Pat Brown

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.