Leah Greenblatt

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.

Green (who made the small, affecting 2018 indie Monsters and Men and this year's little-seen Joe Bell) hasn't reinvented the underdog wheel, but he has made something fresh out of the familiar — a smart reminder that when a story is told well it can hit all the beats we know, and still somehow surprise us.

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.

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.

As an intimate, often infuriating portrait of an artist and era, it's hard to argue with the raw power of the story on screen — and the timeliness of it too, no matter how long overdue.

The title of Loveless is no misnomer: It might just be the feel-bad movie of the year. A new word should be invented for the particular kind of poetic, politically-charged bleakness acclaimed filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan, The Return) brings to the screen, some Cyrillic-alphabet cousin to the Germans with their weltschmerz and schadenfreude.

Noah Baumbach’s latest wisp of privileged New York whimsy vaporizes on arrival.

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.

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

An excellently clear-eyed primer on the woman whose talent carried her from an impoverished childhood in Tryon, N.C., to the world’s most rarefied stages—and whose political defiance nearly ended her career.

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.

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.

As these vastly different men parry, spar, and circle one another, Meirelles’ intimately talky two-hander — not counting, depending on how you might choose to qualify these things, a third invisible hand upstairs — works with wit and quiet humor to demystify perhaps the most powerful and insular post in the world.

The movie is more than a bonfire of the inanities; it’s a shrewd indictment of a dream gone spectacularly, criminally wrong.

Dispatch often feels like the filmmaker in concentrate form, both his best and worst instincts on extravagant display.

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.

Branagh's genuine affection and nostalgia for his subject suffuse the movie; if only the misty romanticism of his story could match it.

By the time the narrative comes to Colvin’s greatest get — she was essentially the first Western journalist to get inside Homs and refute Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s bold-faced lie that he wasn’t bombing his own people into oblivion — the price of that sacrifice, and the power of her story, feels finally, fully real. Whatever her private battles, War works hard to be the public reckoning her work deserves.

In the second half, the movie even manages a few rare moments of visceral thrill, and even something like catharsis. But nothing ever quite gels; instead, the story just keeps banging toward its bloody conclusion, always a little off the beat.

Whitney feels like the kind of film anyone who cared at all about her should see: the fullest portrait yet — if one that will always, inevitably fall short — of a singular artist and human being who may have eluded understanding in the end, but still gave the world far more than she ever got back.

What begins as a gleefully nasty piece of work gradually picks up more nuance as it goes, adding dimensions to characters who could easily have coasted on the story’s arched-eyebrow burlesque.

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.

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.

In an era when nearly everything that can be done on film already has been, Titane forges something sensational from nerve and pure metal, and makes it new.

You can see gifted actors like Hoult and MacKay struggling to make the most of the material, and add finer shadings to Shaun Grant's bare-knuckled script. But for all its real visual flair, it's hard not to feel that the film misses something crucial about Kelly in the end — trading machismo for manhood, and sensation for true history.

Somewhere along the way Earl eases up on the suburban–Wes Anderson whimsy and starts to find its heart, infusing the story’s self-conscious cleverness and trick-shot set pieces with something sweeter, sadder, and even a little bit profound. In other words, it grows up.

The portrait that emerges is one of a brash, talented girl who grew up an outcast in her small Texas town.

Southside doesn’t hang on epiphanies; instead, it delivers something more modest: a tender, unrushed love story.