Michael Phillips

Like the modest but wholly winning precursor to “Hamilton” it is, In the Heights works as an essentially apolitical embrace of the American possibility and the American roadblocks to that possibility, in a canny variety of musical styles, from hip hop to salsa

The film doesn’t begin to know what to do with the reincarnation idea beyond a few sharply edited micro-flashbacks. Is the look on Wahlberg’s face the character thinking What is going on? Or is it the actor thinking Am I in the next ‘Matrix’ or the silliest movie of 2021?

What we have here is a smoothly crafted error in judgment.

Thanks to the director, what they do makes for painless “avoidance viewing” — something to kill 100 minutes or so while you’re avoiding something else, delivered in an impersonal but not unskillful manner.

At times, Limbo can feel confining in ways that exceed the confining circumstances of its characters. But the story of Omar deepens and amplifies the film’s second half, maintaining its droll amusements but playing the circumstances for just enough bittersweet honesty to make it stick.

Even if Godzilla vs. Kong feels more a tad more mecha than human, it satisfies nonetheless. The MonsterVerse remains a better-than-average franchise, pulling enough variations on its theme of Titans, clashing, to keep on keepin’ on.

The cast generates the goodwill. Madison and Quinn bring heart and some shrewd dramatic instincts, while Cook and Sterling settle comfortably into a sincere comic key.

I hate hidden-camera gags on principle and have since “Candid Camera.” It takes something at least as funny as the first “Borat” (and, at its sharpest and sweetest, the second one), or this movie, for my jaw to unclench long enough to enjoy the brutal slapstick and the faux human misery.

I’d love to say it isn’t half-bad, but I can’t, because it is. It’s roughly 50 percent bad. The other 50 percent is better than that, even with a running time that threatens to never stop not stopping.

The movie — certainly Daniels’s best since “Precious” — is as turbulent and zigzaggy as Holiday’s life no doubt felt like to the woman who lived it. If this risky movie hits some bum notes, Andra Day cannot be found anywhere in the vicinity.

The acting’s uniformly strong, and the script is distressingly weak.

Wiig and Mumolo work so easily and smoothly together, you feel like an ingrate for not enjoying their efforts more in these script circumstances (especially since they wrote it). Now and then, though, the payoffs arrive.

I wish the results were better, and a lot stranger. Cahill’s world-building has its moments, though. And the filmmaker did determine — correctly — that it’d be fun to have Bill Nye, the science guy, in a bow tie, portraying a sniffy scientific researcher.

Judas and the Black Messiah is my kind of dramatized Chicago history. It’s a real movie, for one thing — brash, narratively risky, full of life and sneaky wit (even if the dominant tone is one of foreboding) and brimming with terrific actors.

The moral conundrums aren’t particularly thorny, since Balram’s revenge is well-earned. Yet Bahrani works so well with the individual actors, they seem like people, not archetypes or stereotypes.

The actors take your mind off things when they can: I like the way Hathaway jabs her elbow at the elevator buttons for punctuation, and the ardent commitment to language Ejiofor brings to his character’s public poetry readings. But a movie shouldn’t rely on Hathaway and Ejiofor to shell-game your attention away from the movie itself.

The stakes are important, but the film is carried by a stream of small, acutely observed moments, and the way these actors move, converse, relate and enliven Powers’s best dialogue. It’s a case of getting the best of both worlds: a strong, mellow film of urgent, historically prescient ideas expanded from a juicy theatrical premise.

In Pieces of a Woman Kirby never seems to be building up artificial climaxes or big reveals; she works on a quieter, truer level. Too much going on around her ends up working against her.

The movie at hand is small, I suppose, and it may not be enough for some audiences. It’s enough for me.

It’s a moderately diverting sequel. That means it’s also a distinct drop down from the 2017 origin story.

The music is drippy and constant, the wobble from comedy to drama feels off, and the dialects have been reamed in the Irish press. Charm resists calculation; even if actors get some going, even if a writer creates an approximation in or between the lines, deliberately manufactured charm curdles so easily. The one success story of Wild Mountain Thyme belongs to Blunt, who has yet to give a poor or lazily considered performance.

The movie’s a little sketchy and underwritten, and it feels sometimes as if scenes have been pared away or cut altogether to concentrate on Ahmed. But Ahmed really is terrific. Director Marder has a knack for both observing and igniting human behavior, through character. And supervising sound editor Nicolas Baker’s work astounds, period.

The tweaks are interesting, even if they can’t do anything about larger narrative frustrations.

The result is a narrow slice of a much, much larger story, somewhat akin to the hands-off, eyes-wide-open documentary approach of Frederick Wiseman — if Wiseman were a war correspondent. Rarely has recent global history seemed so far away, yet so present. It’s one of the year’s essential documents.

