Leah Greenblatt

Beautiful Boy keeps you strung on that line for nearly all of its run time, and sometimes it feels less like a movie than an endurance test — one that’s lovingly, meticulously made but almost too much like real life: an impressionistic series of highs and lows, relapses and recoveries, without the necessary anchor of a cohesive arc.

Daniels has a way of molding the chaotic murk of history into something neat and shiny — whether it be the roots of Holiday's addiction or the decidedly 2021 cut of Rhodes' rippling torso.

A gothic moodpiece masquerading as a thriller, My Cousin Rachel is a misdirected swoon of a movie—long on black-veiled romance and ravishing atmosphere and a little short, alas, on dividends.

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.

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.

Even a ravishingly shot finale — Queens has never looked so enchanting — can’t quite paper over the weak resolution of the plot’s central mystery.

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.

Director Tom Harper (War & Peace) aptly conveys the single-mindedness that a life of art requires, and the double standard applied to the women who pursue it at the cost of other, seemingly more essential things. But it’s Buckley, wild and free, who makes the movie sing.

Spoonfuls of sugar always help the movie magic go down; if only this Mary had gotten a necessary twist of lemon, too.

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.

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.

Dispatch often feels like the filmmaker in concentrate form, both his best and worst instincts on extravagant display.

Like some of the old-timey classics it recalls — Blazing Saddles, Airplane, the first Austin Powers — Barb and Star commits to its deep silliness so sweetly and completely that you can't help falling a little bit in love with them too.

Nothing in Lost City would really hang together without its main pair, whose chemistry movies like this inevitably live or die on.

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

Director Dominic Cooke is mostly known for his Olivier Award-winning theater work, but Chesil never feels stagey or static. It’s beautifully shot, and he pulls lovely performances from both his leads.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The extremely game presence of actors like Zoë Chao, Veep's Sam Richardson, and This Is Us's Justin Hartley (as the dimpled bohunk she left behind) help anchor the chaotic wisp of a plot that follows, as does Wilson's barrelling, blithely crass energy.

For young people suffering, the movie offers both hope and clarity; for more experienced viewers, it may come off a little too much like "Girl, Interrupted" through a Lifetime lens.

For what is being called a final installment, it all tends to feel both anticlimactic and a little grim in the end.

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.

It's a broad, helter-skelter farce whose best bits hinge almost entirely on the considerable charms of its star.

Swedish-Chilean director Daniel Espinosa (Life) gives it all a dark sheen, and shoots the pair's inevitable confrontations less like traditional comic-book clashes than something from The Matrix.

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.

Sometimes that tips too far into silliness (the final scene, especially, works strenuously towards an end-cute); still, its mildly subversive rom-com sensibilities are just sour-sweet enough to pull it off.

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?).

Until [Cooper] loses his way in the cascading absurdity of the final twists, though, the movie is mostly a study in how good its two main actors can be: Bale's soulful, hollow-eyed conviction, and his odd-couple chemistry with Melling, isn't quite enough to sell The Pale Blue Eye's loopy improbabilities in the end, but it's still a pleasure to watch them try.

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.

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.

[Smith's] conviction carries Emancipation a long way, elevating what is essentially a B movie to the realm of something better than its outsize premise: a blunt instrument, maybe, but a brutally affecting one too.

The movie’s arc is too conventional by half, but the appeal of the two main actors keeps it (sorry) afloat, maybe more than it should.

As a solid B-movie elevated by A-list talent and pushed along by a brisk running time — it’s only 98 minutes—Money has its own rewards.

The heir himself turned out to be a naïve and troubled young man, though Strickland leaves his particular fate a mystery until the final moments of the film. What's in between is unevenly executed but still compelling: a far-out cautionary tale of money, media, and gonzo idealism gone wrong.

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.

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 story begins to feel more like a series of strung-together anecdotes: an intriguing project, incomplete.

The 3-D animated film delivers a mildly diverting mix of winky meta-jokes and moral lessons, cannily aimed at both the next generation of tiny consumers and their more sophisticated parents.

The movie finds real power in its climax, a party that turns into a nightmarish orgy of leering white kids in blackface. And the end-credit photos of real parties just like it at schools across the country are a stark reminder of the ugliness that Dear White People, flawed as it is, wants to confront.

The result is a candy-coated, willfully quirky wisp of a film; like a Michel Gondry fantasy dipped in glitter and rainbow sprinkles.

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.

Purpose itself plays like a family film from another era, its gentle sensibilities a million miles removed from the winky pop culture references and meta layers of most modern all-ages entertainment. The effect is sweet, benignly retro, and just a little bit boring; a comforting Milk Bone for the soul.

What shines through is the visual wit and innate sweetness of the storytelling, and Carell’s cackling, cueball-skulled misanthrope — a (mostly) reformed scoundrel who can still have his cake, and arsenic too.

In a way, the movie feels almost like Marvel antimatter, an auteur's willful response to whiz-bang emptiness and Infinity Stones. Knight is ultimately a tale of honor though, and a deeply moral one — inscrutable, but haunting too.

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

If the storyline is strictly something old and borrowed, though, a peek at the crazy-rich rainbow of Asian experience — even one as razzle-dazzlingly too-much as this one — feels not just new, but way overdue.

