Leah Greenblatt

Peele has never leaned this close to early Spielberg (or if you're feeling less charitable, mid-period M. Night Shyamalan).

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.

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

There's a deep vein of humor and humanity that Polley and her actors mine from the text, and something quietly mesmerizing in their meticulous world-building.

In quiet, often dream-like interludes that frequently burst open into scenes of brutal verbal or physical violence, director Vincent Grashaw explores what it’s like to be Edwin, so battered by anxiety and anger and a crushing sense of unfairness that he hardly sleeps at night.

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.

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!).

Heartbreaking, infuriating, and unmissable.

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.

Sam Elliott, Marcia Gay Harden, and Judy Greer supply sharp cameos, but this is Tomlin’s movie, and she obliges with a spiky, refreshingly unvarnished performance.

The skating scenes, too, are thrilling, but Robbie is the real revelation. In a performance that goes far beyond bad perms and tabloid punchlines, she’s a powerhouse: a scrappy, defiant subversion of the American dream. You won’t just find yourself rooting for this crazy kid; you might even fall a little bit in love.

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.

For all that lavish calibration, its beauty is a little remote, too — so beguiled by style that it forgets, or simply declines, to make us feel too much.

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.

Colman, her eyes darting between hope and devastation, is so lit-up and specific (and funny, a quality that doesn't seem to get mentioned enough) that she lifts nearly every scene.

A sincere effort to illuminate a singularly dark chapter in history — and a stark reminder of exactly what gets lost when human beings fail to take care of their own.

Thankfully, Fremon Craig’s script is smart and sensitive enough not to gloss over the real pain lurking beneath Nadine’s bravado as she deals with the aftermath of her dad’s death, her best friend’s betrayal, and the fact that the right guy (Hayden Szeto) might not be the one with the best bangs.

It feels only appropriate that James Franco, an actor and director for whom weirdness is next to godliness, would be the one to tell his story.

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.

Murphy...brings so much hope and hunger and pure life force to the role that he makes you believe in every punchline, pelvic thrust, and egregiously misplaced karate kick.

Rocket is leisurely episodic and at over two hours, almost certainly longer than it needs to be, but the director's singular gift for street casting — beyond Rex, hardly anyone here has acted professionally before — and deeply embedded sense of mood works its own kind of unhurried alchemy.

Gourav is frankly devastating, his face a cracked mask of pain and disbelief. In others he's ruthless, calculating, even cruel. It's the kind of performance that can either make or break a movie like this, and the broad sweep of Tiger, with its cavalcade of outsize themes and incidents, sometimes threatens to overtake him. But through his eyes, Balram's singular story — in all its wild, exuberant improbability — roars to life

This sprawling German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's classic WWI novel is a film that feels both aesthetically dazzling and full of necessary truths: an antiwar drama that transcends the bombast of propaganda mostly just because it's so artfully and indelibly made.

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

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.

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.

There are more cohesive coming-of-age movies to be sure, and subtler ones. But God doesn't really try too hard to make it all make sense; it's just one boy's dolce vita, drenched in Mediterranean sun, hormones, and salt air.

There’s a raw, tangible humanity to nearly every scene that sets the film gratifyingly apart.