Happiest Season” isn’t full-on farce; it’s lower-key, and runs into trouble only when the script contends with confessional monologues right up against hiding-in-a-literal-closet routines or routine slapstick, as it does in the climax. But you know? It works.

Cutler’s documentary skip-walks a fine line between a great, unstable talent’s rise and fall, and between the un-tender trap of addiction and the joyous energy of a Chicago-bred giant.

Seeing these actors, the late Boseman chief among them, relish the opportunity to try to get a daunting stage-to-screen adaptation right: That’s a privilege to behold.

It’s a familiar but enjoyably vindictive PG-13 thriller about mother/daughter trust issues. Plus a little psychopathology.

What’s missing is the vital emotional turbulence of Sciamma’s modern classic, or of any three-dimensional story of passion and feeling. The compensations here are smaller, but they’re welcome, too; they’re more about two fine actresses digging for what’s underneath the obvious contours.

It’s best taken, I think, as a romantic gesture to a writer who loved movies. Well, two, really: Herman J. Mankiewicz, and Jack Fincher.

A 1960s-set Western laden with big skies, steady gazes and slow-roasted narrative corn, Let Him Go gets by on the strength of its female leads, Diane Lane and Lesley Manville. Kevin Costner’s effective, too, and he’s right in his taciturn sweet spot, muttering about this and that.

A pre-teen on the autism spectrum, lonely and isolated, becomes the online prey of an unwanted stranger, a monster from another realm. That’s Come Play in one sentence. The results unfold more like a collection of reference points to previous film than a film unto itself.

I laughed at a good deal of the movie, but a good deal more of it left me with (Cohen’s intention, probably) the taste of ashes in the mouth.

The pretty, empty, emotionally frictionless and touch-free new Rebecca adaptation may suit the pandemic dictates for social distancing, but the drama fails to spark.

It’s a movie about a movie star taking out the trash, leaving behind a lower body count than usual, but executing his duties faithfully, and with a predictable dash — the right kind of predictable — of world-weary charisma.

Spontaneous allows Langford’s Mara, blasé swagger incarnate, and Plummer’s stealth charmer enough unaffected sincerity to make it stick. Onto that sticky stuff, the script applies comforting reminders: Stuff happens. We don’t know how long we have. Seize the day.

The final third of this grim, accomplished film felt sluggish to me; just when he might’ve profitably gone crazier with the scenario, and the storytelling rhythm, Cronenberg putters and lets the audience get out ahead of the developments.

Seeing what may be Coppola’s least compelling film has a way of reminding you of all her better ones, especially in the seriocomic vein. Those include the aforementioned “Lost in Translation,” along with “The Bling Ring,” “Somewhere,” even the playfully anachronistic “Marie Antoinette.” If they’re new to you, have at them.

Parsons has some sharp, truthful moments, but his demeanor lacks the world-weary authority as written. (His zingers have lost a lot of their zing, it must be said.) Everyone else is wonderful, and the limitations of Parsons and Quinto, in the end, are just that — limitations of often effective work.

Sorkin’s writing may be better served by a director who can bring a new set of perspectives and dynamics to the work, rather than simply presenting them head-on. Yet it works anyway. The actors win on appeal. And it’s always worth revisiting this particular chapter of Chicago unrest and injustice, because that chapter, tragically, is always up for another rewrite.

All four key actors are lovely, none of them playing to the camera — Durkin likes nice, long, slow-zoom set-ups, roomy and generous — and all of them affecting. Coon has the built-in advantage of playing the character undergoing the most evident and playable changes. But she’s extraordinary in her contained emotion.

Souza comes off as a genuine and genuinely humble talent. There is, however, an element of intentional or inadvertent image-packaging that goes with any White House photographer’s beat. One wishes Souza were heard on the subject of the fine, tricky line between reportorial authenticity and visual flattery.

While there’s little or no outright expression of religious faith in Nomadland, Zhao and company have given us a glancing but evocative state-of-the-nation character study. In its own spiritual fashion, Fern’s story becomes one about the character of a nation, and an America desperately searching for the ribbon of highway (to quote Woody Guthrie) to take us all the way home.

Extremely well wrought. Not overwrought. Not underwrought. Just wrought.

Shooting largely on New Zealand’s South Island, Caro has a beautiful knack for fluid transitions: the witch entering the body of an unsuspecting traveler in silhouetted shadow, for example, or a simple, fixed composition of Mulan riding from one side of the screen to the other, in extreme long shot. The dizzying wuxia martial arts action, with warriors sprinting up, down and sideways, defying gravity, propel the action scenes without overwhelming them.

