Pat Brown

The film translates the often difficult realities of a specific kind of marginalized love into a story with broad appeal.

The film is an uncanny reflection of the jingoism that Hollywood has been wrapping in glossy spectacle and exporting to foreign markets for decades.

Even though it’s about a person who speaks with courage about the urgency of the global crisis, I Am Greta itself doesn’t possess enough of that urgency.

Freaky doesn’t reach for any arch commentary beyond the suggestion that, hey, Freaky Friday the 13th is a pretty funny idea.

The film slides seamlessly between empathizing with its clueless bros and making them objects of unsparing derision.

It’s difficult to shake that the film finishes saying what it has to say long before it staggers to the end.

While it can be expected that high-concept horror movies will often be sewn together from the premises of recent genre successes, it’s much too easy to see the stitches in writer-director Jacob Chase’s Come Play.

The repetitious plot is more ritual than text as we watch yet another Liam Neeson avenger defy the will of younger, unscrupulous men.

Radha’s remaking of herself contains an uplifting, unpretentious truth about aging: It’s never too late to make a new start.

The film draws us through its play toward darker, too-seldom-considered sides of human and doggy nature.

It reminds us in eminently cinematic ways that behind the numbers and procedures of a court case are actual lives existing in actual, human time.

American Utopia feels as much like a balm as it is a surprisingly direct call to political action and social betterment.

The film’s experiential approach emphasizes that the fragments of life it captures aren’t impersonal events on a timeline.

Maïmouna Doucouré has a remarkable grasp of the irrationality and volatility of middle-school social dynamics.

That Maite Alberdi’s camera itself is present in The Mole Agent as a quasi-ethical concern suits the way Sergio, as he shuffles through the home’s hallways, gradually comes to be uncomfortable with his own surveillance.

The film suggests that our political system is a popularity contest that functions for no one but those jockeying for power.

Ciro Guerra never quite finds an imagistic equivalent to the novel’s apocalyptic mood and subtly hallucinogenic atmosphere.

The film justly draws attention to the perpetual work that must go into preserving democratic institutions.

The film never feels as satisfying or as haunting as its bow-tying epilogue strives for.

The film’s unreflective earnestness is haunting in all the wrong ways.

The film presents its scattershot cop-movie tropes in earnest, as if, like hurricanes, they were natural, unavoidable phenomena.

With great clarity, the film conveys how discipline can be directed both inward and outward.

The film is an unnervingly beautiful tribute to the lives lost during the Holodomor, and to the people who have seen the world for what it is, instead of the dream of it they’re instructed to believe.

Convenient plot twists undermine its early pretense that it’s aiming for something other than to exploit our deepest, most regressive fears.

Artemis Fowl concocts an adventure that requires its privileged hero to go virtually nowhere, physically or emotionally. As if he ordered it on Instacart, conflict is simply dropped off on his front stoop, and all he has to do is throw on some shoes and sunglasses to pick it up.

Russell Simmons’ victims’ sense of their own complex relations to historical power structures emerges from the film’s lucid recounting of the sexual assault allegations against him.

From beneath defensive layers of distanced comic despair emerges a sincere story about a young woman’s emotional reconciliation with her troubled place of origin.

Around his main character, writer-director César Díaz builds a complex but unpretentious interrogation of national belonging.

Chris Hemsworth’s hyperbolically skilled soldier is borne of childish fantasies about the order of the world.

In more than one sense, Justin Kurzel’s aggressively strange film queers the myth of the oft-lionized Ned Kelly.

At its best, the film doesn’t just privilege altered states of consciousness, it is an altered state of consciousness.

Given its hero’s imperviousness, the film’s chaotically edited action sequences tend to be devoid of suspense.

It’s difficult to imagine a more socially engaged or powerful condemnation of the exploitative gig economy than Ken Loach’s latest.

This lively adaptation plays up the novel’s more farcical elements, granting it a snappy, rhythmic pace.

It has almost enough genuine charm and heart to compensate for the moments that feel forced.

Admirably, Yaron Zilberman’s film focuses on the cyclical nature of violence in a decades-old conflict.

Throughout, the filmmakers occlude the most fascinating and potentially powerful elements of Jean Seberg’s history.

There isn’t anything in the bleeding-heart positions espoused by Jorge Bergoglio that complicates Pope Francis’s public persona.

Its performatively extreme imagery thinly masks a rather banal view of male subjectivity and inner conflict.

Think Michael Mann’s Heat but in East Africa and with real-world stakes.

Woke Disney, trying to navigate a tricky representational path, steps all over itself throughout.

An airport novel of a movie, Bill Condon’s The Good Liar is efficient and consumable, if a bit hollow.

Clarke works hard to make the messy, perpetually flustered Kate relatable, but the film surrounds the character with a community as kitschy and false as the trinkets she sells in Santa’s shop.

Matthew Barney re-instills nature with some of the mystic aura that modernity, with its technologies and techniques of knowledge, has robbed it of.

Like a traumatized psyche, it remains uncomfortably stuck in the past, replaying familiar events in an effort to empty them of terror.

The film feels rather like listening to the arsonist calmly explain why he set the fire as we continue to watch it rage.

Despite glimpses of a larger critique of the American project in Afghanistan, it lets us escape from the horrors of war before it finishes demolishing the illusion of a clean one.

