionary tale, and still somehow a mystery.

As an instrument of righteousness and retribution, Let Him Go can feel both familiar and at times shockingly brutal, especially in its final climactic moments. Still, there's blunt power in the execution, most of it concentrated in Bezucha's moody big-sky atmosphere, and in the seasoned professionals he's found to tell the tale.

If the movie's entire axis spins on the kind of extreme discomfort comedy you almost need a pillow to chew on and a pile of Xanax to get through, that's also the particular genius of Baron Cohen, an artist who instinctively knows how to hold up a mirror — and that a cracked one can show us, maybe better than anything, exactly what we need to see.

This Witches, alas, has the misfortune of doubling down on all the late writer's eccentricities, while somehow finding only a fraction of his magic.

If wallpaper and polyester were any metric to judge a movie by, I'm Your Woman could have been a masterpiece.

It tells a story as urgent and beautifully human as almost anything on screen this year.

With or without that hallowed history, it's hard not to feel the lack of something in director Ben Wheatley's lush, ponderous update — the most obvious thing, perhaps, being Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine.

There's more to admire than to love in Azazel Jacobs' arch drawing-room comedy, with its surreal styling and arch Wes Anderson-y tics — and something essential lost, maybe, in screenwriter Patrick deWitt's own adaptation of his acclaimed 2018 novel of the same name.

A ramshackle, winningly raw coming-of-middle-age shot in vivid black and white but told in emotional Technicolor.

As a reverent highlight reel and a history lesson, The Glorias gets the job done; as a movie, though, it rarely sings.

The movie’s title, by the way, comes from the president’s own evaluation of his handling of the virus, a phrase he proudly repeated more than once.

Like a sturdier Mr. Rogers who just happens to prefer red anoraks to cardigans, Dick comes off as both a kind of holy sage and an extremely good sport — a man whose gentle, pure-hearted exuberance swells to fill nearly every frame.

Boys no doubt has its benefits as both a history lesson and an outsize acting showcase for its talented cast; as a film experience in 2020, though, it often comes as a kind of relief to know that the seismic half-century-plus since its creation — as a play and a 1970 film, then a play and a movie again — have given us so many other sweeter, deeper stories to tell.

Chicago 7 frames the past not just as entertaining prologue but a living document; one we ignore at our own peril.

The story itself, with its gorgeous interiors and jazzy Chet Baker soundtrack, turns out to be a bit of a wisp, a dandelion puff tossed to the gods of romance and prime Manhattan real estate. But if the emotional stakes never really seem all that crucial (love wins, in the end), Murray brings his own cosmic weight.

Jenkins and a nearly unrecognizable Winger make the most of their small monsters, peeling back layers of callousness and calculation to hint at the messier motivations underneath.

Durkin captures it all with a sort of menacing restraint, building a deeply disquieting mood from long, almost voyeuristic shots and loaded gazes.

What it does have in happy excess is Souza’s affable presence, and his remarkable trove of images.

The last 15 minutes are frankly devastating — catharsis, thy name is ugly-cry! — but it all feels a little manipulative and thinly told in the end; Nancy Meyers reset in the key of tragedy.

It's hard, too, to picture any actress other than McDormand (who also has a producer credit) in the part. She doesn't just become Fern, she creates her: melding Zhao's screenplay to her own fierce character in a way that feels almost uncannily real. Together, they've managed to make that rare thing: a film that feels both necessary and sublime.

There's an austerity to the film — long shots of stone and candlelight, clipped dialogue — that can feel rigorous, almost grim. But Lee (God's Own Country) is only building a richer kind of mood, and priming the canvas for his actresses, who reward that faith with remarkable performances.

A quintessentially American tale; profane, profound, and beautiful.

With a cast so large and so consistently good, it's nearly impossible to single out more than a few players, though it's maybe most gratifying to see Holland so far from Peter Parker mode; his performance is delicately underplayed, which is not a claim Pattinson can probably make with a straight face.

