Leah Greenblatt

Why end a rallying cry with a question mark? The devil is in the details, or at least in the punctuation of Hail Satan?, a movie that often seems to teeter on the line between doc- and mockumentary — a sincere examination of a social and political movement delivered with just a soupçon of Christopher Guest.

A movie seemingly custom-made for the era of alternative facts, American Animals feels like a new kind of true-crime thriller: one that shamelessly rewrites its truths in real time as it goes.

The interviews are their own historical document, though it's the visceral thrill of being inside all those archival clips — the flick of Simone's wrist, an ecstatic face in the crowd — that makes Summer of Soul comes most fully alive, somehow both as fresh as yesterday and as far away as the moon.

If Raya's outlines and endpoint are strictly fairy-tale familiar (evil is vanquished, good triumphs, reconstituted dragons romp), the movie feels fresh not just for the mere fact of its female-forward and predominately Asian cast, but for the breeziness with which it bears the weight of Disney history.

If shrewd one-liners and small moments ultimately override the episodic narrative, Someone‘s takeaway — that love is a messy-splendored thing, and “happily ever after” is just a story that hasn’t finished yet — feels refreshing modern and true.

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

The way that the movie eventually manages to bridge all those multiplicities and pull them into focus feels both obvious and ingenious.

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

A big, unabashedly ambitious picture, heavy with the weight of history. But its best moments turn out to be the smaller human ones.

Much like the book, the plot is essentially a wisp, and Byrne is far too luminous for her sad-sack role. But Juliet still feels winning; the small, sweet grace note on a familiar melody.

Mackenzie falls a little too in love with his battle scenes; by the fourth clash of blood and swords it all starts to feel like déjà vu, with different horses. At nearly two and a half hours, there’s clearly room to trim.... But he also films it beautifully in the natural light of candles, torches, and overcast skies, and there’s a solidness to the old-fashioned conventions of his storytelling.

Davis and "Bloodline" Emmy winner Mendelsohn, both Australian screen veterans, do the less glamorous work of being sad, angry adults, though it's often their ordinary grief that grounds the movie, even as their stories lean into the clichés of certain coping mechanisms (Pills! Infidelity! Bargaining with God!).

Instead of melodrama, the movie finds its traction in parsing out micro-aggressions and mood: a sort of devastating slow-drip portrait of the power structures that allowed a man like Weinstein to happen — and keep more like him in place, untouched by any justice a hashtag can reach.

They'd be crazy not to give Meng'er Zhang, as Shang-Chi's ferociously watchable sister Xialing, her own spin-off, and Awkwafina, who spends at least a third of the movie in a fanny pack and lime-green parachute pants, polishes her sardonic slacker M.O. to a high one-liner shine.

If Paige and Keogh weren’t both such indelible, fiercely charismatic characters, the whole thing could easily fall apart. But their presence, and Bravo’s singular vision, give Zola a sort of electric buzz: the thrill of watching something stranger than fiction, and somehow better than true.

Jones — who trained intensively in voice work and American Sign Language for the role — has the gift of coming off like a genuine teenager, and more particularly a girl torn between her unique obligations to the people she's always loved and known and the bigger dreams she holds for herself.

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.

The story then becomes less a forensic accounting of a masterpiece than a bittersweet ode to a certain slice of old Hollywood: part love letter, part cautionary tale, and still somehow a mystery.

In a world that seems to get uglier every day, this movie’s gentle heart and mere humanity feel like a salve.

Unexpected isn’t particularly interested in driving the plot forward or holding its leads up as avatars for a cinematic lecture on poverty and white privilege. Instead, it just lets them live and breathe and make mistakes — not for the aim of any greater message or grand epiphanies, but because that’s what people do.

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.

McAdams, whose comedic skills have gone unsung for way too long, is dizzy fun. The whole movie is, actually, even if it pretty much evaporates on impact — a kooky, vicarious loop of Mad Libs meets Cards Against Humanity, where whoever’s holding the popcorn last wins.

Samba finds a much stronger rhythm when it stops contriving and simply shines a light on the joy and pain (and musical interludes) of lives lived in the margins.

Eventually, it’s Wealth‘s inherent too-muchness that undoes its own best intentions.

Charged with streamlining Figures’ knotty real-life histories, director Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent) tends to paint too much in the broad, amiable strokes of a triumph-of-the-week TV movie. But even his earthbound execution can’t dim the sheer magnetic pull of an extraordinary story.

The story and the songs, with a few notable if hardly unexpected updates, are fondly faithful to the original; the magic mostly intact. Another reboot was never terribly necessary, maybe — but it’s good, still, to be King.

In the scheme of Almodóvar’s rich catalogue, Pain is probably too small, too sad, and too obtuse to really recommend as any kind of starting point. For longtime fans, though, it’s a gift; the kind of quiet glory worth waiting a few decades for.

Strong builds a poignant, methodical portrait of loss.