Peter Rainer

A crowd-pleaser in the best sense, it overflows with empathy for its beleaguered people.

To the Dardennes’ immense credit, their film is not about villains and victims. Neither is the narrative sugarcoated.

“Wake Up” can be appreciated as an excellent example of that venerable murder mystery genre – the “impossible crime” – in which no solution to the murder seems rational. But Johnson also has a bit more on his mind than this. Without being too strenuous about it, the film also probes the nature of religious belief.

The paradox of Train Dreams is that we are looking at a vanishing way of life that, at the same time, has a startling immediacy. That immediacy is more than a matter of careful observation. In its widest sense, the movie is asking what makes life worth living.

I greatly enjoyed Nouvelle Vague, but will anybody besides cinemaniacs and Breathless devotees appreciate it? I think the answer is yes. That’s because it’s not simply a movie about how a landmark maverick movie got made. Its true subject is the exhilaration that comes from being part of an artistic escapade. It’s about how art – the making of it and the appreciation of it – can free you.

To make us begin to understand the anguish on display here, the movie needed more emotional layers and fewer obvious signposts.

Blue Moon may essentially take place inside a single room, but it rarely feels stagy. It captures the connivance and conviviality of theater people – the way they come together, if only for a night, with a spiritedness that is both forced and entirely genuine.

The film’s moral issues don’t come across as tacked on. They arise organically and register as both intensely personal to the filmmaker and much larger in scope. The film even offers up, against all odds – and a truly chilling final moment – a measure of hope.

It would be natural to place this film in the context of America’s ongoing immigration crisis. Certainly it is “topical.” But I think Liu and Majok have transcended its immediate relevance. It’s a human drama, not a sociological artifact. Because of its quality of feeling, and the remarkable performances of its two leads, it will likely outlast its historical moment.

Up until its final scene, I thought A Little Prayer was an entirely decent and poignant piece of work. But its closing scene between Bill and Tammy, those two self-described kindred spirits, moved me more than anything I’ve seen all year. It’s an infinitely touching expression of the love that one human being can have for another.

Modest in scope, it ultimately conveys, at its best, the unifying joy that great music-making can inspire.

The extraordinary tact and compassion with which Victor dramatizes Agnes’s assault and its aftermath allows us to see this story for what it truly is – a diary of personal reclamation.

What finally holds all the hokum together is Pitt. Even though the movie keeps ramming home the idea that Formula One racing is a team sport, Sonny’s outlaw vibe is clearly its focus.

Materialists scores where it counts most. Jane Austen it’s not, but it gets at the consequences of modern romance among the moneyed classes, where self-worth is bound up in one’s market value.

What rescues the movie from being mere flimsy fun is Rutherford’s performance. She gives Agathe’s waywardness a gravity, a hint of darkness.

What we do care about, and what “Final Reckoning” finally delivers on after an overly expository first hour, is watching Tom do stuff. Set pieces involving a sunken submarine and buzzing biplanes amply fulfill the franchise’s main selling point.

Given the pitfalls of gush and treacle in this type of material, The Friend is no small achievement. Is it impertinent to say that Watts has never had a better partner in the movies? The levels of emotion she brings to the role clearly have much to do with her co-star.

The Ballad of Wallis Island is both modest and magical. One of its co-stars, Carey Mulligan, has described its tone as a “gentle euphoria.” That phrase perfectly expresses how this wonderful movie – directed by James Griffiths from a script by Tom Basden and Tim Key – transports us.

I’m Still Here is a movie about remembrance – of a family and a nation. The necessity to acknowledge injustice is its timeless clarion call.

It would be too convenient, I think, to write this movie off as a study of untreated mental illness. The performance of Jean-Baptiste (who was so memorable in Leigh’s “Secrets & Lies”) transcends the clinical. She shows us what lies beneath Pansy’s suffering. This woman who can’t abide other people is terrified of being alone.

What may have begun as a descent into the personal depths of an enigmatic genius ends up as one more cog in the Bob Dylan myth machine.

Moana 2 touts the power of human (and non-human) connection, and the film will certainly connect with its target audience. But it doesn’t trust viewers enough to feel for themselves.

It’s no secret that the best animated movies can enthrall us in ways every bit as immersive as any live-action film. Flow is a triumphant case in point.

High among the film’s many standout virtues is how fully Kapadia has captured the faces of this trio.

