Leah Greenblatt

A measured if still-maddening look into the 2016 USA Gymnastics scandal.

Even at 93 minutes, the material feels thin, and so does its moral message. But the movie's goofy, blunt-edged claustrophobia may also be its greatest gift to viewers: the chance to be grateful that the only ones haunting our own homes right now are us.

Davis and "Bloodline" Emmy winner Mendelsohn, both Australian screen veterans, do the less glamorous work of being sad, angry adults, though it's often their ordinary grief that grounds the movie, even as their stories lean into the clichés of certain coping mechanisms (Pills! Infidelity! Bargaining with God!).

Director Daniel Karslake (For the Bible Tells Me So) does that by homing in on singular tales — and letting them unfold largely without judgment or editorializing.

The script, which Davidson co-wrote, is rooted in his own childhood loss; his father, too, was a fireman, killed on 9/11. In its best moments the movie resonates with those realities, though it also comes packaged, like so many Apatow films, in a kind of incurable ramble — some two-plus hours dotted with pleasingly random cameos (Pamela Adlon, Steve Buscemi) and odd tonal shifts.

Even at the movie's silliest and most unsteady moments, she's (Wasikowska) the ballast: a Judy bruised but unbowed — and finally, fully ready to punch back.

The movie has its moments, some of them genuinely delightful. Still, there's a world where The High Note could have struck a stronger, deeper chord, and resonated.

What feels freshest, maybe, is the mere fact of two leads of color taking on all the tropes of the genre and making it feel as modern as they do.

Still, there's a sort of willful energy field between Giedroyc and Feldstein that pushes the story along; the blithe, anything-can-happen thrill that comes from being young in a world where anything is possible — including the right to wreck yourself spectacularly, rebuild, and then start it all over again.

Maybe what's most frustrating is how much the movie's deeper themes — morality, mortality, the twilight of power — churn intriguingly at the edges of nearly every scene only to turn toward sentiment, or become merely secondary to its relentless focus on his physical decline. There’s merit, of course, in exploring the good and bad in every man, even one as notorious as this one; Capone, in the end, just settles for ugly.

It's a fascinating story, this clash of 1960s idealism with the cold realities of modern science, though not one that director Matt Wolf (Wild Combination: A Story of Arthur Russell) is fully able to bite off and chew in Spaceship Earth, his fitfully enthralling but frustratingly incomplete documentary.

A gentle, almost willfully recessive story about love and loss and all the ways that people find to share the burden of them both, one unhurried day at a time.

As a director, Onwubolu brings a tender, vivid touch the film’s relationships — particularly Timmy’s giddy plunge into first love with the fiercely independent Leah (Karla Simone-Spence) — though he stumbles when it comes to building deeper storylines around them; there's almost no narrative turn that doesn't seem telegraphed from the jump.

A nervy, deeply felt drama that gets a little lost on its winding path to redemption but still finds a way home.

Director Cory Finley (who also helmed 2017’s great, underappreciated "Thoroughbreds") brings a light touch to Mike Makowsky’s script, nimbly balancing broader comedy and pathos.

You can see gifted actors like Hoult and MacKay struggling to make the most of the material, and add finer shadings to Shaun Grant's bare-knuckled script. But for all its real visual flair, it's hard not to feel that the film misses something crucial about Kelly in the end — trading machismo for manhood, and sensation for true history.

Extraction mostly delivers what its swaggering trailer promises: international scenery; insidious villains; a taciturn, tree-trunk Aussie. And the comfort of knowing that the kids — or at least the one he came for — are probably alright.

If only hilarity ensued; instead, Wedding manages to feel both overwrought and underbaked, consistently squeezing the natural charm out of its players in order to bang their hapless miscommunications and personality quirks into the ground. It's enough to make it through once; Repeat may be a bridge too far.

It helps immensely that the film has an actress like Amy Ryan (Birdman, Beautiful Boy) to play Mari Gilbert, whose years-long battle to get anyone at all — the press, the police, the people of New York — to care about her daughter Shannan forms the emotional core of the story.

