Leah Greenblatt

Shot in alternating French and Flemish, it's also quintessentially European, but the language of his storytelling is the most universal kind: a moving and often sublime piece of small-scale filmmaking, told with uncommon empathy.

The vividness of the narrative never quite matches the riotous swirl of color and culture on screen — and neither do the songs, sadly, for how central they are to the story. Instead, Coco settles into something gentler but still irrefutably sweet: a movie that plays safe with the status quo, even as it breaks with it.

In its audacious strangeness, the movie manages to do something history hardly ever gets to: surprise us.

A kind of popcorn movie that doesn't just let wit and storytelling serve as the garnish for big-bang action, but makes that its actual priority.

There are a few legitimately great throwaway lines, and a few vaguely offensive ones. But the movie feels so fast and cheap that it’s hard not to wonder why they’ve made it at all, other than to jump on a small and so-far underwhelming trend in gender-swapping ‘80s remakes (see also: Ghostbusters, Overboard).

Fans of Get Out, Peele’s brilliant, mind-bending 2017 debut, may feel vaguely let down that his follow-up is, for all of its sly humor and high style, a fairly straightforward genre piece, and that its bigger ideas and metaphors don’t feel quite fully baked.

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?).

It’s heartbreaking, illuminating, and yes, fantastic, just to watch her (Marina) live.

If Tillman ties it all together a little neatly, he’s already served up a message that feels too fresh and important to dismiss — not of hate but of hope, and faith that even if sharing these stories can’t magically fix what’s broken, telling them still matters.

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.

Glass Onion doesn't feel like a movie that's meant, really, to be peeled. It's here strictly to dazzle you with money and murder and famous-people pandemonium, then sharpen its knives for the next installment.

Wildly unsettling and original.

The film (shot mostly in Yiddish) has an unpolished intimacy, peeling back the surface exoticism of a cloistered faith to reveal the poignantly ordinary struggle of being an imperfect person in the world.

Durkin captures it all with a sort of menacing restraint, building a deeply disquieting mood from long, almost voyeuristic shots and loaded gazes.

Director Daniel Karslake (For the Bible Tells Me So) does that by homing in on singular tales — and letting them unfold largely without judgment or editorializing.

It’s a movie so well put together as a hero’s tale that it moves along almost too smoothly; the script by brothers Jez and John Henry Butterworth hits its marks of tragedy and triumph with a kind of shiny, measured inevitability.

In the sometimes overstuffed script there’s more than a touch, too, of the TV projects two of its stars are best known for: This Is Us (Brown) and Euphoria (Demie). If the pairing of those two wildly different shows sounds counterintuitive, it speaks, maybe, to how much Shults seems to want to fit into Waves both dramatically and style-wise. In end though, substance — or at least his sincere approximation of it — wins.

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.

Officially, Knock follows four progressive female candidates, though the one who inevitably dominates is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bronx-bred waitress–turned–congressional unicorn. It’s a lot of fun to ride along on her wildly improbable rise, from slinging margaritas and scooping out ice buckets to taking down one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.

At just under 90 minutes, the movie is as short and sweet as its stamp-size muse, but an uncommon loveliness lingers; Marcel might just be the most purely joyful, stealthily profound movie experience of the year.

The movie’s title, by the way, comes from the president’s own evaluation of his handling of the virus, a phrase he proudly repeated more than once.

For the most part it succeeds, gorgeously — though it will probably make anyone over 30 feel either mildly outraged or wildly irrelevant.

Pete is no kind of fairytale; instead, it’s something far sadder and better and more real.

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.

Hanks plays Fred as he lays: a sort of secular Buddha in a red knit cardigan whose gently probing questions and Zen proclamations work as a slow dissolving agent on Lloyd’s resistance.

A ramshackle, winningly raw coming-of-middle-age shot in vivid black and white but told in emotional Technicolor.

Welsh actor Pryce (Game of Thrones) is fantastic — a fussy, adulterous egoist in the Great Man mold of Norman Mailer or Philip Roth, with his own touchingly real frailties. But the movie belongs to Close, whose face, as she is courted and patronized, sexually betrayed and damned with faint praise, is a marvel of emotional intelligence and control.

There’s a loose, jazzy verve to the production, a sort of sonic and visual razzmatazz that gives the film a fanciful Oceans 11-style gloss. Mostly, though, Talk is just a chance to spend two hours watching Streep & Co. make the most of Deborah Eisenberg’s deliciously salty script, while Soderbergh — who also serves as cinematographer — shoots it all in ruthless, radiant light.