It’s a feminist musical crime thriller about a transgender cartel boss. Doubly surprising is that, for all its strangeness – or perhaps because of it – the mashup often works.

A lot of emotional weight is packed into this seriocomic ramble if you know where to look.

On the plus side, we get a front-row seat, often closer than that, to some of the wowiest concerts ever committed to film.

Baker is a humanist – there is nothing exploitative about what he does here. He’s after deeper emotional truths.

At its best, the film demonstrates a showbiz truism: It takes a lot of hard work to make something look easy.

Ostensibly it’s a tradition versus progress fable. In actuality, it’s a movie furiously, perhaps intentionally, at odds with itself.

The film is an indictment of a cultural tragedy; a testament to the steadfastness, against all odds, of the Indigenous community; and a plea for healing.

What grounds the overflow of incident are the many human touches that personalize both the anguish and the stray glimpses of freedom.

[Berger] honors the animation medium by investing it with a full range of feeling – just as if he were making a movie with real people. This is another way of saying that “Robot Dreams” is a film for adults perhaps even more than for children. I

The power of this film sneaks up on you. It glides from jubilation to heartbreak without missing a beat.

The best addition is Austin Butler as the baron’s bald-pated, hypervicious nephew. It’s official: Butler no longer looks or sounds like Elvis Presley. Villeneuve is adept at staging grand-scale battles, but the movie’s best set piece is the climactic tooth-and-nail face-off between Paul and this grinning gargoyle.

Understandably wanting to leave audiences with a measure of hope, Garrone in some ways falsifies what is most powerful about his movie. But there is power, too, in dramatizing the endurance of people such as Seydou. Epic stories require epic bravery.

It’s a wonderful movie, and an Oscar nominee for best international feature. It is also proof, if any were needed, that the rhythms of everyday life, no matter how seemingly mundane, can resonate when beheld by an artist’s eye.

The film periodically risks turning into a swoony fantasy. But it is a fantasy we can favor because it’s one we all can share.

Yes, we can draw links between then and now, but, in a way, Glazer’s film contradicts his own public sentiments. His depiction of this agonized world is so enveloping and unrelenting that, at least for me, it stands wholly alone, untethered to our current traumas.

King is above all a pleasure-giver. He wants to heighten the knockabout joys of unfettered high spirits.

American Fiction is a serious-minded satire about race relations that is often exasperatingly at odds with itself.

To call it “immersive” is an understatement.

Directed by Cooper, who also co-wrote the script with Josh Singer, the film serves up so much Sturm und Drang about the great man’s messed-up private life that it barely bothers to explore his creative genius.

What enlarges Giamatti’s performance, and makes it ultimately more than a glorified comic turn, is how he gradually articulates Paul’s self-awareness for us.

An honorable try, the movie nevertheless doesn’t fully capture the enormity of the tragedy. At best it’s a sorrowful, necessary dirge. Other times, it’s like “Goodfellas” on the range but, understandably, without the spring-coiled momentum of that film.

The film is very good at laying out the forensics of the case, but Triet is after something larger. I’m not sure she altogether succeeds: She wants to show how Sandra is being judged not just for the murder but, in effect, for everything – for her failures as a mother, a lover, an artist.

Carrère, wisely I think, doesn’t turn the film into a reformist anthem. Shooting in a semidocumentary style, he allows us to absorb, along with Marianne, the relentless accretion of injustices. He also gives us some of the most believable portraits of female friendship I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Perhaps inevitably, it falls short of its ambitions. But it’s bracing to see a studio movie these days, particularly one with such huge scope, that at least attempts to serve up more than recycled goods.

It’s a movie knowingly at odds with itself, and the disequilibrium, for all the film’s high cheer, sits uneasily on the screen.

The new “Mission: Impossible,” while not peerless entertainment, is a much better sequel. When not bogged down by unnecessary exposition – really, who bothers to follow the plot of these movies anyway? – it’s a giddy, globe-spanning thrill ride.

It’s a serviceable thrill ride.

More so than with some of his recent films, like “The French Dispatch,” or even such earlier celebrated works as “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” not only did I marvel at its color-coordinated craftsmanship, but I also found parts of it to be emotionally moving – a rarity in the Anderson canon.

Past Lives, the graceful debut feature from the Korean Canadian playwright Celine Song, stands a world apart from most of today’s slick movie fare.

[An] affectionate documentary.

