Nick Schager

A look at Coppola’s creative process that proves significantly more illuminating and entertaining than the director’s finished product.

Electrified by virtuoso filmmaking, its enraged message comes through loud and clear.

This wannabe winsome fairy tale about confronting fears, atoning for sins, and forgiving oneself is a pile-up of preciousness.

Casts itself as a frightening saga about tyranny’s capacity to acclimate its subjects to slaughter and slavery, and to coerce them into performing (and celebrating) self-destruction under the guise of unity, strength, and progress.

Hermanus’ latest establishes him as a filmmaker of uncanny grace and Mescal and O’Connor as two of Hollywood’s finest young stars.

A prototypical example of talking, ceaselessly and crudely, at the audience.

Both a nail-biting thriller and a messy moral drama, rife with tensions between justice and vengeance, healing and suffering, and reality and fantasy.

Stylized to the hilt but empty inside, it faithfully echoes the harried shallowness of its protagonist, whose desperate search for one big score to reverse his fortunes is all surface, no substance—the cinematic equivalent of a knock-off Rolex.

The film around her never quite comes together, but Foster is more than enough reason to embark on this off-kilter investigation.

A collision of agony and ecstasy that approaches the divine even as it reveals piousness to be an outgrowth of, and justification for, earthly suffering, it’s like nothing the genre has seen before.

Blending horror and humor, sweetness and scares, and fantasy and family melodrama, it shoots for the moon—and, more often than not, scores a bullseye.

With nothing lurking beneath his character’s brawny exterior, and even less to his up-and-down tale, Johnson proves merely an adequate contender in his bid for dramatic credibility.

A refreshingly eccentric spin on the staid biopic.

A beguiling psychodrama about familial fractures, slippery identity, and the difficult means by which people move on from tragedy.

A reimagining that’s thrillingly, monstrously alive.

Linklater’s latest is a moving and multifaceted ode to a bygone era and an artist whose creativity and contradictions were equally titanic.

A big-hearted fable of self-actualization, tolerance, and togetherness.

Snappy, sweet, and moving, this crowd-pleasing winner starring Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, and Callum Turner continues the genre’s much-needed revitalization.

A work of tremendous look-at-me energy: all prolonged close-ups and studied master shots of actors weeping, screaming, laughing, longing, and freaking out with sweaty, grimy intensity.

With Ian McKellen in superbly crotchety form and Michaela Coel exuding chilly cunning, it’s further proof that Soderbergh remains one of American cinema’s most inimitable, and adventurous, auteurs.

Mimicking the form, and channeling the spirit, of ’70s big-screen blockbusters, it’s a bravura tale of community, persecution, and the way in which memory is both stolen and recovered.

Reeves’ goofy childlike routine lends the film the sweetness it seeks.

An unforgettable portrait of the search for unity at the edge, and end, of the world.

Johnson’s franchise remains a sly and sure-footed delight, as well as demonstrates, with its religiously minded latest, that it’s capable of coloring its Christie-esque mysteries in a variety of shades.

Rife with symbolic weight, the action is thematically jumbled, and worse, it takes so long establishing its scenario that it never develops a sense of urgency and madness.

A frenzied plea for compassion and a stirring tribute to the men and women who sacrifice their lives, and sanity, for those in need.

So rote that even an A.I. wouldn’t dare try to pass it off as original.

Heartbreaking barely begins to describe it, although the terms masterful and transcendent also apply.