Leah Greenblatt

At its inventive best—like the creation of a little cloth fox who never speaks but steals almost every scene he’s in—it does capture the odd, tender wonder of his world.

Even if the script’s psychological reach ultimately falls short, Colossal is still a clever, comic, wildly surreal ride — right up until the last sucker-punch frame.

A wry low-key dramedy that lands with surprising sweetness.

They don't really make fairy tales for women over 40. If they did, though, it might look a little like Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris — a featherweight meringue of a movie so sweet it threatens to float away on its own sugar high, if not for the sheer generosity of the story's premise and luminous commitment of its lead actress.

Even as the story's inevitable reckoning descends, Farhadi allows his modest morality tale to take on a note of battered, ambiguous hope: a cautionary fable whose purest notes ring poignantly, painfully true.

Nightmare Alley is both a beautiful-looking film and an oddly forgettable one, maybe because borrowed material is no match for the ingenious creations of del Toro's own mind.

The best scenes in Late Night are consistently the ones where the movie’s main stars spar and banter and intermittently connect; two unlikely satellites smashing into each other’s orbits, and maybe finding themselves in the wreckage.

Eric Appel's directorial debut essentially plays like a movie-length Funny or Die sketch — which it is, technically (or at least produced under that production umbrella): a giddy cameo-stacked satire propelled by murder, mayhem, Mexican drug lords, and athletic sex with Madonna. This is whole-cloth fantasy, of course, and that's the point: less Walk the Line than Walk Hard, with accordions.

As her success spikes exponentially, so does the film's momentum, shifting toward the more familiar touchstones of a traditional music doc: The smear of foreign cities seen through a town-car window; the endless roundelay of interviews, meet-and-greets, and promo signings.

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.

More disappointing, maybe, is how much the story takes Buckley's agency away as it goes on, her defiant, sharply defined presence in the first hour giving way to the bog-standard helplessness of every woman trapped in a horror movie. Men's eerie, encompassing mood lingers; the rest is a mystery.

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.

Åkerlund — the Swedish mastermind behind tastemaking music videos for the likes of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift — has jittery, high-gloss style to spare. But the primary-colored nihilism of his storytelling feels amateurish and ultimately exhausting; a gleefully unhinged teenage-boy dream that aims only for hard, shiny surfaces, and stays there.

Most illuminating are the various journalists, attorneys, witnesses, and admissions counselors who testify to the case

Havana’s crumbling trapped-in-time beauty also plays a starring role, but it’s Medina who provides the movie’s raw, tender heart.

As an acting showcase, Creatures is more than admirable; as a tourism ad for Ireland, untenable. As a movie experience, alas, it's both intriguing and teasingly incomplete.

Egerton’s whole-body commitment captures not just Elton’s outrageous physicality — in costume designer Julian Day’s hands, he’s essentially a one-man Mardi Gras — but his enduring sadness and insecurity (and the self-sabotaging behavior it was too often funneled through) without tipping into showbiz-tragedy cliché. He’s the starry-eyed cosmonaut the part demands, but merely, endearingly mortal too.

It’s Cooper, in his directing debut, who ultimately has to carry the film from both sides.

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.

In a world that seems to get uglier every day, this movie’s gentle heart and mere humanity feel like a salve.

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

The performances are strong and the story is absorbing; a smart diversion for adult attention spans.

Depending on your demographic, Bodies will probably either make you feel seen or utterly obsolete. But it's also just straight-up fun: a black-hearted comedy of manners meets contemporary social nightmare, written in blood and vape smoke.

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.

One day, Captain’s pint-size viewers will undoubtedly move on to Marvel’s spandex universe; until then, they’ve got this sweet, silly starter kit.

A big, unabashedly ambitious picture, heavy with the weight of history. But its best moments turn out to be the smaller human ones.

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.

Cha Cha feels like both a fitting showcase for a young auteur like Raiff and a larger marker of how much movie masculinity has evolved: a real-smooth manifesto for the anti-toxic man.

The real draw is seeing these two legends together again.

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.”

What works almost disturbingly well is the way Berg calibrates his delivery of the disaster while still holding on to the human scale of it.

The movie's stark Nordic mood and obscure mystery are as coolly immersive as nearly anything on screen this year — and in the hammy world of supernatural horror, that ambiguity alone feels like a small, spooky gift.

Most of Fighting’s narrative moves are as choreographed as any undercard match — and the outcome as clearly forecast — but the tears brought on by the movie’s last ten minutes of rhinestoned Rocky triumph taste salty, and real.