R.M.N. is one of the most searing cinematic examinations of xenophobia I’ve ever seen.

The film wants to be a wing-ding entertainment, but it also strives to say Something Important. The first half of that equation is what makes the movie eminently worth watching.

It has one big thing in its favor: Sally Hawkins’ performance as Langley. She’s perfectly cast, which, as a general rule, does not always translate into a perfect performance. Not so here.

Although Gravel doesn’t make a big deal about it, Julie also represents something larger than herself. Her plight as a single working mother is far from unique. But Full Time doesn’t ennoble the working class.

This extraordinary film, which, despite its tragic trappings, is often surprisingly playful, can be appreciated without knowing anything about Panahi or his long-term battles with the authoritarian regime.

Would Caro’s books have been any less great if he and Gottlieb had never met? Who knows? But as this bracingly affectionate film makes clear, it was the gift of a lifetime for both that they did.

[Cameron] may not be a great artist, or a visionary, but in its look, and its feeling for family, this behemoth enterprise still has an ardent, cornball grandeur to it. I look forward to “Avatar 3.”

It’s a truism that actors love playing scoundrels much more than goody-goodies – though Thompson excels at both. Here she goes full out into villainy mode, and she’s a hoot.

The film, directed by Maria Schrader and written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, doesn’t add much to the existing record. What it does do, when it’s good, is something the news headlines could not: It dramatizes the survivors’ voices on camera.

Spielberg is such a supersleek craftsman that what might have been intended as a deep dive instead comes across for the most part as a sprightly gloss.

If Armageddon Time simply recounted Paul’s coming-of-age, complete with a hefty serving of family spats, it wouldn’t have the resonance it often exhibits at its best. The friendship between Paul and Johnny, even more than Paul’s relationship with his grandfather, is the film’s emotional core.

The film medium has often been discussed in academic terms as a vehicle to contain the passage of time. But “Three Minutes” does much more than that. Although it raises all sorts of issues about the nature of the film image and how it can affect us, it is also the least theoretical of movies. We are bearing witness.

A story of overwhelming humanitarian sacrifice.

Manville carries it all off effortlessly.

Rather than structure their movie as a chronological biography, the co-directors, Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine, wisely focus on the genesis of Cohen’s most celebrated and performed song, “Hallelujah.” This approach allows them to interweave Cohen’s entire career while also avoiding the one-thing-after-another sprawl that often bogs down these kinds of films.

Top Gun: Maverick is a perfectly tolerable time-killer, and I enjoy popcorn as much as anyone, but I just hope these won’t be the only kinds of movies that bring audiences back to the theaters.

Despite his sorcerer bona fides and voluminous cape, Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange isn’t strange enough, and trying to parse the convolutions of the Marvel multiverse is more exhausting than engaging.

The Duke is a genial British entertainment that, at its best, reminded me a bit of those wonderful postwar Ealing Studio films like “The Lavender Hill Mob” and “The Ladykillers.”

Perhaps most heartening about Writing With Fire is how the film doesn’t discount the personal toll on these women. Crusaders though they may be, they voice throughout the film their deep doubts and fears.

Apollo 10½ is a portrait of innocence untainted by any agenda other than the need to convey as honestly as possible what it felt like to be that particular boy at that particular moment in history. It’s a movie about how we conjure and commemorate our pasts.

“Lunana” demonstrates, as few films ever have, how inspired schooling can break through even the most abject obstacles.

In its own rueful way, The Automat functions as a kind of restorative to those feelings of loss. It’s a celebration of what for so many people was among the happiest of times.

Just when you think you’ve pinned down someone as good or bad, the tables are turned and the complexities thicken. Just like in real life.

Spielberg and Kushner were right to bring modern attitudes to this beloved warhorse. Their movie, at its best, isn’t just a remake. It’s a rethink.

Certainly few people on the planet were more interested in food than Child, and, judging from this movie, few people are as interesting.

It’s the most sheerly pleasurable movie I’ve seen so far this year.

To the film’s credit, Diana’s gilded-prison desperation is not displayed as a martyrdom for which she is blameless. This royal can be a royal pain, and Stewart doesn’t flinch from the more unsavory aspects of Diana’s woe.

Even if Zhao and her co-screenwriters were more adept at establishing the family-style togetherness of the Eternals, the emotional continuity is shattered by the incessant time tripping and globe hopping. Just when you think you’ve got your bearings in South Dakota, you suddenly find yourself in Mesopotamia.