Fists will smash; pecs will flex; hard consonants, like dirty cops, don't stand a chance. It's the only sure thing in this crazy world, kids — except maybe a sequel.

A bittersweet comic absurdity, told in the rhythms of real life.

If Bening’s genteel British accent sometimes feels a little wobbly, her character is by far the most vivid force in the film.

Affleck keeps the movie anchored with his rumpled, unshowy performance: a man killing himself to live, until he can start to believe that maybe there's a better way.

Even at a relatively brief hour and 37 minutes, the familiar contours of Scanlon's story line struggle to conjure the wonder that Pixar’s most transcendent movies do; instead of truly new, it’s mostly old things borrowed, and tinted blue.

If Big Time isn’t exactly a PSA for good adulting, it’s still an endearingly messy portrait of boyhood and manhood and all the lessons in between.

If the buildup and catharsis of its final minutes are more than a little silly, and marred by Whannell’s urge to put too neat bow on it all, the movie still has its satisfying jolts — including possibly one of the single most shocking screen deaths so far this year.

The freshness is found, primarily, in the energy of her storytelling and her vital young cast.

As an attempt to scale the craggy heights of a marriage in crisis, Downhill may be more bunny slope than black diamond — a force mineure, but still worth the trip.

Though it also feels like the kind of movie you wish they made more often for all the boys, and girls, still figuring out who they are — especially the ones who don’t tend to see themselves nearly enough on screen: a reflection shinier than real life maybe, but generous and good-hearted to the core.

Does the movie’s pop-feminist message need to be as consistently, cartoonishly violent as it is? Almost definitely not. But in a world gone mad, the catharsis of Prey’s twisted sisterhood doesn’t just read as pandemonium for its own sake; it’s actually pretty damn sweet.

In the second half, the movie even manages a few rare moments of visceral thrill, and even something like catharsis. But nothing ever quite gels; instead, the story just keeps banging toward its bloody conclusion, always a little off the beat.

Zeitlin has a gift for casting vivid new talent, and for creating images that read like fevered visual poetry: gorgeously saturated tableaus of the natural world, all luminous light and color. But he also tends to strip away nearly every necessary aspect of plot and character development in his strenuous pursuit of whimsy.

If the subject ultimately proves to be more slippery and diffuse than in the duo’s previous films (The Invisible War addressed sexual assault in the military, The Hunting Ground, campus rape), it also never feels like less than required viewing: brutal, heartbreaking, and — with or without Oprah’s co-sign — utterly necessary.

As satire, Woman‘s first two acts are fun but broad: a winky, wildly stylized slice of girl-powered revenge porn. And Mulligan, who’s always given smart, delicately shaded performances in movies like Far from the Madding Crowd and An Education (she was great in 2018’s underseen Wildlife) is an entirely different animal here: furious, damaged, ferociously funny.

Ironbark might not be a great film in the end, but it is a satisfying good one — a story that’s at its best when it colors outside the black and white (or Communist red, as it were) lines of war and hones in on the real, fallible men and women who fight it, one quiet inglorious step at a time.

If Paige and Keogh weren’t both such indelible, fiercely charismatic characters, the whole thing could easily fall apart. But their presence, and Bravo’s singular vision, give Zola a sort of electric buzz: the thrill of watching something stranger than fiction, and somehow better than true.

Instead of melodrama, the movie finds its traction in parsing out micro-aggressions and mood: a sort of devastating slow-drip portrait of the power structures that allowed a man like Weinstein to happen — and keep more like him in place, untouched by any justice a hashtag can reach.

You wish you’d seen more of this Taylor a long time ago. But that’s the point of the whole movie, maybe: She was always there; it just took her 30 years to get to here.

The Gentlemen is nothing if not a callback to the Locks of yesteryear, star-stacked and defibrillated with enough juice to jolt a gorilla out of cardiac arrest.