The documentary infers a good deal about Mulvihill’s underworld connections and political maneuvers without quite nailing them down.

Cheesy, yes, hit-and-miss, maybe, but the bits that work really do work.

It’s frustrating, although I’m grateful Kaufman didn’t simply film the book as written. The actors couldn’t be better attuned to the nervous system of this universe.

I wish Tenet exploited its own ideas more dynamically. Nolan’s a prodigious talent. But no major director, I suppose, can avoid going sideways from time to time.

Tilda Swinton’s a tightly wound riot as Copperfield’s snappish aunt, living seaside and fending off stray donkeys while her serenely mad lodger Mr. Dick resides in his own universe. He is played by Hugh Laurie, beautifully, as if Bertie Wooster had taken a few wrong turns.

In the sadistic yet middling road-rage thriller Unhinged, Crowe literally steers the vehicle delivering the big box of acting, over- and under-. While there’s barely a movie there, a year from now, when the multiplexes of the world will either largely be back, be gone or be something in between, we’ll have forgotten Unhinged.

While Represent could’ve used another 20 minutes to flesh out its unguarded moments, this is a strong feature-length directorial debut. Regional politics is local politics is national politics. It’s revealing to see how the sausage gets made, and who gets to make it.

The clever and nicely gory Sputnik comes from Russia with love, slime, and an impressive lesson in efficient, low-cost pulp filmmaking.

Howard does a fine, loving job tracing who he was as a gay Jewish boy growing up in Baltimore; as an aspiring playwright and theatrical impresario, schooled at Boston University, Goddard College in Vermont, the summer theater program at Tufts University, and a graduate student at Indiana University; and as a hungry young New York City transplant, eager to make his mark.

This one’s more than one kind of comedy, too. It’s a sweet yet nicely vinegary immigration fable; a deadpan fantasy; and a tale of two Brooklyns, one (1920) a repository of rat-infested factories and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the other (2020) the gentrified land of their progressive, pea milk-drinking great-grandchildren.

It’s frequently gripping and finally very moving. The director’s innate decency and forthright sense of craft does justice to a painful subject — one with unexpected connections to the 2020 pandemic moment.

The lightly carbonated fizz of I Used to Go Here has everything to do with Rey’s deftly chosen ensemble.

It starts out good and turns out dumb, ditching a promising, nicely suggestive first half for second-half payoffs (revealed in the trailer) taking director Dave Franco’s feature directorial debut into lame and lamer slasher-film territory.

In several scenes, the camera stays close to Dyer’s dazzling array of expressions at the computer keyboard, while Alice processes the latest rabbit hole or interior dilemma. Maine knows a pitch-perfect performance when she sees one.

It’s hard to shake the familiarity of the premise and the set-ups in “Lake of Death The story rhythms wander instead of screw-tighten, and while Robsahm has little interest in Raimi-style pulp or dynamism, the placid surface of Lake of Death rarely gets disturbed, or disturbing.

Everything happens quickly in Fatal Affair, since it’s all plot and no character. These movies are what they are: disposable; full of shiny, unstained, high-end kitchen countertops.

The film’s peculiar, lingering pathos do not depend on any sort of strict genre definition. The effectiveness depends on caring about the people in the bar, waiting for last call.

It’s worth seeing in any case, any format, if only to see a seriously skillful debut feature director breathe new life into a familiar Old Dark House scenario.

It’s consistent, and there’s enough juice in Hanks’ personal, human-scaled interest in ordinary heroism under fire to make the movie underneath the labels work on its own terms.

It’s probably best to call it after this one. But I remain astonished at the rewatchability of these “Trip to” films.

An unusual, agreeable heist picture with just enough feeling behind the style to make it stick, Lucky Grandma rests almost wholly on the withering glances of Tsai Chin.

But for the performances, and for just about everything Sallitt is up to, the film nonetheless feels full and true.

As corporate directives go, Scoob! has a lighter spirit (until the obligatory protracted action climax) and swifter throwaway gags than either of the live-action “Scooby-Doo” remakes offered. (Thank God for Matthew Lillard and Linda Cardellini, though. I start each day with that prayer.) The animated “Scoob!” aims younger, and mostly is better for it.

It’s dumb to measure the worth of anything by its ability to make you cry, but by the end of Driveways the feelings of the characters spill over into your own experience of watching a small, very quiet, very powerful 83-minute short story of a movie.

Anything made well in advance of the pandemic feels like a weird period piece these days, of course, yet Jury’s small, affecting picture fits snugly within the pandemic realities of 2020.

There’s no way to experience Becoming apolitically, not now. You don’t have to consider it first-rate documentary filmmaking of any sort to feel something watching it.