The dragons in this movie are expertly brought to life.

From a purely pictorial standpoint, this new Dune is indeed often overwhelming. The sheer monumentality of it all is impressive. Alas, the film’s emotional power underwhelms.

It offers up the requisite thrills, stunts, and bad guys. Beautiful people abound, and 007 still knows how to fill out a tux. I had a reasonably good time at it.

As this film amply demonstrates, in the highest realms of commerce, wielding power is paramount.

Although Neville obviously had the cooperation of many in Bourdain’s inner circle, the film never feels authorized or hagiographic. He allows for Bourdain’s inner darkness.

This time capsule of a movie is timeless.

The film is decidedly hagiographic but, in a time of heightened racial unrest, it’s worth being reminded of the fighter Ali’s origins.

Sisters on Track starts out as a flashy success story about headline-making kids but turns into something much more meaningful: a tribute to the value of being strong in spirit.

This is not intended as a movie about what a genius must endure on the path to success. Sharad’s story is much more relatable than that.

Gunda is one of the most immersive and eye-widening documentaries I’ve ever seen.

What I ultimately took away from the documentary is the deep love that can exist between owners and their dogs. In The Truffle Hunters, both are shown to be the custodians of each other’s happiness.

The role of Fern gives McDormand license to indulge an opaqueness that is often more gnomic than expressive. Perhaps she and Zhao felt that being more demonstrative would shatter the film’s wayward poetic mood.

It’s not simply that it’s “too soon” for such movies. That’s highly debatable. More to the point is that the stark reality of these explosive events as we live through them – in the news, in real time, on TV and through investigative documentaries – potentially outflanks any attempt to dramatize them using embellished scenarios and famous actors.

If Balram was simply a born hustler, his odyssey would not have the resonance it has here. But we can see glimmers of what he might have become if not for his caste.

King was not a perfect man. But as this film so powerfully demonstrates, he forced a reckoning with America’s racial history that, more than ever, resonates today. It’s a reckoning he gave his life for.

A film director doesn’t have to shoot the works to hold an audience. If the drama is galvanizing enough, that’s all you need. And what we have here is more than enough: Viola Davis in one of her greatest performances, and the late Chadwick Boseman in his final and most powerful appearance.

Clearly Sorkin sees the Chicago 7 as victims of the vilification of dissent. He also sees them as exemplars – this is his version of a superhero movie – and the idealization at times gets a bit sticky.

For all its skill and scrupulousness, I found the film a strangely remote emotional experience – a slice of black and white that never quite bursts into living color.

The Booksellers is a documentary for people who treasure the sheer look and feel of books. It is for anyone who has ever spent way too much time in used and rare bookstores teetering on tall ladders or squeezing through narrow, tome-filled aisles in search of that most precious of commodities: the book you didn’t know you needed until you found it – or, to be more precise, it found you.

The problem is that there is very little chemistry between the actresses, and Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy are far too studied in their depiction of passion. The most impressive performance in the movie is given by Blanchett’s elaborately coiffed, cast-iron hairdo.

The paradox of Tarantino’s oeuvre is that it is highly derivative of other movies, mostly genre pulp, and yet the films seem distinctly his. He is the most influential director of his generation because he ranges promiscuously through pop culture and brings to his borrowings an incendiary force.

I can’t imagine a world without the Beatles, but I can well imagine a world without this movie.

It doesn’t put you through the emotional wringer the way its predecessor did, but it’s consistently inventive, funny, witty, and heartfelt. In other words, it’s a lot better than it has any right to be. It’s more than good enough to justify its existence.

The role of Deb is not written with any great depth, but Miller gets into the character’s psychological complications in a way that almost compensates for the lack.

Although Howard doesn’t go in for a lot of musicological analysis of Pavarotti’s genius, which would have enriched the presentation, he compensates by giving us an ample dose of the singing.

Kaling’s naive earnestness in the role is very winning, and Thompson makes her boss lady clichés seem almost fresh. Not quite fresh enough, though, to rescue the movie.

If you care anything about the music of groups like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the ramshackle, engagingly anecdotal Echo in the Canyon is required viewing.

Rocketman is a campy, overblown, self-glorifying fantasia.

Whether you deem this project an extravagant boondoggle or a masterpiece, you have to admire Christo’s tenacity in finally making it happen, as chronicled in the documentary Walking on Water.