Richardson and Ferreira have a sweet, sharp chemistry: one the type-A perfectionist trying desperately to keep it together, the other a hedonist in green fun fur whose outrageous exterior masks a deeper hurt.

Lee's hand in all this seems to be a light one; aside from his intimate but unobtrusive camerawork, the show appears essentially unaltered from the live performance.

Whether its stronger rating and more somber tone will translate to a home-bound family audience, only time and streaming revenues will tell; in the meantime, Mulan might be the closest thing to a true old-fashioned theater-going experience the end of this strange summer will see.

The star works valiantly to channel Eden/Veronica's pain and confusion, and the whole humanity of a life her captors so casually dismiss. As a performer, she commits utterly; if only the story could do the same.

Mostly, the joy comes from watching Reeves and Winter on screen, two holy fools just doing their best to bring light and love and non-heinous riffs — and remind the bleary-eyed citizens of 2020, perhaps, of a simpler, sweeter world gone by.

The movie's just pure fun; a cock-eyed Valentine to a place so outrageous that death or dismemberment was an actual acceptable risk — but so was the chance to live, as one former security guard fondly recalls, in “an ‘80s movie that was real life. And it will never happen again.”

Buckley and Plemons are left to carry that water for much of I'm Thinking's 134-minute runtime, and they're both fantastically game, infusing the movie's heady concepts with a naturalism that borders on heroic.

Amidst all his meta tricks — the winky callouts to Wikipedia, the deliberately kitsch sets and incongruous soundtrack — Tesla’s own story ultimately fades; a small, bright light lost in the bigger spectacle.

It doesn't help that Pistorius' Rachel spends the first 75 of it like a woman who's never seen a horror movie — if there were noises in the basement, she'd run right down to investigate with a plastic spork in her hand — and the final 15 like a ninja assassin who invented them.

For all the patently corny bits and some 17 attempts at an ending, Power still somehow makes it easy to suspend your disbelief and your imaginary degree in biochemistry, and just let it ride.

Mostly though, State tells a story both heartbreaking and hopeful: part C-Span, part Lord of the Flies, and wholly unforgettable.

It feels almost churlish to fault the film for its weightlessness, when light is exactly what movies like this are meant to provide: a fizzy, sun-drenched escape from the pale monotony of our own lives.

Wildly unsettling and original.

A film whose big ideas strain against the staid outlines of traditional screen storytelling — though budget alone can't be blamed for its odd jumps and tonal twists, from earnest biography to magical realism and back again.

At times, Amulet can feel a little too in love with style over story; immoderately hung up on gooey close-ups of gutted fish or Magda engaged in a sort of jerky, mesmerizing dance whose offbeat rhythms rival Elaine on Seinfeld. But even as it builds toward a more conventional climax — only the first, it turns out, of several twist endings — the movie casts a grim sort of spell; a brooding, stifled dread that creeps in quietly from the margins, and lingers long after the last triumphant frame.

A neat, nasty little thriller with a brutally effective final third.

If the setup feels quotidian, the tension still climbs steadily, egged on by Edna's increasing confusion and cognitive decline and Kay and Sam's conflicting ideas of what should be done about it. But it's the final scene, it turns out, that James has saved her chips for: a haunting tableau both gruesome and beautiful and somehow, full of love.

At its core, the movie is too in love with love — or at least its messy, time-jumping ideal of it — for that kind of true discomfort comedy. That makes it less brave, maybe, but in this moment we're living in, who could begrudge a happy ending?

That leaves a movie that, beneath its strong female presence and few contemporary bits of flair, has a sort of inevitable bog-standard action feel, just entertaining enough in its live-die-repeat machinations to pass the minimal engagement test.

The movie maps its course by Hanks' steady hand: A ship moving swiftly and with sure purpose — compelled by death and danger, but safe in the certainty of history.

If it all feels like less than the sum of all that wig glue and flop sweat and silver lamé — and far short of Ferrell's best — it's also still the kind of movie that frankly, the lowered expectations of These Times are made for: Not a new song or even a very good one, but somehow still enough to hum along.