Geyrhalter made, among others, “Our Daily Bread,” an equally arresting visual essay on industrial food production. We need filmmakers such as this one very badly these days. We need to know what we’re up to as a species, in the name of comfort, convenience, attractive home furnishings and hazardous disregard for the global house we live in.

It’s heartbreakingly good.

It’s an efficient, well-acted thriller from the writing-directing team — relative newcomers to features — of Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage Cole.

It’s a lame and weaselly thing, made strangely more frustrating by some excellent performers.

In Reichardt films ranging from “Wendy and Lucy” to “Meek’s Cutoff” to “Certain Women,” the lives of outsiders are defined by the natural world, economic circumstance and by their own dreams of connection. First Cow is one of her very best.

With The Way Back, Ben Affleck didn’t have to deliver his biggest or most attention-getting performance, simply — and simplicity is hard — his truest.

Does it work? It’s one busy movie, though without much variety in its rhythm or much breathing room in its perils.

The film is about bargains made and broken and re-negotiated. You watch it in an anxious, protective state, regarding the fate of these characters, and this fallout.

The latest film version loosely adapting the Wells story exploits it both ways, subtly and crassly. It works, thanks largely to a riveting and fearsomely committed Elisabeth Moss mining writer-director Leigh Whannell’s stalker scenario for all sorts of psychological nuance.

The latest “Emma,” marking the feature directorial debut of Autumn de Wilde, is a little edgier, driven by a more ambiguous and emotionally guarded portrayal of the blithe young matchmaker played by Anya Taylor-Joy.

Not much music finds its way on the soundtrack, but what’s there is crucial. Vivaldi’s “Violin Concerto in G Minor," heard twice and strategically, ends up crystallizing the love story in ways we don’t see coming.

Seriously, the running time of Fantasy Island should be listed as “sometime tomorrow."

The Photograph treats all its characters with some decency and understanding, in a genre where straw villains and cardboard adversaries typically run rampant. The plaintive, jazz-inflected musical score by Robert Glasper establishes the right vibe and level of drama, which is to say: more like life and less like the movies.

Besides being the best American film of our new year, writer-director Kitty Green’s drama The Assistant confounds expectations and has the strange effect (on me, anyway) of simultaneously chilling and boiling the viewer’s blood.

The movie is made well, if you’re buying what it’s selling, and if you don’t consider a story or a script as crucial to the quality of a thriller.

It’s not straight-up realism; nor is it the usual moralizing, candy-coated melodrama. It’s just very, very good, and the scenes between Tenille and Perrier are very, very easily among the plaintive screen highlights of this new year.

The problems begin and end with the script, credited to three writers. “Dolittle” turns its title character into an eccentric and wearying blur of tics, tacked onto a character who comports himself like a bullying, egocentric A-lister rather than someone who, you know, actually enjoys the company of animals.

Bad Boys for Life may be a frantic visual blur but it’s razor-sharp thematically. Its mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make a jaded 2020 audience glad to see these guys again. The movie’s not the point. The boys are the point.

Conceived and developed shortly after Haddish scored, deservedly, with “Girls Trip,”” the movie is a mechanical series of witless yeast infection jokes, or thereabouts. While director Miguel Arteta has made some interesting work in the past, including “The Good Girl” and “Beatriz at Dinner,” his way with low physical comedy here is pretty artless.

What’s missing, I think, is a sense of human complication within an inhuman judicial sphere. While Foxx works wonders, especially in his scenes with Jordan, Just Mercy rarely gets under the skin or behind the eyes of McMillian.

The latest nerve-shredder from Josh and Benny Safdie is worth seeing, even if it’s not their finest two hours, and even if half of any given audience will resent the hell out of it. Adam Sandler’s excellent.

Is it the worst film of 2019, or simply the most recent misfire of 2019? Reader, I swear on a stack of pancakes: “Cats” cannot be beat for sheer folly and misjudgment and audience-reaction-to-“Springtime for Hitler”-in-“The Producers” stupefaction.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker does the job. It wraps up the trio of trilogies begun in 1977 in a confident, soothingly predictable way, doing all that cinematically possible to avoid poking the bear otherwise known as tradition-minded quadrants of the “Star Wars” fan base.

However freely fictionalized, I like my docudramas with as much moral complication and human shading as filmmakers can provide. Years from now, it’d be wonderful to look back at something more than good actors, with or without wizardly prosthetics, taking our mind off what’s not quite right with the stories at hand.

A different editing rhythm (and a less narcotic musical score) would substantially change the personality of this movie, for better or worse.

Richard Jewell is a sincere and extremely well-acted irritant from 89-year-old director Clint Eastwood. It’s destined to get under the hides of different moviegoers in radically different ways.