Leah Greenblatt

It’s a testament to writer-director Matt Ross, who is probably best known as an actor on shows like Big Love and Silicon Valley, that Captain skirts cliché as well as it does; his indictments of both contemporary emptiness and misguided idealism feel earned, even if it all ties up a little too Sundance-tidy in the end.

Writer-director Angus MacLachlan also penned the acclaimed 2005 indie "Junebug," and he aims for the same kind of gentle absurdity here.

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.

If McQueen feels like it’s missing some deeper insights, it may be because its subject kept so much of himself hidden from even the people who loved him most.... What’s left is a fascinating if incomplete portrait of genius interrupted — and a life that should have lasted much longer than it did.

With its English subtitles and small-scale epiphanies, Girl is the kind of quiet film that could easily get lost in a noisy season; lean in anyway, and listen.

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.

Both Mbatha-Raw and Parker are appealing, expressive actors, and writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball) lets them breathe, filling in the boilerplate bones of the story with smartly nuanced commentary.

The script is wispy, but the performances (including Patrick Chesnais as Caroline’s prideful, devastated husband) shine.

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.

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.

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.

Despite its promise, Hacksaw never really delves into the moral grays; it’s just black and white and red all over.

Stewart, who appears in nearly every scene, is intensely watchable, a coiled spring. But the movie is too fragmented and tonally strange to register as more than one of Maureen’s wispy, haunted apparitions.

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.

There's something gently intoxicating about O'Connor's dreamlike pastoral settings — oh, those wily, windy moors! — and her determination not just to rewrite Emily, but set her free.

Witherspoon can easily carry an entire movie in her dimples, but it’s hard not to measure Alice against a role as richly written as her recent turn on "Big Little Lies." Here, she’s mostly just a winsome proxy for midlife wish fulfillment — a bubbly brunch mimosa you drink up before the fizz is gone.

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.

The result is chilling and beautifully composed, a stylish study of disintegration that is easier to admire than enjoy.

Give Sam Raimi a multiverse, and he will take a mile. The director's take on Doctor Strange feels like many disparate and often deeply confusing things — comedy, camp horror, maternal drama, sustained fireball — but it is also not like any other Marvel movie that came before it. And 23 films into the franchise, that's a wildly refreshing thing, even as the story careens off in more directions than the Kaiju-sized octo-beast who storms into an early scene, bashing its tentacles through small people and tall buildings like an envoy from some nightmare aquarium.

Even in Valhalla or Paradise City, though, there is still love and loss; Thor dutifully delivers both, and catharsis in a climax that inevitably doubles as a setup for the next installment.

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 an all-in-one viewing experience, Bardo is undeniably uneven, often maddening, and seems to have approximately 17 endings. Still, the movie is a marvel in its own way, dotted with pure cinephile delights and small unexpected pockets of profundity.

Wonder's spare, muted intrigue hangs mostly on Pugh and atmosphere, an elusive minor-key mystery.

Majors, already seemingly inescapable this year, brings a wounded menace that suggests the many sedimentary layers of fury and grief underneath; he's less some sneering Iron Curtain meathead á la Rocky villains of yore than a lost soul.

For a lot of its runtime, Velvet is fun and silly and enjoyably outrageous. It’s hard, though, to walk away with a real sense of anything more than blood on the canvas and a blank where your feelings — beyond mild bemusement, and a sudden appetite for prime Los Angeles real estate — should be.

Mbatha-Raw brings a fierce, quiet containment to the lead role, and Hart builds so much mood through her atmospheric cinematography and deliberately slow pacing that it nearly papers over the sketched-in quality of the script. Eventually, though, you start to wish her characters would speak in more than just vague koans and disaster-movie platitudes.

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.

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 looping flashback structure and relaxed, intimate pacing has the odd effect of making the fate of the free world feel a lot less urgent than it probably should; the movie frequently comes off less like a standard MCU tentpole than a metaphysical family drama whose black sheep just happens to be Thanos.

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.

The immersive look of the film, with its strikingly unadorned landscapes and dim-lit interiors, casts a spell, and Waterston (the Fantastic Beasts franchise) and Kirby (The Crown, Pieces of Woman), bring both urgency and fragility to their constrained characters — two lost souls aligned and finding love in a hopeless place.

There's a low-key charm to the movie's knowing spin on familiar beats, and far more chaotic non-sexual nudity than Julia Roberts would ever allow in her contract.