The film is so eager to please, so relentlessly quippy and quirky and tipped with antic whimsy, it often feels like visiting a zoo built into a Tilt-A-Whirl.

Banter and bullets is the action-movie MO, and the duo at the center of it hardly seem to have to stretch to spread their bickering charm on thick. By the shock-and-awe climax, though — when everything but the goatee pretty much goes up in flames — other things have worn thin.

She’s (Stewart) just another action hero — albeit a smart, flinty one with exceptionally good hair — learning the hard way that under the sea, as in space, no one can hear you scream.

Clemency does what few other movies about death row have, handling a thorny, infinitely complicated subject in terms that are neither moralizing nor melodramatic. And Chukwu’s clean-lined storytelling has an undeniable pull; something quietly incandescent at the center. In the end though, it’s hard not to wish that she’d let a little more light in.

Even after 110 tumbling, tail-swishing, deeply psychedelic minutes, it’s hard to know if you ever really knew anything — except that C is for Cats, C is for Crazy, and C is probably the grade this cinematic lunacy deserves, in the sense of making any sense at all. And yet that somewhere under the Jellicle moonlight, it is somehow, too, an A++.

A sort of forgettable Christmas wisp, a black-hearted jingle bell only half-rung.

As a filmmaker, Eastwood may not be famed for subtlety, but he does have a way with economy. And he delivers Jewell’s story with almost no unnecessary flourishes; a taut, streamlined drama leavened by crucial doses of empathy.

As these vastly different men parry, spar, and circle one another, Meirelles’ intimately talky two-hander — not counting, depending on how you might choose to qualify these things, a third invisible hand upstairs — works with wit and quiet humor to demystify perhaps the most powerful and insular post in the world.

Bombshell belongs to its three main female stars. It’s their fierce, finely shaded performances that transcend the film’s drab visual style and drier episodic moments — not just by speaking truth to power, but by confronting the audience’s own ideas of who the right to do that belongs to.

There’s almost no single moment in Portrait of a Lady on Fire that couldn’t be captured, mounted, and hung on a wall as high art. That’s how visually ravishing it is to experience writer-director Céline Sciamma’s arthouse swoon of movie — winner of both the Queer Palm and Best Screenplay at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Jones reportedly did nearly all the stunts herself in a real balloon, and she makes the stakes feel fretfully real despite the dreamy, almost painterly quality of George Steel’s cinematography. By the time the story comes back to earth, though, that urgency is largely gone with the wind, and the film returns to what it was: a whimsical, oddly airless curiosity.

The film belongs to Chapman and more than anyone, MacKay, a 27-year-old Londoner with the long bones and baleful eyes of a porcelain saint or a lost Caulkin brother. His Lance Corporal Schofield isn’t just a surrogate Everyman; he’s hope and fear personified, and you couldn’t look away if you wanted to.

If Gerwig’s woke Women-hood verges on anachronism, though, it also feels fully loyal to the spirit of Alcott, a woman always well ahead of her time. And like a sort of balm too, for an era when the novel’s long-held values — courage, kindness, strength in vulnerability — still feel a lot further away than they should.

What feels important in Parkland is less about pushing any kind of political agenda or viewpoint than about simply listening, and bearing witness.

It’s not a bad setup, and Bridges would be a better movie, easily, if it had let a little more nuance creep into its script. Instead, it lays the task squarely on Boseman’s shoulders — having him fill in all those broad strokes with his own fine lines, and spraying bullets and mayhem across the rest.

These Waters never quite run as strong or as deep as they should.

In the sometimes overstuffed script there’s more than a touch, too, of the TV projects two of its stars are best known for: This Is Us (Brown) and Euphoria (Demie). If the pairing of those two wildly different shows sounds counterintuitive, it speaks, maybe, to how much Shults seems to want to fit into Waves both dramatically and style-wise. In end though, substance — or at least his sincere approximation of it — wins.