As the princess’s handmaiden, Nasim Pedrad at least has the comic timing that the rest of the cast, including, surprisingly, Will Smith, conspicuously lack. Smith understandably didn’t want to compete with Williams, but as the big, blue, top-knotted Genie, he’s uncharacteristically bland. Even the magic carpet in this movie looks bummed out.

What Batra is reaching for here is the fairy tale beguilements of Bollywood romance but without all the hoopla. He wants to tenderize the Bollywood clichés and bring the essence of their ardor into the real, teeming world of Mumbai.

Given the impossibility of crafting William Shakespeare into a believable human being, the film is an honorable try.

Most of all it’s about talking. It’s practically a nonstop jabberathon. What rescues the film from tedium is that much of the talk is enticing.

Just in case we don’t register the mismatch, Rogen is outfitted to look especially shlubby, and he sports an unbecoming beard that never comes off. With his crack timing, he still manages to get a few laughs, but he would have gotten a whole lot more if the jokes were any good. Theron, meantime, is photographed in full glamour mode throughout. This is probably just as well, since, as an actress, she doesn’t appear to have a comic bone in her body. Therein lies the true mismatch in this coupling.

The White Crow fitfully does justice to Nureyev’s overwhelming desire to be an artist, and that’s not a negligible achievement.

Ultimately it’s an upbeat movie about life’s downbeats.

Best of all is Robert Downey Jr. Amid all the hardware, he alone in the Marvel series has consistently given top-notch performances. His work in “Endgame” is extraordinarily moving and makes me wish yet again that this great actor would on occasion see fit to be great in a movie that doesn’t require him to fill out a franchise.

It’s a rarity, and a real pleasure, to find a movie that presents without condescension rural working-class people, especially women.

The latest entry in this dubious enterprise is “Dumbo,” a perfectly lovely 1941 animated movie that has been transformed by director Tim Burton into a cloddish fantasia that never soars.

The director has a good eye for semidocumentary detail, and the performances, which also include Bruce Dern as a veteran trainer, Gideon Adlon as Roman’s estranged daughter, and especially Jason Mitchell as a fellow inmate and trick rider, all have the sharp tang of authenticity.

At his best, Costner both exalts and complicates the strong and silent types who crowd, often to diminishing effect, so much of our American movie mythology.

This is not the sort of movie that offers up immediate gratifications, though there are some of those. Instead, it moves along with a steady grace. Its ruminative power creeps up on you.

What makes this film different from numerous other such movies is that, in many instances, it utilizes footage never before seen publicly.

As a piece of storytelling, Everybody Knows covers a vast expanse of human experience, but it doesn’t dive very deep.

What struck home the most forcefully for me in Cold War is its depiction, insidious and unrelenting, of how artists under communism suffered for their art. At its best, the film is like a bulletin from a benighted world.

It’s a rueful and respectful tribute that stands on its own because of the extraordinary performances of Steve Coogan as Stan and John C. Reilly as Ollie.

The Upside is a movie that somehow works, at least some of the time, even when it shouldn’t.

This is one of those radical change-your-image performances that tries too hard to defy our expectations. Kidman has indeed proved in the past to be quite versatile, but this muddled, scabrous, neo-noir procedural does her no great favors.

The casting of Jones as Ginsburg might have seemed like a good idea, but, as fine an actress as she is, she can’t quite manage to bring the future Supreme Court justice to life, perhaps because it’s tough to animate cardboard. She’s stiff and humorless.

When, at the end, we hear Cheney intone “I was the bad guy so you didn’t have to be,” the self-serving gravity of that pronouncement rings hollow because the movie is hollow, too.

It’s well crafted, well acted, and features some terrific live-action/animation combos. But it never quite achieves liftoff, which is a big problem for a musical – especially this musical.

Roberts, in her “serious” performances, is often a tad too stiff and monochromic, but she works well here with Hedges, who knows how to be volatile without chewing the scenery. They are quite believable as mother and son.

For all the film’s righteous anger and obeisance to Baldwin, it remains a baffling, amorphous construct.

In real life, Mary and Elizabeth never met, but this film, directed by Josie Rourke and written by Beau Willimon, stages numerous interactions, many of them accompanied by flaring nostrils.

It’s a charming, wistful movie, and I trust Tan will not have to wait another 20 years to direct her next film.

