Mick LaSalle

As in “The Wrestler,” Aronofsky presents us with a protagonist whose physical appearance is forbidding, and then shows us their delicacy of spirit. He films Charlie’s home with just a hint of the macabre, which serves as a counterbalance to any whiff of sentimentality in the script. The Whale doesn’t make a lunge for your emotions. It earns them.

Pelosi in the House is a one-of-a-kind document of one of the most important women in American history.

Avatar: The Way of Water is a one-hour story rattling around in a 192-minute bag.

By the time we get to the last 20 minutes, Empire of Light is so scattered, so without impact or focus, that every scene could be the last. Ending it anywhere would make equal sense, because making sense is no longer a possibility. The movie is a glossy wreck.

Unfortunately, by the time the movie gets around to the parts that might have dazzled us, Emancipation already lost its audience.

Even when it tries to be funny, there’s never any point of connection. The emotions in White Noise are neither real nor meant to be real. The audience is always watching from a distance — until, finally, it starts wondering why it’s watching at all.

Violent Night isn’t terrible, but it’s stuck between parodying something and trying to fit the genre it parodies. And it really should have been funnier.

This adaptation does not allow for the energy and primal healing quality of sexuality. The movie’s grief of tone finds no antidote in the exuberance of this physical connection. The rhapsodic language of Lawrence’s text gives way to the spectacle of grinding between two average-looking mortals.

So The Fabelmans is entertaining enough, but perhaps what’s best about it is that Spielberg got it out of his system. After this, he won’t ever need to make a film about himself or his parents again.

Guadagnino has a choice, whether to be an artist or just the maker of artistically rendered, conscientiously realized garbage. It’s time to quit while he’s behind.

It’s maybe not one of the best movies of 2022, but it was certainly one of my favorites.

It isn’t exciting, because such movies never are. Rather, it is consistently, calmly and compellingly interesting, not the story of a crime but about the process of revealing it.

Spirited was never going to be any good, but it would have been slightly better — and a change of pace — if Reynolds and Ferrell had switched roles.

The brilliance of what Iñárritu does here is that, if you watch any scene in “Bardo” for 30 seconds, you will keep watching. But you have to be willing to give him those 30 seconds at the start of each scene. You have to work with him a little.

As it stands, Wakanda Forever feels as lost and forlorn as the Wakandan people.

The experience of seeing Causeway isn’t what you’d imagine while trying to decide whether to watch a 92-minute movie about a veteran’s slow recovery. It feels more like moving in with her — invisible — for weeks, and watching as she makes a sandwich or stares into space. That isn’t drama. That’s practically audience abuse.

The Wonder is no fun at all. It’s not even fun in the way it’s not fun. Even for a movie about starvation, it’s not a nourishing experience. The more the audience finds out about what’s actually going on, the less compelling the movie becomes.

Going into Armageddon Time, I had no interest in James Gray’s childhood. But that was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was to have even less interest going out.

The best thing about The Banshees of Inisherin is Kerry Condon as Pádraic’s sister, an intelligent woman with an even temperament and a good sense of humor who finds herself marooned in the wrong part of Ireland and in the wrong half of the 20th century.

Call Jane doesn’t depict a radical transformation, just a deepening. And Banks makes it worth watching.

Seriously, don’t see Black Adam. Don’t encourage this. I don’t even want to admit that it’s an actual movie, but assuming it is, it’s the worst of the year — and one of the worst I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, thanks to Lourd, Clooney and Roberts — who radiates an appealing groundedness and sanity, despite having been suffocatingly famous since her early 20s — “Ticket to Paradise” is a lot more enjoyable than it deserves to be.

Till confirms Chukwu as an actor’s director and should establish Deadwyler as a major presence in movies.

Together, the two actors build a rapport that goes beyond the dialogue and justifies where the story ultimately goes. Anyway, that’s the paradox in “The Good Nurse,” which potential viewers must sort out for themselves: The performances are worth seeing, but the movie isn’t.

There are dull stretches — interrupted by moments of terror — but that’s not really a complaint for a movie such as this. “All Quiet on the Western” is only partly a narrative. It’s also an immersive experience, an invitation to walk in someone else’s shoes, albeit from the safe side of a screen.

The movie maintains interest throughout and it’s ultimately satisfying, though with one qualification: The last minutes treat the story as though its whole purpose was to illustrate a social and political issue. It’s actually, for 98% of its running time, the story of a person — and it’s better that way.

It’s still an unusually good picture and worth the time (though you could skip the last 30 minutes and still get all you’re going to get from it). But if only writer-director Ruben Ostlund (“The Square”) had figured out a graceful way to end his movie at, say, the 100-minute point. He’d have had something extraordinary.

Efron makes what he can of an impossible role. He’s watchable, that helps.