The fighting, when it comes — from competing tribes, and from white colonizers steadily advancing an international slave trade — is viscerally satisfying too, even as the screenplay, by Dana Stevens (Fatherhood) and actress Maria Bello, works mostly in the broad strokes of genre storytelling.

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.

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

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

Ejiofor is eminently relatable as an analog man who can't seem to understand where it all went wrong, and Clarke's eyebrows knit with such pained expressiveness, it's as if they're having their own wriggling monologue throughout the movie.

Like its muse, the movie feels a little like a black-box experiment, one that can be both frustratingly opaque and achingly lovely: a still-waters mystery whose ripples, even up to the last frame, only hint at what lies beneath.

There’s really no not-terrible term for smart, silly female-bonding movies that are somehow considered subversive just for acing the Bechdel Test.... Sisters earns a spot in that pantheon, however it’s defined—even if it’s never quite as good as its leads.

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.

Ultimately though, it’s all secondary to Saunders and Lumley’s riotous chemistry together.

Even as the story descends into full bloody camp at its crescendo, Spencer holds the more ludicrous plot threads together.

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.

The film, while gorgeously shot, is schematic and wholly implausible. But Skarsgård saves it; wild and funny and ferociously alive, he’s a crucial bolt of color in all that tasteful gray.

Gyllenhaal, bright-eyed and brittle, brings her signature intensity to the role, though Lisa’s true inner world remains murky; it’s never quite clear if she’s just deeply unhappy or certifiably ill. Instead, the movie remains an intriguing but ambiguous portrait of a flawed, fascinating woman who knows herself either too well or not at all

Halftime is often hagiography, but a keen and sympathetic one too, designed to humanize a tabloid-headline life and remind us once again that where she comes from (the Block, the boogie-down Bronx) is as integral to her success as beauty or talent or sheer tenacity.

The sheer awesomeness of Villeneuve's execution — there might not be another film this year, or ever, that turns one character asking another for a glass of water into a kind of walloping psychedelic performance art — often obscures the fact that the plot is mostly prologue: a sprawling origin story with no fixed beginning or end.

It’s British stage actress Erivo who feels like the real star. Her steely charisma and gorgeous powerhouse of a voice (Goddard takes every plausible opportunity to let her loose on a classic 1960s songbook; can you blame him?) is what gives the movie not just a different kind of heroine, but 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.

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.

Shot by cinematographer Shabier Kirchner in hazy, endless-summer half-light, Kitchen finds a kind of urban poetry in the swooping parabolas of the skate park and the rumbling scrape of wheels on pavement.

Jon M. Chu (several Step Up movies) has taken over directing duties from Louis Leterrier, and he has a lighter, goofier touch. He seems to get that the silliness is baked in.

Woman could use some of the quieter character nuance of a movie like last year’s "Wind River," another fact-based drama that reflected the struggle of indigenous people with a sensitive, unvarnished kind of naturalism; White’s well-meant version is undoubtedly incomplete, and gilded with a certain amount of Hollywood silliness.

By trading in all its intrigue and emotional subtleties for the gotcha moment it’s clearly been waiting for, Tree wins the battle but loses the war.

To see a black female over 40 holding the center of a story about ordinary, unsung lives makes Support a low-key pleasure; one that transcends its own shaggy narrative.

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.

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.

Aniston has a great time as the vampy, Krav Maga-ing Bitch Who Stole Christmas, and Miller’s willful idiocy is weirdly endearing.

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.

Director Paul Weitz is mostly known for lighter, more observational stories like "About a Boy" and "Mozart in the Jungle," and the strongest moments in Bel Canto are the small ones.

In a genre where winky self-awareness has become standard-issue, Free might have come off as manic and hollow; instead, it has fun having a heart.

In the Fade is a flawed filmgoing experience, but still a viscerally affecting one.

Sisters gets sadder and more eccentric as it goes along, and the ending actually tugs sweetly on a few heart strings, though it’s also hard not to wonder why exactly, with all the Westerns already in the cannon, this movie got made — other than to give its crew of excellent actors a chance to put on their boots and ride off, cock-eyed and whimsical, into some kind of sunset.

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.

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 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.

A New Era is strictly high-toned formula, from its God's-eye opening over spire-tipped turrets and green-velvet lawns to its soft-focus finish, but it feels like home.

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

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.

Southside doesn’t hang on epiphanies; instead, it delivers something more modest: a tender, unrushed love story.

Their odd couple interplay propels a series of shambling, expletive-laden mishaps that aim more for easy laughs than Wild epiphanies.

Huppert is a wonder, inhabiting every iota of rage and froideur and helplessness; if only the movie's motives were as lucid as her performance.

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

If there’s anything Sander’s ravishing set pieces fail to sufficiently color in, it’s the movie’s emotional stakes.

It's a gentler, sadder movie than the dizzying trailer suggests, and less driven by plot than a stickler for storytelling like Alithea might prefer: a loopy little jewel-box reverie, slipped between two Furies.

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.

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.

Despite the rich settings and crowded cast, the film can’t help feeling a little airless too: These players aren’t history’s masterminds, they’re wasps trapped in a jar, bumbling against the glass in sting-or-be-stung chaos.

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.

At 160 stately, glacial minutes, it’s also an endurance test — one that can feel like its own act of faith to pass.