Manohla Dargis

I don’t think for a second that Joseph is interested in answering questions, one reason that “BLKNWS” can feel like an invitation. He wants to open your mind and maybe blow it (he succeeds on both counts) in a work that, among many other things, interrogates memory, history and the archive.

For his latest knockout, The Secret Agent, the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho embraces a freewheeling sensibility, and finds laughter amid the terror.

Despite its unsettling political resonance, “Wicked” is finally most convincing as a story of an intense, soulfully nurturing female friendship.

There’s nothing wrong (or incorrect!) about either Wright’s desire to please or the righteousness, and at times you can sense a bit of anger wafting off the screen, even if Wright and Powell mostly seem to be having a very good time.

Watching it again, I recognized that Linklater’s film is itself an expression of a certain approach — a consciousness — toward cinema’s pleasures and possibilities, one that at once embraces the art’s past and insists on its future.

Trier’s lightness of touch makes a striking contrast to the film’s emotional weightiness. Death haunts this movie, as it does other of Trier’s features, and while “Sentimental Value” has bursts of pure comedy (it can be very funny), it’s steeped in melancholy.

In the end, what is most surprising about Predator: Badlands is also the most obvious, which is that filmmaking matters even to formulaic, apparently indestructible franchises.

Bonitzer evinces an appreciable warmth toward his creations that you feel even from the analytic distance he establishes.

Jude is an interesting, admirably unorthodox filmmaker who likes to push his viewers. Here, he simply punishes us.

The great surprise of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere — a solid, very likable, very affecting drama about an anguished period in the life of the young Bruce Springsteen — is that it doesn’t shy away from soul-deep pain.

Like the overall movie, the character opens up incrementally to quiet, meaningful effect.

It’s a cry from the heart, a comic howl in the dark and one of the year’s essential movies.

Bigelow’s work here is superb. She puts the many moving parts into coordinated place and keeps them coherently spinning even as she switches out some elements and introduces others; she doesn’t drop a single plate. The script occasionally gets in her way, which sometimes happens in her work.

There is, of course, enormous pleasure in watching Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor of extraordinary sensitivity whose ability to convey a character’s interiority — the delicacy and the violence — can seem almost mystical. The problem is that as Anemone continues, the strength of the actor’s performance lays bare the banality of the writing, and Ray’s grip on your imagination loosens even as Day-Lewis’s remains fixed.

Densely packed, the movie is a whirlwind of ideas and images, by turns heady, enlivening, disturbing and near-exhausting. It’s a work of visceral urgency from Peck, who’s best known for his 2017 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” about James Baldwin.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is an exciting, goofy and deadly serious big-screen no — a no to complacency, to oppression, to tyranny. It’s a carnivalesque epic about good and evil, violence and power, inalienable rights and the fight against injustice; it’s also a love story.

Greengrass knows how to shoot and cut, but The Lost Bus is at once too high-minded and too exploitative to work. However skilled the cinematography and editing, there is no saving a movie predicated on looming death with badly written characters and such a frustratingly narrow point of view.

It’s almost always pleasant to hang out with old friends, particularly when no one overstays their welcome. The good news about “Spinal Tap II” is that everyone involved seems to have understood the assignment, which makes for a genial 83 minutes of soft jokes and jowls.

Veiel’s documentary is a welcome addition to the historically grounded rebukes to Riefenstahl and her apologists, including bad feminists.

For whatever reason here, Aronofsky always remains at a frustrating remove from Hank, which flattens the emotional and psychological stakes that Butler works so hard to raise.

Relay, a slick, sneaky thriller that’s elevated by both the actor and the director, David Mackenzie, makes it clear that Ahmed also has a silent-era performer’s gift for feverish stillness.

Like many sequels, this one ramps up everything, including the body count. The fight sequences here are well-staged, shot and cut, more elaborate than in the earlier movie and at times gleefully grisly, with skewered and barbecued flesh.

The most appealing character in Suspended Time is Assayas, a hovering offscreen presence who delivers the confessional, gracefully digressive narration.

Washington’s most successfully sustained sparring partner is Jeffrey Wright, who plays Paul, the family’s chauffeur. He comes into focus through his beliefs, his attire and salient details (including a banner for the Five Percenters, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam), though primarily through Wright’s discreet, moving performance.

Weapons may not be about anything much other than Cregger’s talent, but the guy knows how to slither under your skin — and stay there.

An Officer and a Spy is well-crafted; Polanski’s movies generally are. Its contribution to cinema’s role in historical storytelling, though, seems largely as an allegory about Polanski.

Taken individually, a lot of the jokes might not work, but when you’re in a blizzard you don’t notice each snowflake.

An enjoyably arranged collection of all the visual attractions and narrative clichés that money can buy, “F1” is very simply about the satisfactions of genre cinema and the pleasures of watching appealing characters navigate fast, exotic cars that whine like juiced-up mosquitoes. It’s also about the pleasures of that ultrasmooth performance machine, Brad Pitt.