Michael Phillips

It’s wonderful to watch Gosling mine the non-verbal comedy in his character’s 50/50 swagger and insecurity. Blunt’s both a sterling comic foil and a soulful romantic one. Audiences crave romantic comedies with real wit, and the spirit of adventure, because romance is nothing without it. If someone could write one of those for these two, I’d appreciate it. The Fall Guy will do for now.

Anne Hathaway basically saves it from itself.

It’s one of the essential titles of the year so far, if only for its sheer kinetic assurance.

Rather than go for the throat, its central friendship makes room for feeling, but also for listening, and watching, and reflection. You may cry or you may not. But the movie is up to far more than making sure you do.

Its devotion to the untamed territory of the human heart, its artfully discombobulating time and locale shifts, the shifting personae handled with marvelous fluidity by Seydoux; it takes you somewhere, and more than one somewhere.

I found it coldly gripping, as well as a mite ham-fisted. At its best, this vision of American end times, an election or two from now, sets aside its less persuasive “tell” for more persuasive “show,” without generic spectacle (though with a $50 million production budget, it’s Garland’s and distributor A24’s biggest gamble to date) or diversionary thrills.

The First Omen hardly qualifies for landmark or pantheon status. But it’s a movie that maximizes all its elements with some panache.

Much of the material in “Ennio” will be a revelation to the garden-variety American fan of film music (i.e. me).

It is a bracing and chaotic and memorable experience.

At one point King, as Chisholm, resists the advisors’ pleas to simplify her “messaging” (was that word in circulation 52 years ago?) by saying: “I am not leaving out the nuance!” In “Shirley,” the top-shelf actors aren’t, either. Even if their material does.

Whole sections of “Godzilla X Kong” shove the humans off-screen for many minutes at a time. Few will complain.

What “Frida” does, it does well. It also does too much, probably, crowding its subject with expressive add-ons.

Just about everybody on screen in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire lightens the load. But sometime around the eighth or ninth round of expository mumbo jumbo concerning the ectoplasmic nightmare about to happen, the movie starts moving sideways, not forward.

I wish the busting-loose part went further in “Love Lies Bleeding.” But Stewart, subtle and fierce, and O’Brian, sinewy and fiercer, prove exceptional at hitting two or three notes at once, and never obviously.

Black and Awkwafina and Hoffman do their jobs, but the jokes have a way of arriving like jokes, and sounding like jokes, but not quite being jokes. This is an action movie foremost, which is fine.

The film basically and improbably works, even with some limitations.

It’s beautiful work, and not just because it’s beautiful.

Only Viswanathan, wonderful in “Hala” and others, comes close to locating a tone that makes some human sense inside this wildly uneven material, careening all across the character-to-caricature spectrum.

Not a zingy marvel of narrative momentum. But it's not trying for that.

There’s life, lived with serenity and purpose and, yes, plenty of money and property, in the lives depicted in Hung’s film. Binoche and Magimel see to it in every scene, with or without utensils.

All worldwide musical phenomena carry with them some enigmatic quality that encourages, deliberately or not, a kind of adoring guesswork on behalf of fans. In Bob Marley: One Love, both as written and acted, Marley himself remains more cipher than enigma.

It plays like a bland, third-season Marvel series as watched on a 12-year-old TV set playing in the wrong dramatic aspect ratio, which I realize isn’t a real thing. But now it is.

Already, McKenna-Bruce can work wonders in terms of assured technique and complicated emotions and she’s magically right as Tara.

You can go into Anselm knowing roughly as much as I did (very little, or less), and Wenders’ latest nonfiction portrait of an artist and their environment will work, effortlessly, because it’s just plain beautiful.

It’s lousy, and a frantic bore, squandering its on-screen talent and making bland visual hash of its preening, recreational slaughter.

If all this sounds difficult to track, well, sort of. But not really. It’s a flow, not a plod, and Stratman isn’t after conventional linear storytelling.

What the writing and filmmaking sometimes overdo, the actors mitigate beautifully. Benesch is a powerhouse of subtlety and focus, and the camera stays as close as possible to her watchful, at times disbelieving eyes.

It is, I suppose, educational; it’s also vibrant and adroit and searching as human drama.