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.

Comes drawn in bold, broad strokes — a fond treatment of a flawed but fascinating American icon whose revelations feel mostly cosmetic in the end.

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.

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

Even the cast’s uniform excellence can’t quite crack Children’s outer carapace, or bring full life to Fiona’s emotional struggle as she’s forced to confront her own failings. Instead the story drifts iceberg-like toward its carefully muted conclusion, only a small part of its true scope visible above a beautiful, chilly surface.

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

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.

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.

Uneven but endearing.

Enter Shiva at your own risk then: a hell of Danielle's own making maybe, but still a witty, jittery trip.

First-time director Maggie Betts has said she based her story in part on extended research into the aftershocks of Vatican II’s new liberties — in its wake, devoted members left the Church in droves — and on personal biographies of the women who experienced it firsthand.

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 Bronze has a loony Napoleon Dynamite–meets–Talladega Nights-on-the-balance-beam charm. Hope may be a giant jackass, but she’s America’s jackass.

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.

Writer-director Drew Pearce must have done something right to get a cast like this to sign on for what is essentially a loving, highly stylized homage to the kind of camp apocalyptia John Carpenter used to make; the only thing missing here is an Ernest Borgnine cameo and Kurt Russell scowling in an eye patch.

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.

It works its own sort of magic. After all, who doesn't want to believe that the soul does have a window, and that if it closes we might open it again?

Ejiofor’s performance make the movie; the rest, you may just have to take on faith.

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.

A charming and generally painless way to spend two hours. It’s not nearly as sharp as some of the best stuff she’s done, but it’s pointedly kinder too, wrapping even its nastiest characters.

Efron and Devine are an endearingly loony duo, and as much as Plaza and Kendrick never quite sell their vixen shtick, the supporting cast is wickedly stacked. It’s like riding a roller coaster fueled by Red Bull and grain alcohol: kind of gross but pretty fun, too.

Some of Status’s cringe comedy feels forced or simply wasted on soft targets.

Subtle it is not; Strangelove can feel aggressively self-aware, nouveau John Hughes with a pocket full of f-bombs and carefully worked one-liners.

Its title sounds like the premise for some kind of high-adrenaline adventure about maze-running or outgunning a nuclear apocalypse. But The Escape is both less thrilling and much scarier, in its own way — a quiet domestic-drama chamber piece with a vein of pure desperation thrumming beneath it.

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.

Till-Mobley's choice to let the world see what Mississippi had done to her son — she demanded an open casket at his funeral — helped ignite a movement, and made history. Till bears stirring witness to that, even if it leaves the full measure of her life a mystery.

In an industry that defines “mature audiences” as anyone old enough to vote, a movie centered entirely on women over 65 — a sex comedy, no less — feels like some kind of small Hollywood miracle.

Subtle it's not: Kate is red-meat storytelling, all broad outlines and crunched bones. But there's a visual wit and visceral energy to it that other recent efforts (the pop-feminist comic-book gloss Gunpowder Milkshake, also on Netflix, and Amazon Prime's spectacularly silly Jolt, featuring a rampaging Kate Beckinsale) struggle to find.

Director Kevin MacDonald (The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void) gives the movie both the global sweep of a thriller and the more granular details of a procedural, though in the end hardly any of it takes place in a courtroom.

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 dizzy, fizzy comedy with occasional flashes of real wit.

This Seven’s just silly, solid entertainment: multiplex fun by numbers.

How to Be Single is a lot like its Jager-bombing, romance-seeking protagonists: Cute and goofy and kind of a mess.

To be clear, Stuber is a very silly movie: Half the action scenes look like they were shot inside a Cuisinart, the sexual politics are questionable, the violence cartoonishly extreme, and the plot has the general coherence of a wet napkin. But Stuber knows that sense and logic aren’t what its audience came for; we’re here for good dumb fun — and of course, central air.

As Bird time-jumps between the claustrophobic action of the house and a desperate sort of jailbreak, director Susanne Bier (The Night Manager) keeps the mood taut and defiantly in the moment.

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.

Touched With Fire has something to say about a thorny, serious subject, but the light it shines doesn’t really illuminate anything new.

In its own druggy, dick-pic way, it’s also a pretty endearing tribute to male friendship — hammy and crude and more baked than a fruitcake, but with a sweetly squishy holiday heart at its center.