Bacon is great fun as a girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown, chirping with increasing desperation that she's fine, and Finn is a pleasingly nervy stylist, letting the camera tilt and flip at seasick angles and ratcheting the tension as he goes. Smile is a pretty silly movie by any metric; still, it has teeth.

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.

Her character, reportedly based on writer-director Lorene Scafaria’s own mother, isn’t drawn with any particular depth or nuance (and the broad New Yawk accent Sarandon tries on is about as authentically Brooklyn as a Sara Lee bagel).

The East is still a compelling portrait of what gets lost (and found) when a cause becomes an obsession.

A quiet, intermittently poignant portrait of two people who've lost each other and aren't sure they want to find their way back.

A tasteful, surprisingly sedate biopic slathered in the traditional signposts of heavy exposition, gold-toned cinematography, and note-perfect period detail.

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.

Though the bag of tricks that Bruckner (V/H/S, The Ritual) digs through — the jump scares and shadow figures, the eerily suspended rules of gravity and physics — are familiar, he uses them to build a kind of clanging, feverish atmosphere. And British actress Hall (The Gift, Godzilla vs. Kong), tasked with carrying nearly every scene, grounds her performance in more than meat-puppet panic; her unraveling springs from genuine, furious grief.

A movie seemingly custom-made for the era of alternative facts, American Animals feels like a new kind of true-crime thriller: one that shamelessly rewrites its truths in real time as it goes.

If it’s not exactly unforgettable, it’s still pretty fun.

Sandler and Hernangomez have a sweet, goofy chemistry, somewhere between razzing and familial, and the on-court sequences are consistently electric. Hustle isn't reinventing the sports-story wheel; it's hardly even spinning it forward. But in the moment, they're having a ball.

It all goes down easily if not exactly unforgettably; a wispy slice of hirsute whimsy.

A quirky bootstraps narrative of improbable small-town ambition and extremely regional accents designed not to rush its modest, affable charms.

The levity of the first half is soon sorely missed, and the run length alone — the movie clocks in at just under 165 minutes — dilutes the intended emotional resonance of the final scenes; Never Say Time might have been a truer title.

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.

Crimes of the Future . . . sometimes feels like a Cronenberg Greatest Hits, at least aesthetically; so loaded does it come with his signature themes and gooey, seemingly hand-crafted contours.

Cage, so great and unexpectedly subdued in last year's small-scale indie drama Pig, has a ball with his own myth-making, a star contracting and expanding in the movie's fun-house mirror of fame and destabilized celebrity. Not that he ever went anywhere.

If Widow, with its winky one-liners and spandexed catsuits, is purely pop feminism, the movie's female gaze still reads like more than a cynical marketing ploy; it's one step closer to real, messy life, Marvel-size and amplified.

As more than a decade passes on screen, the one constant is Miller’s presence in every scene: a messy, chain-smoking sex kitten stumbling from delayed adolescence toward a grown womanhood — painful, honest, and flawed — worth waiting for.

Reinaldo Marcus Green’s quiet drama still carries its own kind of big stick, even if the story’s impact is ultimately muffled by his meditative, low-key style.

Writer-director Ricky Staub brings real-life rhythms and texture to his feature debut by filling the screen with that homegrown scene, and casting several actual riders from the city's Fletcher Street Stables in supporting roles.

The movie's overt themes of familial love and loss, its impassioned indictments of military colonialism and climate destruction, are like a meaty hand grabbing your collar; it works because they work it.

The movie’s lofty narrative ambitions never quite catch up with its aesthetics, but it’s still a fantastic beast of a film, intoxicating and strange.

Long live Michael Myers, so maybe someone can finally kill him — in a big, funny, scary, squishy, super-meta sequel that brings it all back to the iconic 1978 original.

Based on the best-selling 2011 novel, Fang is directed by Bateman with a sensitivity that the story’s sour whimsy doesn’t quite deserve.

Duel is entirely, often sensationally watchable without ever quite justifying why it needs to remind us what the world has done to women for centuries.

Much like the book, the plot is essentially a wisp, and Byrne is far too luminous for her sad-sack role. But Juliet still feels winning; the small, sweet grace note on a familiar melody.

Cave has a smart, stylish way of storytelling that somehow makes a film built on bone saws and grotesqueries feel almost breezy.

Is Annette a farce, a metaphor, a noir meditation on fame? Only God and maybe the Maels know for sure. But like so many of the best and strangest moments that festivals like this bring, it's nearly impossible to witness it all and not walk away feeling altered (irrationally, emotionally, chemically) in some way.

What the movie doesn’t do, until it’s nearly over, is make any real case for why so much of America continued to put their faith in Kennedy long after the facts of the case were revealed.

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.

