Michael Phillips

At its best, Nightbitch is many things at once: funny, unruly, bizarre, tender.

We know where The Order is going; the actors ensure our interest en route.

Moana 2 is more of an action movie with a few accidental musical numbers of varying quality.

This is sublime work, with poetry and prose in unerring balance, thanks to writer-director Payal Kapadia.

Truly, this is a movie dependent on managed expectations and a forgiving attitude toward its tendency to overserve.

Too often, though, the magic in Wicked remains stubbornly unmagical. And whenever Erivo isn’t around to make us believe, and take the mechanics of Wicked to heart, Part I reveals what’s behind the curtain, an adequate set-up for next November’s second act.

Red One is the holiday fantasy built on retribution, punishment and crushed hopes we deserve right now.

A Real Pain, shadowed by the Holocaust and the grandmother we never see, may be a modestly scaled second feature, but Eisenberg makes an enormous leap forward, coming off his promising directorial debut, “When You Finish Saving the World.”

Cross-cutting between son and mother, and their constant efforts to reunite among the carnage, flames and rubble before it’s too late, director McQueen keeps the screws tight, blowing past realism for a trickier realm of historically grounded but highly stylized imagination.

It’s one of his good ones. Small, modest, a little stodgy. But good, and even a little brave in its courtroom-drama willingness to dunk the audience in the main character’s soup of anxiety almost immediately.

The book’s melancholy spareness has been replaced by a “Here” existing somewhere in a pristine, remote suburb we’ll call Uncanny Valley Falls, a few miles away from real life.

It’s not perfect, but Anora is a touching comic and dramatic odyssey, driven by a terrific performance by Mikey Madison in the title role.

Sleek, confident and peppered with delicious portraits in pursuit, deceit and evasion, the carnival of papal intrigue known as “Conclave” works like gangbusters.

Smile 2 goes in a newish direction, to frustrating mixed results — but it’s a mixed bag you can respect because it’s not hackwork and it’s trying new things.

Super/Man should introduce many people, young and older, to a fine actor’s work and, more importantly, to what Reeve accomplished for himself and so many others in the life he was dealt.

It’s an actual, conflicted and sporadically insightful film, dramatizing what made Trump Trump at an especially impressionable period in his rise.

Recently making its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Wild Robot already has been pumped up into the contradictory “instant classic” stratosphere. I understand the enthusiasm, or most of it, I guess, especially given the mellow, less photorealistic, more painterly visual landscapes, and Sanders’ assured tear-duct massage technique.

Saoirse Ronan does subtly spectacular work in every phase of this character’s odyssey.

In 2024 a movie about a live-TV countdown to destiny, once upon a time in ’75, needs more than moderately skillful reverence, and reaction shots of people cracking up at colleagues, to show us what it might’ve been like to be there.

So who’s up for a strange, disarming musical? As much as I hated the first one, this one works for me.

With a crucial performance from Adam Pearson to complement Stan’s fine work, the film is well worth seeing. It is, in fact, a serious joke about the act of seeing.

A lot happens, some of it life-changing, some of it heartrending, parts of it (in story terms) a bit rushed or on-the-nose. The actors, unerringly well-cast, more or less take care of those last parts.

The script’s conflicts and obstacles get their tidy share of the available 90 minutes. I’d love to see a two-hour version of Rose’s film, aired out to some degree, with a more unpredictable rhythm and some conversations allowing us to hang out with these people without worrying about advancing the story.

Naive, decadent, sluggish, dazzling, touchingly sincere in its belief that “a vital conversation” about the state of our nation can save us, even with barbarians at the gates: There’s something to vex everyone in Megalopolis.

Does it matter that Wolfs is about literally nothing except itself and its star packaging? Maybe not. On the other hand, Watts hasn’t written a single fleshed-out character. It’s about genre tropes, distilled to minimalist quipping amid maximalist mayhem.

[Moore's] gripping in ways the rest of the picture is not, transcending the thesis points and comic exaggerations simply by playing against the comic extremes and holding a card or two, always, in reserve. She reminds us here how good, and tough, she is at her best, when she gets half a chance.

The actors put it over, and Watkins is a genre filmmaker who believes in using his actors as more than pieces of plot in human clothing. That, I appreciate, with no reservations whatsoever.

What’s missing is not simply surprise, or the pleasurable shock of a new kind of ghost comedy. It’s the near-complete absence of verbal wit, all the more frustrating since Keaton is ready to play, and he’s hardly alone.