Leah Greenblatt

Kids could still watch the peerless 1966 original, though their blooming little cortexes will probably respond to the shiny-bright novelty here — and be newly spellbound by a tale almost as old as color television, but still evergreen.

In a year short on so many of those things, Jangle feels like finding something sweetly familiar but also new, finally, under the tree.

It’s Cooper, in his directing debut, who ultimately has to carry the film from both sides.

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.

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.

There’s a kinetic energy in Levinson’s telling, and real catharsis in a riotous final sequence that feels all the more triumphant for the unlikeliness of such a bloody, happy ending.

There’s some real, weird fun in secondary characters like Tony Hale’s desperate-to-be-down principal, Natasha Rothwell’s exasperated drama teacher, and Logan Miller’s Martin, a theater kid so eager to please he practically turns himself inside out.

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.

Cha Cha feels like both a fitting showcase for a young auteur like Raiff and a larger marker of how much movie masculinity has evolved: a real-smooth manifesto for the anti-toxic man.

The movie, which bowed to uniformly rave reviews at Sundance earlier this year, is also — it will probably be noted ad nauseum — the first film collaboration from Barack and Michelle Obama’s new production company Higher Ground. But the heart and soul of American Factory, like all American factories, is never really politics of course; it’s people.

And for all the absurdist laughs (and not a few cringes) both men wring from it, their interplay feels both inherently ridiculous and entirely true to life; a bittersweet bromance writ in whiskey and spandex.

Navalny has a bracing, heart-racing story to tell, even as the improbable facts rush past. But it never fails to focus on the human man: funny, prickly, and unimaginably brave, down to the last defiant frame.

PP2 sometimes feels less like a movie than a two-hour episode of Glee ghostwritten by Amy Schumer; jokes fly like they’re being shot from T-shirt guns at a gonzo pep rally, and not all of them stick the landing.

Branagh executes his double duties with a gratifyingly light touch, tweaking the story’s more mothballed elements without burying it all in winky wham-bam modernity.

The movie borders on hagiography, but Gordon is a charmingly voluble storyteller; he’s like Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World recast as a balding Jewish guy from Long Island.

A smart, eminently watchable thriller, taut and stylish, and Plummer is remarkably good in it.

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.

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.

As a surreal slice of history served up nearly half a century later, it feels oddly satisfying: A reminder not just of simpler times, but of all the other wild untold stories we may never know, just because no camera was there to capture them.

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

Even when the film fails to ask so many of the questions its narrative begs, Author is still a tricky, fascinating look at the strange nexus of art, artifice, and the intoxicating cult of celebrity.

The movie may feel minor next to Vinterberg’s more serious work, but it’s more personal, too: A messy, tender window into the world that shaped him.

It's Coen lite, basically, but still filled with their best signatures: cracked humor, indelible characters, and cinematography so rich and saturated you want to dunk a cookie in it.

Director Cory Finley (who also helmed 2017’s great, underappreciated "Thoroughbreds") brings a light touch to Mike Makowsky’s script, nimbly balancing broader comedy and pathos.

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.

Because it's Spielberg, it's all beautifully, meticulously rendered, and not a little glazed in wistful sentiment: an infinitely tender, sometimes misty ode to the people who raised him and the singular passion for cinema that shaped him.

Between "Moonlight" and the upcoming "Call Me By Your Name," some are calling this the golden age of gay coming-of-age cinema; Beach Rats’ slow pacing and dreamy verité style doesn’t feel made for quite that level of mainstream appeal. But still it gets under the skin, and stays there.

Depending on your demographic, Bodies will probably either make you feel seen or utterly obsolete. But it's also just straight-up fun: a black-hearted comedy of manners meets contemporary social nightmare, written in blood and vape smoke.