At just over 120 minutes, though — a blink in Marvel time — this Ant-Man is clever enough to be fun, and wise enough not overstay its welcome. Who better understands the benefits, after all, of keeping it small?

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.

An unabashedly heady romance, rich in pretty costumes — when they're wearing them — and lush, lusty atmosphere.

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.

If the 
story’s outcome is hardly a 
mystery — the landmark case was affirmed by a 5–4 margin in June 2015 — and the look of the film itself a little docu-drab, it’s also a shrewd and frequently moving testament to the true nature of change.

While a Black Panther without Boseman is undoubtedly nothing like the film's creators or any of its cast wanted it to be, the movie they've made feels like something unusually elegant and profound for the multiplex: a little bit of forever for the star who left too soon.

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

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.

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.

A film literally made from thin air, the French thriller Oxygen (on Netflix starting Friday) is a neat little sci-fi nightmare; a cool-toned exercise in claustrophobia that nearly pulls off the innate improbabilities of its high-concept nonsense.

Even when it falls short of its aim to get every last Beyoncé joke and Big Idea onscreen, the movie still offers what any barbershop worth its repeat customers provides: An hour or two of good company, and the feeling that you’re leaving a little sharper than when you came in.

Directors Nick Johnson and Will Merrick sometimes strain the credulity of what shooting in-screen can do — June's laptop camera does a lot of heavy lifting — but the movie rarely feels forced or claustrophobic; it's just a whizzing, cannily of-the-moment spin on a familiar genre, reupped for the Genius Bar age.

Conceived by the conjoined comedic minds of Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, and Evan Goldberg and baked (in more ways than one) for more than eight years, the movie looks like Pixar but plays like "Pineapple Express" unleashed among actual pineapples.

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.

Powell and Majors, both born with surfeits of natural charisma, strain mightily to imbue their scant dialogue with deeper meaning, but Devotion, earnest and determinedly earthbound to the end, never really captures the air up there.

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.

John Cena is top billed, and though his brick-jawed military man doesn’t actually get many scenes, he does get a disproportionate share of the script’s best lines. He gives good muscle, but Bumblebee brings something even more important — and actually transforming — to the series: a sense of humor, and a heart.

It's nice to see actors like these do such subtle, sympathetic work for a gifted young director — and to find an outlet for storytelling that doesn't demand neat redemption, but still allows for grace.

The real draw is Dinklage: with his mournful eyes and crooked smile, he's the tender, towering soul of Cyrano.

McAdams, whose comedic skills have gone unsung for way too long, is dizzy fun. The whole movie is, actually, even if it pretty much evaporates on impact — a kooky, vicarious loop of Mad Libs meets Cards Against Humanity, where whoever’s holding the popcorn last wins.

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.

In sweetly calibrated moments — a downtown drug deal gone wrong; Falco alone under strobe lights, swaying ecstatically to Donna Summer — Landline finds the analog joy it’s reaching for.

It falls on Pattinson's leather-cased Batman to be the hero we need, or deserve. With his doleful kohl-smudged eyes and trapezoidal jawline, he's more like a tragic prince from Shakespeare; a lost soul bent like a bat out of hell on saving everyone but himself.

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.

Compared to the tender groundedness of Baumbach's finest films, like The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story, the scampering leaps and feints of his script here come off as deliberately arch, even artificial. The movie's final scene, though, without spoiling too much, is also easily its best.

Without much dramatic tension beyond the will-he-or-won't-he of Cameron's final choice, the film feels oddly inert, a melancholic iPhone ad stretched to feature-length.

A showcase mostly for Boyega and Beharie, whose tense, delicate interplay makes up much of the movie's emotional core.

He (Hill) makes Mid90s resonate with universal poignancy and electric energy; his kids are the best, messiest kind of real, and they’re alright.

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.

It’s in Deadpool’s DNA to channel the wild id of a 12-year-old boy — a very clever one who happens to love boobs, Enya, and blowing stuff up. Which is dizzy fun for a while, like eating Twinkies on a Gravitron. Eventually, though, it just wears you out.

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.

Director Marc Turtletaub pulls thoughtful, carefully shaded performances from Denman, Khan, and, most of all, Scottish actress Macdonald (Boardwalk Empire, No Country for Old Men), who refuses to let Agnes be an easy avatar for midlife longing and suburban discontent.

Pike . . . feels unleashed by the wickedness of the role, gleefully sinking those gleaming white teeth into her finest villainy since Gone Girl. As the mercenary Marla — cool-eyed and indomitable, a razor blade poured into a buttercream blazer — she's delicious, a shiny-haired nihilist who couldn't care less if she tried.