Leah Greenblatt

Shot by cinematographer Shabier Kirchner in hazy, endless-summer half-light, Kitchen finds a kind of urban poetry in the swooping parabolas of the skate park and the rumbling scrape of wheels on pavement.

It’s a testament to writer-director Matt Ross, who is probably best known as an actor on shows like Big Love and Silicon Valley, that Captain skirts cliché as well as it does; his indictments of both contemporary emptiness and misguided idealism feel earned, even if it all ties up a little too Sundance-tidy in the end.

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

The thing that truly makes the movie, though, is Bell.

As satire, Woman‘s first two acts are fun but broad: a winky, wildly stylized slice of girl-powered revenge porn. And Mulligan, who’s always given smart, delicately shaded performances in movies like Far from the Madding Crowd and An Education (she was great in 2018’s underseen Wildlife) is an entirely different animal here: furious, damaged, ferociously funny.

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.

The tart in-jokes and absurdity of the script, its winky acknowledgment of all the tropes gone before it, feels like a delirious cap on recent genre hits like Barbarian and Malignant.

It’s an artful, quietly affecting piece of filmmaking, more than worth the lessons learned.

No one gets off easy here, and no one quite gets answers, either; maybe that’s the point.

Kimberly Reed’s taut documentary is also damning, clear-eyed, and as gripping as any John Grisham thriller.

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.

Laurent, an actress known Stateside for movies like Inglorious Basterds and Beginners, has adapted Ball from the bestselling novel by Victoria Mas, whose facts are rooted in actual history. She shares Mas' justifiable outrage at the casual inhumanity of it all — the brutal experiments and biased theories, the rampant physical and emotional abuse — and also her sense for melodrama.

Shot in the goldenrod-and-avocado palette of the ’70s and dabbed with incongruous soft-rock lullabies, the movie itself is both painfully intimate and strangely opaque on the subject of mental illness, taking us deep inside Christine’s disintegration even as it never quite figures out what it wants to say about it.

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

Who can take a reboot, sprinkle it with something new, cover it with blood and bumblebees and a pointed social commentary or two? Candyman can, at least for a little while, even if the movie doesn't really find its more-than-body-horror groove in the end.

Like the fretful violins that stagger raggedly over the soundtrack, the skin-pricking pleasures of Midsommar aren’t rational, they’re instinctive: a thrilling, seasick freefall into the light.

Writer-director Chloe Okuno has a remarkably sure hand for mood-building in her feature debut, using the winding alleys and tree-lined boulevards of Bucharest to woozy, enveloping affect. But she gives her star so few specific contours that Julia mostly comes off as a beautiful cipher and an increasingly maddening protagonist to root for, seemingly both paranoid and obtuse.

The script, accordingly, herks and jerks along with a sort of forced-festive glee, its mounting body count buffeted by goofball banter and pounding soundtrack cues. A good half of the jokes don't land, but unlike his predecessor's joyless slog, Gunn's version at least celebrates the nonsense.

If the buildup and catharsis of its final minutes are more than a little silly, and marred by Whannell’s urge to put too neat bow on it all, the movie still has its satisfying jolts — including possibly one of the single most shocking screen deaths so far this year.

It falls on Pattinson's leather-cased Batman to be the hero we need, or deserve. With his doleful kohl-smudged eyes and trapezoidal jawline, he's more like a tragic prince from Shakespeare; a lost soul bent like a bat out of hell on saving everyone but himself.

Penna’s concept is hardly new, but his execution is sharp, clean, and smartly paced; a harrowing postcard from the void.

The result, alas, is totally bolloxed, as a Brit might say, by execution.

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.

The story's bright swirl of Pixar pixie dust, jangle soundtrack, and gentle lessons on accepting otherness and learning to move past fear feel like a temporary passport: a sweetly soulful all-ages dip in la dolce vita.

The movie loses some momentum in the final third, and tends to over-egg its caricatures of all these platinum-card fools and clueless masters of the universe. But its appetite for destruction is also too much fun in the end to refuse: a giddy little amuse bouche for the apocalypse to come.

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

Even a ravishingly shot finale — Queens has never looked so enchanting — can’t quite paper over the weak resolution of the plot’s central mystery.