The film's command of action defuses concerns about whether it offers a thorough social critique.

In transforming folk metaphors into utilitarian attributes of an action hero, Disney exposes the emptiness of their product.

Its depiction of the perpetual terror of living in a war zone will stick with viewers long after The Cave’s doctors have left Ghouta.

Whatever new technology facilitated its genesis, the film is just another assembly-line reproduction.

Olivier Meyrou’s ironically titled documentary weaves a tightly constructed story about success, power, and mortality.

The film falls back on the myth of modernity being born in the laps of practical, native-born American ingenuity.

The second half’s series of hollow visual spectacles foreground the film as a corporate product.

Balancing rough-edge verité with highly composed images and a meticulous structure, it doesn’t preclude itself from finding something like poetry in its subjects’ struggles.

The film is remarkable for capturing a brewing conflict between women while also celebrating their connection.

The film is inspirational only in the sense that it may inspire an uptick in Amazon searches for running gear.

Gene Stupnitsky’s Good Boys is Big Mouth for those who prefer ribald humor about tweenage sexuality in live action, though it lacks the Netflix show’s frankness and authenticity.

The film diverts us away from its hint of a social message using a series of tired twists and turns that don’t signify much of anything.

On the whole, the film is an unvarnished reflection of the ugliness of American attitudes toward assimilation.

Claudio Giovannesi’s film is more an interesting tweak of Goodfellas than an eye-opening social statement.

It seems so invested in a rehabilitation of Brittany Kaiser’s image that the filmmakers’ own motives end up being its most interesting subject.

After a while, the film’s not-strictly-linear structure and handheld camerawork come to feel like self-conscious signs of “gritty” realism, attempts at masking a certain conventionality.

The film taps into universal truths about the passage of time, the inevitability of loss, and how we prepare one another for it.

There’s something very cheap at the core of this overtly, ostentatiously expensive film, reliant as it is on our memory of the original to accentuate every significant moment.

More than its violence, the film is defined by its vileness, its straight-faced attachment to outmoded ideas about masculinity and law enforcement.

A deeply unnerving film about the indissoluble, somehow archaic bond between self and family—one more psychologically robust than Aster’s similarly themed Hereditary. And it’s also very funny.

Transforming Ophelia’s abuser into a helpful co-conspirator hardly seems like the most daring feminist reading of Hamlet.

The film is at least as likely to elicit laughs as shrieks, and certainly unlikely to leave a lasting impression.

In verbally recounting her history, Morrison proves almost as engaging as she in print, a wise and sensitive voice.

The film seamlessly interweaves fun escapades and earnest emotions, but it lacks the visual power of its predecessor.

The film wastes its charismatic leads in a parade of wacky CG creations whose occasional novelty is drowned out by its incessance.

Sienna Miller lends credibility to a character that in other hands might seem like a caricature of the white underclass.

There’s a surprising sense of communal exchange between the male strippers and their fans in Gene Graham’s documentary.

The film simultaneously announces itself as an expressive portrait of a city, an endearing ode to male comradery, a leisurely paced hangout flick, an absurdist comedy, and a melancholic reflection on gentrification and urban black experience.

It's an R-rated teen comedy that proves that you can center girls’ experiences without sacrificing grossness, and that you can be gross without being too mean.

As a musical, Dexter Fletcher’s film is just fun enough to (mostly) distract us from its superficiality.

In pushing so many seemingly crucial moments off screen, the film transforms its main characters into blank slates.

At the very least, Ryan Reynolds’s casting perfectly splits the difference between the adorable and the absurd.

The film’s relatively static approach to narrative works in scenes where the material is funny or elevated by a certain performance.

As it proceeds toward its telegraphed rom-com ending, the film becomes just more empty rhetoric, an ineffectual reiteration.

Rachel Lears’s film is a rebuttal to the position that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's election victory was an incidental event in American politics.

Ralph Fiennes’s film too conspicuously avoids an overt political perspective.

Its major contribution, as one museum curator suggests, may be to bring the works of Moshe Rynecki back into prominence.

The film's slotting of two African women into a familiar romantic structure represents a radical and important upending of contemporary Kenyan sexual mores.

The film’s playful tone is a corrective to a century of scholarship that insisted on projecting the image of a moody spinster onto Emily Dickinson.

With its naked celebration of self-sacrificial combat and idealization of the soldier as an avenging angel, it strikes a tone redolent of old-school war propaganda.

Michal Aviad’s film forcefully brings home a reality that many of us have been aware of only intellectually.

The film might have better performed if it consisted of more than a smattering of good but relatively isolated ideas.

Throughout, the film can’t decide what attitude to strike toward its characters’ evident greed.

Michael Winterbottom’s film succeeds in translating the problematics of intercultural conflict into thriller fodder.

Director Ty Roberts’s film is unable to realize that its subject matter is that of a horror story.

The film’s repetitive and lifeless dialogue robs otherwise charismatic performers of distinguishing characteristics.

The documentary brings to the foreground a fascinating and, moreover, beautiful culture lurking in the background of other stories.

It’s the way the film’s humor specifically subverts its genre’s expected emotional valences that makes it so effective.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film takes a leisurely approach to narrative that’s both intensely dialogical and transfixingly visual.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film prioritizes the sentimental over the true, the tidy moral over the messy reality.