Blunt but brutally effective little slice of supernatural horror.

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

It turns out that Rules Don’t Apply is hardly about Hughes at all. Instead, it’s a small-scale, lovingly filmed study of the blossoming romance between two fictional show-business newbies.

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.

A love triangle, or maybe something more like a love polygon, lies at the center of the slight but alluring latest from Parisian writer-director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, The Sisters Brothers) — one of those supremely French films in which impossibly chic people fight, come together, and fall apart, all filmed in saturated black and white.

There’s a pleasing sort of B-movie-on-an-A+-budget simplicity to Death Cure.

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.

Watch it sincerely or as a curiosity; at least you know you won't forget it.

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.

Gucci might have been a better movie if it had fully committed to the high camp its Blondie-soundtracked trailer promises. It's more serious than that, at least intermittently; a strange melange of too much and not enough. The script also skimps, weirdly, on the actual murder, which is treated mostly as a framing device and felonious afterthought until the final moments. But even a House divided is still more fun than it probably should be: a big messy chef's kiss to money and fashion and above all, movie stars — criming and scheming like they have nothing left to lose, until it's true.

Frankly, it's almost enough just to watch them all run around in states that range from manic panic to Zen serenity while McKay employs his usual coterie of meta tricks and treats. But it's hard not to long for the shrewder movie that might have been: Not just a kooky scattershot look, but a deeper truer gaze into the void.

What’s fun is just watching Lopez and her supporting cast — including her real-life best friend Remini, Tony winner Annaleigh Ashford as her tightly wound coworker, and a loopy Charlyne Yi as her phobic new assistant — move through the scenes so easily.

Caring may be fundamental, but it never quite feels necessary.

The movie Tokyo-drifts into tedium in its more chaotic, casually gruesome chase scenes, and the “serious” dialogue is so consistently clunky it feels like it’s been carved from woodblocks with a dull butterknife. Thankfully, it’s frequently also much funnier and lighter on its feet than previous outings, and a lot of that credit goes to Statham and Johnson.

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.

The violence is cartoonishly casual and the ending pure Hollywood corn. The absurdity, though, is the point: They're just two brothers on the run, and escape is what we came for.

Adapting the script from his own 2020 audio play, Eisenberg treats his cast with measured acidity, drawing out their snarky moods and narcissistic missteps without mocking them too cruelly; you may not particularly love these characters, but that's no match for how little they like themselves.

What makes it more than a slick impersonation of sociopathy, though, is the layers he peels — Bundy’s desperation, his endless calculations and longing for connection. He also has some great interplay with John Malkovich, as the Tallahassee judge who engages in a sort of folksy, combative back-and-forth with him in court that nearly verges on buddy comedy.

Lively looks fantastic in every era’s fashion as it passes, and she does a nice job of conveying Adaline’s old-world diction and reserve; there’s no Gossip in this girl.

Even within the stagy confines of the movie's Scenes From a Marriage setup, Horgan and McAvoy manage to tease out the more subtle and enduring bits in their characters' unravelings.

Pine and Newton work valiantly to fill in the blanks, though the gray-flannel template of the dialogue often pushes back. When they do manage to transcend it, the movie becomes something still rare enough to appreciate: an urbane thriller calibrated for slow burns and analog attention spans.

Ocean’s 8’s girls-just-wanna-have-grand-larceny conceit is the kind of starry, high-gloss goof the summer movie season was made for, even if it feels lightweight by the already zero-gravity standards of the genre.

The movie never quite stops feeling like Moulin Rouge! written in extra-large block font, or Broadway projected straight onto a big screen, which certainly isn’t bad news if that’s exactly what you love.

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

The real draw is seeing these two legends together again.

The script’s second half drifts, going too soft on teachable moments, but Little still finds its loopy sweet spot: Tom Hanks’ "Big" flipped and recast as pure black-girl magic.

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.

It's faithfully acted by an earnest, intelligent cast, and directed with fervent purpose by Maria Schrader. But the result, for all its galvanizing, well-oiled plot machinations, remains consistently earthbound, and often frustratingly schematic, a movie so bent toward education and edification that it feels a little bloodless in the end — human tragedy as PSA.

Uthaug also manages to work in a few genuinely cool visual tricks, though the dialogue, from a serviceable script by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons is strictly standard; a mix of clunky action-movie exposition and winking Indiana Jones-style humor.

