Nick Newman

Great concert films impose a directorial presence onto player and stage alike, but Lee and team seem more content to record.

The notable disappointment of this always-big, deft-enough, equal-parts compelling and lumbering work is its programmatic portrait of an operation we’re bluntly told changed humankind forever.

Wright doesn’t simply apply technical precision and innovation to genre-smart storytelling — he also makes what must be exhausting work look like so much fun. And as a crime caper, heist movie, mob tale, puppy-love romance, jukebox-musical-of-sorts, Baby Driver is almost nothing but.

If the screenplay’s sense of scale can begin to feel limited by an overfamiliarity in environment, it’s suddenly made expansive with the realization of how much these places are extensions of these five people’s lives and personalities.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is not a great film, but it flirts with that designation far more often than this lapsed fan could have ever expected. If, on a creative level, what’s contained herein is ultimately the planting of seeds that will continue growing two, four, or forty years down the line, I suspect this franchise is in its best-ever state. How fortunate that it also stands alone as a good time at the movies.

The exposition-mountain screenplay leaves little to feel just as a devotion to the written word leaves scant room for anything to look at. I’m slightly unsure what anybody involved was hoping to get from the experience, much less what’s the takeaway sans basic admiration for baseline craft.

I don’t entirely know what to do with this work which has the capacity to play as both a definitive film about spiritual vocation and a sometimes torpid melange of concept and execution — all, mind, said after one viewing as often confounded by expectation as it was made joyous by the discovery of what had Scorsese so bothered for decades.

It takes a good stretch of precious screentime for Part Two to play as its own entity and not the serial continuation of a two-year-old film based on a 60-year-old property; it also takes a good stretch of precious screentime for Part Two to play as anything other than a thoroughgoing, checklist-meeting obligation bolstered by obvious craft.

In its formal inventiveness and compassion, Contemporary Color moves well past the boundaries of “concert movie.”

McCraney may be the closest thing a totalizing directional presence like Soderbergh has had to a true co-author in years.

The Card Counter’s powers linger well past plot machination—its methods of approaching incident miles deeper than how they’ll play, its pauses in conversation bruising harder than anything spewed. I’m smitten with his latter-day tone-setter vibe, the stumbles amusing (I’m curious who got that horrific music into key scenes) and indulgences almost touching.

The lushness of its images, how they simultaneously recall and move forward, in concert with its confidence in its pacing, as a work of both writing and editing, are a powerful thing taken in-tandem.

Logan Lucky‘s spell is light, the magic casual.

Yourself and Yours is enjoyable the way every other Hong Sang-soo film is enjoyable: funny, relatable and emotionally honest, structurally innovative, and composed with a patient eye that favors the peaks and valleys of conversation over standard get-to-the-point construction.

Whether or not John Wick: Chapter 2 is superior to its counterpart matters little when the experience is worth enjoying unto itself.

It basks in the rightness of those who work hard to get a proper result, simultaneously disinterested in reinventing the wheel and still finding some new ways to spin it.

A well-modulated vision of the fight against encroaching malaise or mere trifle dressing itself up? Depends on the scene. But trifles have their place and auteurs should be allowed their fun, which On the Rocks deploys over 90 minutes kind enough not to feel like a waste of anyone’s talents or time.

Make no mistake, it’s mostly staged for campiness. More often than not that De Palma touch is zooming in on the specter of terrorism until it can find something ridiculous, heightened, thrilling in their possibilities. The rub is that Domino comes into a world with too many scarring reflections of itself to sit right. How amusing that a director so fascinated with the voyeurism-violence dichotomy would make a terrorist thriller about insurgents using the power of propaganda.

As much as I admire Nocturama (answer: an awful lot), locating exact points of admiration proves difficult when its pleasures are so purposefully alienating and bitter.

It is worth reemphasizing that all assembled players rise to the occasion, and Emma. generates most interest when the effects of its verbosity begin paling against non-verbal turns.

This movie has the greatest ratio of zone-out time to narrative comprehension I’ve ever experienced.

Will it change my consideration of European-Islamic relations? No. Have I thought about its moral quandaries in the days since seeing this film? More than most others, at least. Does Les Cowboys create an itch to again see The Searchers? Absolutely — and that alone is a fairly strong end result.

Alien: Covenant‘s bargain is good enough: come for the Fassbenders, stay for the nihilism and grotesquerie, and emerge with at least a few questions and curiosities on your mind.

Though less a take-it-or-leave-it gauntlet-toss than Lana Wachowski’s more boldly experimental work, the virtues of her fourth Matrix are often in excess of anything she’s made since the polarizing-but-great sequels, sometimes in contradiction to the matter of us even watching it—a work about the fact that it almost should not exist.

Any number of sequences find feelings both externalized and hidden intermingling within the same shot, continuing in a subsequent image that carries the impression, the feeling, without replicating the exact tenor of what has just been seen. They exist simultaneously as certain backstories and what motivations they may inspire delicately unfold.

Even at a pace or two too long, while starting to coast on the pure rush of initial, stronger ideas, it’s perhaps his best-engineered work since The Village and arguably the purest piece of entertainment he’s ever made.

Little is left after a while until, finally, Planetarium doesn’t conclude so much as come to an end, and the lasting impression is one of bitterness — a bitterness at once sweetened and worsened by memories of the genuinely great work it had promised and, at turns, even embodied.