Michael Phillips

All of Us Strangers is a lovely way to begin 2024, not because it’s especially seasonal — though one key scene takes place around Christmastime — but because it’s just so beautifully acted and tenderly observant.

Night Swim comes from a crafty 2014 short directed by Blackhurst and McGuire, not quite three minutes in length minus end credits. Apples and oranges, I suppose, but the short gets more done in terms of atmosphere and rhythmic wiles than the full-length version. Still: These filmmakers have both a past and a future in evocative horror.

I wouldn’t mind seeing Ferrari again sometime just for Cruz, and for a few of Mann’s most gratifying examples of classical Hollywood technique, done his way. The movie reinvents no wheels. But it sure knows how to film ‘em.

It’s nearly impossible not to respond to The Color Purple and Celie’s odyssey, in any version. But it’s also possible to wish for a movie that felt more like real life, and real lives, in all their emotional colors, without so much showbiz.

The movie we have is a movie that works, blending seriocomic domestic material with the larger, more pointed social observations about white liberal guilt, code-switching Black authors (Issa Rae is most welcome as Monk’s primary foil) and a lot more.

Anyone But You isn’t terrible, or a travesty. It’s eh-notherthing ehltogether.

While Wonka overfills its slate with two or three escalating climaxes, the throwaway verbal jokes en route keep the contraption humming.

Fallen Leaves, by contrast, strikes an adroit balance between dark and light, stoicism and optimism. There’s a stealth buoyancy at work.

It doesn’t duck the messy, unresolved contradictions, the way so many movies about famous artists do.

As a visual capture of a tour supporting an album, “Renaissance” may not hold a candle to her remarkable, 65-minute visual album “Lemonade” that appeared, more or less out of nowhere, in 2016. But it’s holding an entirely different sort of candle, or rather two candles. One’s a concert movie; the other’s a how-I-made-the-concert-and-this-movie movie.

I realize writing a new Christmas screenplay can’t be easy; to get made, it must check a certain number of predictable boxes. Murphy is game, but only in a few moments with Ross — small-talk scenes not dependent on forced wonderment or reaction-shot gaping — do they appear to relax and enjoy the company.

As written, “Rustin” does a pretty good job of making the (re-)introductions. As acted, the movie transcends pretty-good.

Napoleon was many things, and with this dutiful career highlights reel, Phoenix and his director deliver glancing blows to as many aspects of the warrior-tyrant-genius-fool-lonely heart as cinematically possible in two and a half hours.

"Songbirds and Snakes” takes its job SUPERseriously, with more solemnity than imaginative excitement.

I’d place Thanksgiving halfway between “fair” and “good.” Inevitably, Roth can’t keep his baser storytelling and filmmaking instincts at bay forever.

Yes, May December exists in an uncomfortable realm. Haynes isn’t afraid of that, and American movies are better for it.

While there are plenty of influences afoot, ranging from Jenkins to Terrence Malick to Toni Morrison, “All Dirt Roads” is guided, fragment by fragment, by a new director’s way of seeing and listening to a woman’s life — in all its puzzle pieces.

Too often the movie’s franchise mechanics and green-screen overload have a way of dragging “The Marvels” into generic sequeldom. But the stars give us something to hang onto, even if Larson — so good in so many films — has yet to master the useful trick of looking neutral yet invested in her many, many reaction shots.

Priscilla, the movie, exists in a state of hushed wonderment, magical one minute, bittersweet the next.

A sleek, tight, fastidiously executed nothing.

This movie’s religion, if it has one, is the Church of Performance, and Giamatti, Sessa, Randolph and company make it worth attending.

Green has made two very different, extraordinarily efficient and compact movies in a row. That, too, may look easy but is anything but — unless you’re a filmmaker and writer of her particular gifts.

It’s an odd one, indecisive about its tone and intentions.

Scorsese has rendered a tragic, forlorn piece of American history, indebted equally to classical Hollywood craftsmanship and the director’s own obsessions with honor, guilt, family, criminal codes and America’s centuries of greedy bloodshed.

Even if Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour represents a triumph of novel distribution more than a triumph of the concert-movie form, its impact will be fascinating to chart.

In the end, both Dahl’s stories and Anderson’s movies require a few common but difficult skill sets of the actors. Wit. Technical precision. Verbal facility. Adroit timing. And some fun, even if it’s tightly prescribed and carefully confined to a certain place in a fastidiously arranged, ever-shifting picture frame.

The Exorcist: Believer has its moments, but we’ve had a half-century of this stuff. And the filmmaker in charge has to show us something new; there’s more to life, and moviegoing, than coasting on cherished memories of projectile vomiting and head-swiveling.

I’m not sure the story’s resolution entirely serves what comes before it; it’s not predictable, exactly, and it avoids turning into a different sort of genre just for thrills, yet Domont’s writing and direction are both skillful enough to make me want a few extra minutes in the final round.