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.

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.

Aniston and Sandler, paired before in 2011’s "Just Go With It," relax into their roles as if their only stake in Mystery is to enjoy the free trip to Italy and have fun running down cobblestones.

Life is hard; Downton Abbey is easy.

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.

Shot in the goldenrod-and-avocado palette of the ’70s and dabbed with incongruous soft-rock lullabies, the movie itself is both painfully intimate and strangely opaque on the subject of mental illness, taking us deep inside Christine’s disintegration even as it never quite figures out what it wants to say about it.

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.

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.

Beneath the runes and visions, it's a tale as old as Game of Thrones, and as simple as a story told around a campfire: a ride of the Valkyries spelled out in gore and popcorn.

An inspired fantasy sequence midway through hints at the more intriguing movie The 33 might have been; instead, its tragedy-to-triumph narrative aims mostly for width, not depth.

Check your brain at the popcorn-butter pump in the lobby and enjoy it.

Soho is one hell of a half of a movie: a wildly styled neon reverie whose spooky bedazzlement only crashes to earth when it succumbs to bog-standard horror in the final act.

The phrase “low-key thriller” might be an oxymoron, but it also feels like the best description of The Wedding Guest.

A tar-black comedy so caustic it nearly burns a hole in the screen, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri banks a lot on the gale force of Frances McDormand, and nearly pulls it off.

Tender teachable moments about racism or depression or midlife ennui ride alongside indie-pop needle drops and broad, breezy punchlines about tea-dance orgies and ketamine.

Writer-director Chloe Okuno has a remarkably sure hand for mood-building in her feature debut, using the winding alleys and tree-lined boulevards of Bucharest to woozy, enveloping affect. But she gives her star so few specific contours that Julia mostly comes off as a beautiful cipher and an increasingly maddening protagonist to root for, seemingly both paranoid and obtuse.

The stuff of a thousand future Twitter gifs, though, is a featured appearance by Keanu Reeves. It’s better not to know too much about his role going in, other than that nearly everything about it has the winking air quotes of a movie star playing directly to his own storied Hollywood history, and that it is for the most part ridiculously fun.

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 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.

Smallfoot has its own silly, beastie charm.

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.

Chastain fully commits to her boss-bitch persona, even if we only obliquely learn why she might have chosen such a lonely, mercenary life.

In a movie that only nominally needs to make sense, those little mango-colored agents of chaos — with their thumb-shaped bodies, jaunty overalls, and inscrutable dialect ("Who are these tiny tater tots and where did they get so much denim?" Gru marvels in his own esoteric accent) — are often the best thing on screen, a loopy confluence of Buster Keaton and Evel Knievel.

A shiny-bright jukebox musical with a heart of gold and a plot of pure polyester, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again works hard to be the feel-giddy movie experience of the summer. And it mostly succeeds in its own glittery, aggressively winsome way.

As the tone wobbles between absurdity and tragedy, it also starts to shift toward something deeper and more bittersweet than mere midlife ennui. A lot of that is down to Mendelsohn, an actor who seems born to embody Holofocener’s kind of hero: weary and wounded but still putting it out there, a beautiful mess in progress.

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

A clever, corrosive little trick of a movie, a neon candy heart dipped in asbestos.

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.

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.

Dumbledore feels like an improvement, at least, on the joyless, enervating slog of 2018's Crimes of Grindelwald; it's nimbler and sweeter and more cohesive in its storyline. And the cast, less trapped in a fug of half-formed symbolism and subplots, are allowed realer and more romantic stakes.

Shift looks and feels low-budget, from its slapdash effects to its sketched-in script, though that also feels like kind of the point: It might be bright daylight, but it's always midnight-movie time somewhere.

Subverting expected narratives may have been Silva’s aim all along; still, the turn isn’t just nasty, it’s confounding.

Director Gregory Jacobs worked under original Magic Mike helmer Steven Soderberg for years, but sadly he has almost none of his former boss’s ability to elevate material that is essentially one lamé thong away from a TLC reality series.

Mostly this is all just pretext for dreamy postcard shots of Europe, a metric ton of slapstick, and as many highly specific vocal riff-offs as one empty airplane hangar can handle.

The movie is much better when it relaxes its death grip on screenwriter-y punchlines and slapstick cringe and just allows its cavalcade of stars to act like actual, you know, people.