It takes a lot of talent, apparently, to make a movie like Last Christmas — a pile-on of dingle-bell schmaltz so deeply ridiculous it’s almost hard to believe all the top-tier names that went into it.

Harris, eyes blazing, brings a humanity and an urgency that serve the story maybe more than it deserves: a performance above and beyond the call of duty.

But the truth, when it does come out, is devastating — to the point that it can feel invasive to watch such a profoundly private moment unfold on camera for our benefit.

It delivers something more and better, too: a moving, beautifully humanistic story whose inevitable hardships are laced with real hope and levity.

The mannered aye-matey dialogue often gives Lighthouse the performative feeling of a play, but Eggers (The Witch) is also a masterful stylist; judging by several cues, the story is set in some version of the 19th century, though it tends to treat time less as a set fact than a sort of metaphysical condition.

For all the flying intestines and skulls that split open like past-due melons, Double Tap has another squishy organ at its center: a big, goofball heart.

For kids maybe this is still magical; grownups, though, will waste many long, busily bedazzled minutes wondering why the powers that were able to bring Pfeiffer and Jolie together on screen couldn’t do at least marginally better by them both, and give them parts to truly sink their movie-star teeth into.

What’s left is primarily a series of grand battleground set pieces — filmed crunchily, and well — and a series of consistently strong performances. (Has Mendelsohn every not been menacing and great in anything?).

A serrating, brilliantly stylized portrait of class and fate and family in modern-day Korea.

It’s Nyong’o who makes Monsters worth spending 90 breezy, bloody minutes on; wielding her tiny guitar like she did a fateful pair of scissors earlier this year in Jordan Peele’s "Us," she’s both a warrior queen and a fallible, believable human woman — and never not a movie star in every scene.

Somehow though, the film registers as a strange, airless whiff — stale, inert, and oddly melancholy. The script rarely rises above the schematics of a thousand thrillers that languish on late-night cable, and the almost willfully cliché dialogue sounds as if it’s been generated by some kind of free-with-purchase screenwriting app.

Murphy...brings so much hope and hunger and pure life force to the role that he makes you believe in every punchline, pelvic thrust, and egregiously misplaced karate kick.

If a motley crew of movie stars is what it takes to shine more light on government malfeasance, then let Meryl carry that torch in a wig and a bucket hat. But as a pure movie-going experience, it’s all kind of a wash.

It all becomes a sort of muddle for a while midway, one that’s not nearly as compelling as the acting itself, which is largely phenomenal, frequently surprising, and often more than a little bit heartbreaking.

In the scheme of Almodóvar’s rich catalogue, Pain is probably too small, too sad, and too obtuse to really recommend as any kind of starting point. For longtime fans, though, it’s a gift; the kind of quiet glory worth waiting a few decades for.

Donald Trump was less kind, essentially abandoning him after his then still-secret diagnosis. Tyrnauer smartly doesn’t overplay the symbolism of their relationship, or work too hard to connect the dots; it’s all there to take or leave in the film’s shrewd, illuminating exploration of a man whose influence, for better or worse, may have far outdone even his wildest dreams.

Beneath all the chinchilla and body glitter, there’s a smart, beating heart.

Though it may not be an easy movie to watch, or even a particularly original one — there’s still Kramer vs. Kramer, after all — Marriage still feels like something special on the screen: a movie that somehow makes its intimacy seem like a radical act, one messy, heart-wrecking moment at a time.

If its aim to inspire and educate inevitably leaves the movie feeling a little classroom-bound, Harriet is still an impassioned, edifying portrait of a remarkable life, and a fitting showcase for the considerable talents of its star, Tony-winning British actress Cynthia Erivo.

A silly, stabby, supremely clever whodunnit that only really suffers from having too little room for each of its talented players to fully register in the film’s limited run time.

Hanks plays Fred as he lays: a sort of secular Buddha in a red knit cardigan whose gently probing questions and Zen proclamations work as a slow dissolving agent on Lloyd’s resistance.

