Mark Feeney

There’s one NSA staffer in particular — seen in shadow, her voice altered — who’s the real star of Zero Days. Her reveal is at once solid journalism and dramatic tour de force. It’s a challenge Gibney meets with ease.

It’s like a collection of short stories — most dystopian, some not — trying to pass itself off as a novel.

The Spanish-Argentine comedy is about as far from being a CGI-fest as you can get, but Cruz’s hair is a very special special effect. Its oxblood abundance is torrential, jungley, diluvian, an in-your-face to the very concept of baldness. It’s also gloriously ridiculous, and ridiculousness masquerading as glory — male pomposity and artistic pretension, too — is what “Official Competition” is all about.

So the big surprise about White Boy Rick is how well the movie works. It’s one thing to know a story is based on nonfiction. Being made to believe its plausibility is something else. White Boy Rick you believe.

Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President isn’t a political documentary, but it is a civics lesson.

Maybe the biggest problem with Muscle Shoals is that it doesn’t dig deeper into something even more miraculous than the music.

From start to finish, you don’t know what’s coming next in Nope. When was the last time you saw a movie where that was true? Nope is deeply strange, and Jordan Peele knows exactly what he’s doing with that strangeness. It’s designedly strange. It’s coherently strange.

Like the title characters and the performances that go with them, Being the Ricardos has real zip. It’s a virtue of Sorkin’s tendency to glibness. His writing can be irritatingly slick, but never boring.

Much of the charm of this highly charming film is the window it affords on the offstage Beatles and their families.

"I've seen the look on people's faces when I've brought them there," Whedon says of the convention. "It's the look I had on my face. 'My tribe, my tribe, I've found my tribe.' "

Lively and loving documentary.

The man we meet is intelligent and good-humored. "They do what they want," he says with a shrug, indicating a set of just-completed canvases. "I planned something different."

With so much going on, it’s easy to overlook that the most profound and moving relationship in either film is the bond between Elsa and Anna. It’s the most human and least-calculated thing in “Frozen” or Frozen II. Their love is the ultimate special effect. Ice is nice. But sisterhood is what’s really powerful.

Hipsters is also kind of amazing, thanks to headlong enthusiasm and an endearing obliviousness to just how ghastly the whole thing keeps threatening to become.

Belkin’s smart, dynamic documentary shares its subject’s slam-bang style. That’s good. Watching it is exhilarating. It also shares Wallace’s aversion to nuance. That’s less good. Belkin has a weakness for split screens and rapid-fire editing. In fairness, that’s one way to cram in more material, and Belkin has lots (and lots) of material to cram in.

The Bad Guys takes the cute kid with a fishing pole in the DreamWorks logo and replaces him with a rather raffish-looking wolf who sneaks his way up onto that crescent moon. Right off the bat, we’re being told to expect irreverence and inventiveness. Those expectations will be met.

Everything feels strange, savage, implacably other: royalty alongside slavery, formality prized yet pity nowhere to be found. The Northman seems so foreign, as it should. Yet what Eggers never forgets, and this does almost as much as his talent does to make his film so frequently compelling, is that what to the characters is mundane is to us unreal — and vice versa.

There's a restraint to Mademoiselle Chambon that's more English than French. Emotions get repressed more often than expressed.

Alice Creed isn't as good as Tarantino's directorial debut, or another movie it calls to mind, "A Simple Plan.'' But the genetic resemblance to those two films indicates how good much of this extremely assured picture is.

With this fifth and final go-round, it’s clear who the best Bond is. It’s Craig, Daniel Craig.

TÁR is ambitious, unusual, forceful, and ultimately frustrating, an emotional epic that’s also a nose-against-the-glass view of classical music and unconventional take on the #MeToo movement in that world.

Jenkins has given the documentary a structure that’s largely chronological but primarily thematic. The shifting around makes for a nice flow. The film moves along crisply without ever feeling hectic or rushed.

It’s easily the most mannered movie Anderson has made, which is really saying something. It’s so mannered at times as to be almost unmoored — speaking of ships — but the many marvels it contains make that an acceptable price to pay.

Listening to Taylor is so compelling the screen could be blank and “Lost Tapes” would still be interesting. But director Nanette Burstein keeps things visually abundant with home movies, snapshots, film stills, film clips, newsreels, publicity photos.

Sword of Trust has a dogged weirdness all its own, a singularity that extends to Maron having written the excellently jangly score. When was the last time you saw — or heard — a movie where the star composed the music? It’s just part of the its-own-world quality of Sword of Trust.

The biggest complaint about Brooklyn Castle is that there's not enough of her. A presence as magnetic as Vicary's demands more screen time. How did she come to chess (a notoriously male-dominated game)? How did she come to 318?

The verb in the title of The Day He Arrives doesn't refer so much to a traveler reaching a destination as to a man finding himself - or hoping to.

Chicken With Plums has Iran in common with "Persepolis," but little else. Largely, though not entirely, live action, it's a fairly traditional story about thwarted love - a kind of fairy tale for grown-ups.