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.

The actors, particularly the inexhaustible Yeoh, do much of the work to ground what often feels, with its dream logic and layer-cake Inception feints, like a coded story whose secret key you haven't been invited to share.

For all its noble intentions, though, the movie struggles to transcend broad outlines: Its characters are strictly symbols, timeworn archetypes of good and evil as threadbare and familiar as the artfully faded calicos and denim on their backs.

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.

In a post-Knives Out world, is a movie like this meant to be a classic whodunit for the whole family, or something more deliberately meta and modern? Branagh mostly lands on the former: a sort of sumptuous dinner-theater redux studded with stray bits of caricature, camp, and many CG pyramids.

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.

Laurent, an actress known Stateside for movies like Inglorious Basterds and Beginners, has adapted Ball from the bestselling novel by Victoria Mas, whose facts are rooted in actual history. She shares Mas' justifiable outrage at the casual inhumanity of it all — the brutal experiments and biased theories, the rampant physical and emotional abuse — and also her sense for melodrama.

The cast (which includes Glenn Close, Sam Waterston, Kristen Stewart, and Corey Stoll) is strong, but the movie itself is a little exhausting, like a New York cousin to Paul Haggis’ Crash, with a smaller budget and a bigger vocabulary.

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.

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 movie, whatever its pile of ideas about love, gender constructs, and modern living, never really transcends Stepford mood-board pastiche. It's all nefarious and gorgeous, Darling, and strictly nonsense in the end.

Escobar’s story hardly lacks for plot points, and director Fernando León de Aronaoa (Mondays in the Sun) hits them all obligingly, if broadly. What he doesn’t carve out much room for is richer character motivations or context.

Live by Night is clearly Affleck’s love letter to classic pulp, and almost no noir touchstone goes unturned in its two-hour-plus run.

The racial politics feel almost willfully retro, but the actors’ charisma cuts through: Forced to work strictly from the neck up, Cranston is just the right amount of gruff; Hart, aside from a deeply unnecessary catheter scene, gives a gratifyingly prickly and vulnerable performance. Somewhere beneath this passable-enough Upside, there’s a better, sharper movie for them both.

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.

Fee steers Cars 3 like the sleek piece of movie machinery it is—a standard ride with a half-full tank, a gorgeous paint job, and not much at all under the hood.

What saves it is the casting (Fanning especially is fantastic, both winsome and wonderfully strange) and Mitchell’s obvious fondness for his milieu. His giddy, knowingly camp direction has a sort of glitter-stick DIY spirit that keeps the movie aloft long after the story itself has run out of road.

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.

The movie is disappointingly flat-footed about both rock and journalism, and its shaggy plot sheds logic as it goes. Still, the actors are excellent; they’re triple crème slathered on an odd little undercooked biscuit of a script.

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.

Director Drake Doremus carefully constructs an us-against-the-world romance for Silas and Nia (an idea he pulled off beautifully in the underrated 2011 drama "Like Crazy," starring Felicity Jones and the late Anton Yelchin) and provides them with a rogue band of fellow thought rebels, including Guy Pearce and Jacki Weaver.

Director David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2) seems to know how to set up his outrageous set pieces, then get out of the way often enough to let his stars do what they need to do: Joke, chokehold, kiss, and smash until the helicopters come home.

[Perry] also has a way of making even the most telegraphed twists and overheated dialogue ring with conviction, a consummate entertainer to the end.

For better or worse, Looking Glass loses none of the first film’s muchness, with Bobin mimicking both his predecessor’s wildly saturated style and his general disregard for plot and substance.

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.

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.

For all its clumsiness, the story resonates—and the photos that run over the final credits are a poignant reminder of the real life, not just the political legacy, that Laurel left behind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For all its eerie scene-setting and squishy entrails, Antlers never really exposes the emotional guts of its narrative beyond the scope of midnight-movie horror; without that, it's just another nightmare fairytale leaning hard on heavy vibes and jump scares, and losing the forest for the trees.

For all its earnest sentiment and questionable science, though, Adam barrels along on movie stars and charm, from futures past and back again.

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.

Riz Ahmed takes Encounter a long way. But he can't single-handedly carry a film that never quite figures out what it wants to be — stark sci-fi paranoia? Psychological family drama? Desert road-trip apocalypse?

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.