Mark Feeney

The film’s episodic nature, which serves to underscore the moments of grim drama, adds to the problem. One can only salute the filmmakers’ ambition and seriousness of purpose, but it’s hard to see who The Breadwinner audience is.

There is a great and perhaps unique French cinematic tradition of braiding together love and manners and the past. Think of "Children of Paradise," "Casque d'Or," "The Earrings of Madame de . . .," "Elena and Her Men." Now one can think of The Princess of Montpensier, too.

Till avoids all flash. That makes it a bit didactic at times, but didacticism is a form of commitment: not so much political, though there’s certainly that, but also to emotional truth and simple human decency.

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.

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.

Much of the plot is outrageously, if also cheerfully, implausible — except that, in a context of talking fish, what qualifies as implausible? The important thing is how everything rings true emotionally.

Beautifully shot and deeply dispiriting, the documentary examines the global refugee crisis.

It’s not hard to see the script’s appeal for the actors, John David Washington and Zendaya. Playing the only characters in the movie, they get a very serious workout and give seriously good performances.

Even when events get intense, even violent, and they do, there’s nothing abrupt. Corpus Christi never erupts. It unfolds.

Watching “Story,” one realizes that so much of what most of us most love about the movies isn’t the medium, per se, but its appurtenances: stardom and glamour and the pull of narrative. What Cousins loves is the medium. We love the effects. He loves the cause.

Beverly Dollarhide, Nicholas's mother, says of the period after her son's disappearance, "My main goal in life at that time was not to think." Apparently, the filmmakers have taken a cue from her. At least her unwillingness to think makes sense.

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."

So expect the upending of expectations: visual, emotional, tonal, generic. Especially generic. Is First Love a comedy? A crime thriller? A love story? An advertorial for subscriptions to Guns and Ammo?...Yes.

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?

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

It's superb filmmaking, uncluttered and utterly assured. Miike places us in the household of Li, offering up rich, deep colors, with an almost painterly exploration of fields of depth and volume.

It’s no surprise that [Rex] gives Mikey everything he’s got. What is a surprise is how much he’s got to give. The performance is riveting until, like the movie, it just becomes too much.

The documentary has its memorable moments. Period footage of the now-legendary 1973 auction of contemporary art by the collector Robert Scull is riveting.

Goofy is easy. Earnest is easy in a different way. Disturbing is both easy and hard. They’re all dissimilar, and Hail Satan? has lots of all three.

These characters are so vibrant and the episodes so richly imagined that it’s easy to overlook how shapeless The Hand of God is. The film has the vividness of memory, but also the structure of memory, which is to say no real structure at all. Visually, though, the movie is of a piece; it’s Sorrentino’s eye that holds it together.

About a third or so of Spencer doesn’t work: flashbacks to Diana’s childhood, hallucinations involving Anne Boleyn, a secret visit to her old house, a Boxing Day pheasant shoot that turns into a battle of wills between Diana and Charles (Jack Farthing). But Stewart’s performance makes those things immaterial and the rest of the movie seem all the finer.

King Richard is a movie, not a miniseries; and part of what makes Baylin’s screenplay so effective is his knowing what to leave out as well as what to put in.

It would be wrong to call El Planeta a comedy, or drama, or even that wretched if useful term dramedy. It’s a slice of life, the life belonging to Gijon.

Surely it’s no coincidence that Encanto is set in the homeland of the literary master of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez. That’s what Encanto is, magical realism brought to the screen by way of the Magic Kingdom.

What Emily the Criminal really is is a character study; and this is where Plaza comes in. She’s the really good thing the movie has going for it. Over the course of 96 minutes, Emily will do some surprising things. Plaza makes them seem as natural as swiping a credit card, and in both senses of the verb.

In some ways Easy Money recalls Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic." They have drug dealing in common, of course, but also a sense of constant swirl and density of onscreen population.

Lively and loving documentary.

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.