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.