The Goldfinch feels like more than the sum of its disparate parts; a painting in the wrong frame, maybe, but one whose imperfect beauty still draws you in.

Life is hard; Downton Abbey is easy.

It’s solidly rewarding to watch the wheels of Mercy turn, though the direction ... can’t seem to help falling into certain schematics that tend to follow movies like these: the original sin; the uplift; the leering good-old-boy sheriffs; the big-moment court scenes.

Waititi ... finds such strange, sweet humor in his storytelling that the movie somehow maintains its ballast, even when the tone inevitably (and it feels, necessarily) shifts.

If it all sometimes feels trapped in the amber of his intentions, Brooklyn still casts a quiet sort of spell: a meticulously, lovingly made mood piece, full of empathy for the ones who can’t speak — at least not always the way they want to — for themselves.

If the blond, marathon-lean Zellweger hardly seems like a natural doppelganger for Garland, she subsumes herself completely in the role, without ever tipping over into some kind of gestural Judy drag.

It’s a movie so well put together as a hero’s tale that it moves along almost too smoothly; the script by brothers Jez and John Henry Butterworth hits its marks of tragedy and triumph with a kind of shiny, measured inevitability.

The main problem with Chapter Two is that it goes on, and on, for so very long. If brevity is not necessarily the soul of a good scare, it would certainly serve a story that sends in the clowns, and then lets them just stay there — leering and lurking and chewing through scene after scene — until the there’s nothing left to do but laugh, or leave.

The thing that truly makes the movie, though, is Bell.

And even as the narrative goes through its sometimes sermonizing paces, it’s hard not to be moved by the singular passion of a woman who effectively dismantled her own life not just to salve her conscience, but to save the soul of a nation.

The movie, which bowed to uniformly rave reviews at Sundance earlier this year, is also — it will probably be noted ad nauseum — the first film collaboration from Barack and Michelle Obama’s new production company Higher Ground. But the heart and soul of American Factory, like all American factories, is never really politics of course; it’s people.

So come for the crossbows, etc., and to watch Weaving’s star be born in real time; stay for the socio-economic lessons and sweet, sweet revenge.

In the end, it’s their fundamental goodness — not all the wicked, winky “bad” — that’s easily the best thing about Boys.

Linklater, who brought such subtle, generous feeling to films like Boyhood and the Sunset trilogy, feels somehow miscast as the steward of Bernadette‘s willful eccentricities.

Love, faith, Springsteen; that and a Sony Walkman are all it takes to surrender to the pure, ingenuous joy of Blinded by the Light, a Technicolor ode to the power of music so deeply tender and heartfelt that it disarms even the most misanthropic critic’s instincts.

If the script’s epiphanies don’t feel quite as shocking or profound the second time around, it’s still pleasing to watch these beautiful, troubled people move through their equally beautiful spaces: something borrowed, something blue — and with Freundlich’s careful alterations, something new.

If One Child sometimes seems to raise more questions than it can answer, and more pain than it has room to explore, the movie offers an urgent and affecting reminder of what happens when the rule of law subsumes not just free will but the very act of existing — and the humanity that still, against all odds, endures.

There’s so much talent in The Kitchen, and so much of it wasted; that’s kind of all you can think about for most of writer-director Andrea Berloff’s debut.

Rain is not a bad movie, really, and it doesn’t sell itself as anything other than earnest, floppy-eared family entertainment. But there’s a gooey out-of-time feeling to the whole thing that a lot of films like these seem to have — a sentimental IV drip that steadily manipulates heartstrings without ever quite touching anything like true life.

No one gets off easy here, and no one quite gets answers, either; maybe that’s the point.

At nearly 140 minutes, the narrative takes its time wending toward a final, inevitable confrontation, and the incidents that punctuate it can sometimes feel like singularly ugly stations of the cross to be marked off; a series of random man- and nature-made cruelties meted out without pity.