Leah Greenblatt

Take away the people-eating, and it could almost be a Springsteen song. Which often makes it feel, in a strange way, like Guadagnino's most traditional film to date — a born provocateur's faithful ode to a classic cinematic genre, only with human gristle between its teeth.

The sheer awesomeness of Villeneuve's execution — there might not be another film this year, or ever, that turns one character asking another for a glass of water into a kind of walloping psychedelic performance art — often obscures the fact that the plot is mostly prologue: a sprawling origin story with no fixed beginning or end.

Thelma doesn’t play with pig’s blood and jump scares; its dreamlike dread is subtler and stranger, and much harder to shake.

If the film itself feels like a little less than the sum of its provocative premise, it’s still moving in its own unshowy way: a quietly profound exploration of identity, sacrifice, and the connection all human beings long for, whether or not their God or their family or their community approves.

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.

Love’s most radical act may be the simple fact of its Blackness — that the faces at the center of the screen are ones that for so many decades we’d mostly see only in the margins of a movie like this, or not at all.

The result is undoubtedly a canny mediation on the vagaries of fame, but it feels more intimate and essential than that: a lifetime of searching and self-regard distilled, somehow, into a state of grace.

As more than a decade passes on screen, the one constant is Miller’s presence in every scene: a messy, chain-smoking sex kitten stumbling from delayed adolescence toward a grown womanhood — painful, honest, and flawed — worth waiting for.

If the storyline is strictly something old and borrowed, though, a peek at the crazy-rich rainbow of Asian experience — even one as razzle-dazzlingly too-much as this one — feels not just new, but way overdue.

It's faithfully acted by an earnest, intelligent cast, and directed with fervent purpose by Maria Schrader. But the result, for all its galvanizing, well-oiled plot machinations, remains consistently earthbound, and often frustratingly schematic, a movie so bent toward education and edification that it feels a little bloodless in the end — human tragedy as PSA.

What feels important in Parkland is less about pushing any kind of political agenda or viewpoint than about simply listening, and bearing witness.

First-time director Maggie Betts has said she based her story in part on extended research into the aftershocks of Vatican II’s new liberties — in its wake, devoted members left the Church in droves — and on personal biographies of the women who experienced it firsthand.

The story itself, with its gorgeous interiors and jazzy Chet Baker soundtrack, turns out to be a bit of a wisp, a dandelion puff tossed to the gods of romance and prime Manhattan real estate. But if the emotional stakes never really seem all that crucial (love wins, in the end), Murray brings his own cosmic weight.

Aaron Paul has key scenes as the drone pilot who actually has to pull the trigger, but it’s the late Alan Rickman, as Mirren’s superior, who steals the film.

Majors, already seemingly inescapable this year, brings a wounded menace that suggests the many sedimentary layers of fury and grief underneath; he's less some sneering Iron Curtain meathead á la Rocky villains of yore than a lost soul.

As the story unfolds over nearly a decade, Biggest becomes something even more impactful: a thoughtful and often profoundly moving portrait of the remarkable work involved in producing mindful food — and an eloquent reminder that so much of what we take for granted on our plates is, in its own everyday way, a miracle.

It's a fascinating story, this clash of 1960s idealism with the cold realities of modern science, though not one that director Matt Wolf (Wild Combination: A Story of Arthur Russell) is fully able to bite off and chew in Spaceship Earth, his fitfully enthralling but frustratingly incomplete documentary.

The immersive look of the film, with its strikingly unadorned landscapes and dim-lit interiors, casts a spell, and Waterston (the Fantastic Beasts franchise) and Kirby (The Crown, Pieces of Woman), bring both urgency and fragility to their constrained characters — two lost souls aligned and finding love in a hopeless place.

For all its well-worn outlines, the narrative exerts its own fierce, clenched-jaw grip: a cautionary campfire tale that reminds us it’s not merely the end that matters, it’s the style and skill of the telling.

It's the combined incandescence of the stars at the center of the screen, not the ones meant to be gazed at through telescopes, that carries the movie; its best and truest source of light.

Both Mbatha-Raw and Parker are appealing, expressive actors, and writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball) lets them breathe, filling in the boilerplate bones of the story with smartly nuanced commentary.

A brightly contemporary retelling that is not so much an origin story as a coming of age: The On-His-Way-to-Amazing Spider-Boy.

The movie offers few surprises and even less alacrity; and yet there's a cumulative weight to World that feels, if hardly new, still worth sitting through.

The symbolic power of what happened there — one small step, one giant leap for womankind — is still the movie’s truest ace.

These Waters never quite run as strong or as deep as they should.

In the larger sense of whatever a movie like this promises to be — that you will laugh (in a properly low-key English way) and cry (but not too outrageously), and feel the sudden, urgent need to drink milky tea and own a pair of dungarees — The Dig more than fulfills its destiny.

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.

Tender teachable moments about racism or depression or midlife ennui ride alongside indie-pop needle drops and broad, breezy punchlines about tea-dance orgies and ketamine.