Leah Greenblatt

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.

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.

The whole thing is so wrapped in leaden dialogue and B-movie cliché that by the last weary, bloodletting hour, you'll envy Alex's ability to forget.

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.

Navalny has a bracing, heart-racing story to tell, even as the improbable facts rush past. But it never fails to focus on the human man: funny, prickly, and unimaginably brave, down to the last defiant frame.

Sciamma's elegant, melancholy fable captures something lovely and ineffable: a brief glimpse into life's great mystery.

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.

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 story belongs to its young cast, and Lords' ramshackle comedy sweetly captures the rank anxiety, random humiliations, and undiluted hope of being young.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Both directors have made much better movies; go watch one of those instead.

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.

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

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

In the tricky world of tween-dom, it captures something sweetly universal: Growing up is messy, no matter how you bear it.

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.

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 all cream puff, a featherweight fairytale too shiny and mild to attempt the better movie about midlife romance and second chances that might have been.

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.

Pay no attention to the shades of late-night cable in the title; Speak No Evil is a lamentably generic name for a movie as stark and unsettling as Christian Tafdrup's queasy, inexorable thriller.

Ford imbues his story with a tense, vibrating energy, moving briskly between the breathlessness of a heist thriller and the sharper barbs of social satire.

Thompson is, unsurprisingly, a force: alternately brittle and vulnerable and mordantly witty, her whole body vibrating with a lifetime's worth of sublimated desire.