The actresses are so expert, especially Colman, with her grievous, hardbitten woe, that you may not care, but if one is to mock this sort of historical extravaganza, I much prefer the nutbrain Monty Python approach to all this deep-dish folderol.

Kore-eda’s slow reveal of who these people are, and what they mean to each other, has its mystery story aspects, but this is essentially a character study, or at least it tries to be, and not a puzzle picture. He fills in each of the main players leisurely, in snatches.

As evocative and soulful as I found parts of this movie, I experienced these stylistics as more evasion than immersion. Cuarón is so careful to avoid overdramatizing the narrative that his steady-state underplaying ends up seeming equally coercive. But this is not how we are supposed to react to “Roma.” We are supposed to regard it as “real life.”

One of the great achievements of this movie is that, in the end, Van Gogh’s words enter into our soul with the same force as the paintings.

Mortensen, who reportedly put on thirty pounds for the role, starts out playing Tony like a big lug but as the road trip ensues he brings all sorts of subtle shadings to the role. He even comes to appreciate Doc’s artistry. In Tony’s eyes, he’s right up there with Liberace.

How intently should we take Joel and Ethan Coen as artists? Despite their extreme unevenness and the flip misanthropy that runs through their work, I think they deserve to be taken seriously as such. In this new film, their extraordinary jeweler’s-eye attention to detail, their gift for concocting dialogue in plummy 19th-century vernacular, their lyrical embrace of wide-open landscapes, and their woeful nihilism that conceives of a world where paradise is always on the precipice of ruination are hallmarks of something much more than mere jokesterism.

Jackman, sporting a distracting, Hart-like brown hairpiece, seems miscast. He doesn’t convincingly convey this politician’s swagger and slickness, and Reitman’s attempts to mimic a loose-limbed political movie in the style of, say, Robert Altman’s “Tanner '88” series or “The Candidate” are rather leaden. It’s a film that’s less interesting to watch than to discuss afterward.

It was beset by legal woes and held in French vaults and labs for almost 40 years. Both Neville’s film and “The Other Side of the Wind” are being released simultaneously in theaters and on Netflix. I would advise seeing Welles’s film first. It’s more rewarding and less confusing that way.

As it turns out, bearing Welles’s words in mind, it becomes almost a meta version of Welles’s movie. I would like to think that the great magician himself would have approved.

Given the slam-bang slapstick featured in so many of her movies, I have to admit the subtlety and fullness of [McCarthy's] performance in this film did hit me as a shock to the system.

It builds slowly, and, at almost 2-1/2 hours, it occasionally drags. But it’s worth the time. This is a very knowing movie about the ultimate unknowability of people.

One of those movies with a terrific premise left unfulfilled.

Despite, or perhaps because of, these constraints, it’s one of the most cinematically alive movies of the year.

Whatever the approach, there isn’t enough psychological heft to the drama to make it seem much more than generic.

First Man pays lip service to the politics of the cold war that surrounded the moon shot, but it’s not that kind of movie, really. For all its scale and ambition, it’s essentially a small-scale character study. The character, Armstrong, is microscopic, and the backdrop is macroscopic. It’s an odd, uneasy fit.

The surprise is that, at least for its first half, this newest A Star Is Born is so powerfully fresh.

The cast is strong, though, and demonstrates yet again how good acting can carry audiences through movies that otherwise would not be worth the trip.

I hope this won’t be his last acting job. He’s too vital to go in for such a soggy send-off.

It’s impossible not to be charmed by these students, by their aspirations and idealism, not to mention the fact that one of them, or someone like them, may well end up winning a Nobel Prize. It’s also impossible not to recognize, although the movie does not make a political point of it, that a goodly percentage of these participants are first- or second-generation immigrants to the United States.

The best part of the movie is when the few who make it through are introduced to their new owners. It’s love at first touch.

A better movie would not have hinged its thesis so closely on Anna’s innocence. The film doesn’t fully allow for the fact that the issue of Anna’s veracity, or lack of it, is essentially a sideshow.

For a movie that is about a collection of oddballs, it can sometimes feel rather generic. But at its core, the film is not a comedy at all. The eccentricities issue from real adversity.

The movie is all nuance and it continually wafts away into artiness.

One of the bright sidelights to Juliet, Naked is the bemused way it deals with the crazy-making ramifications of hero worship.

Although the role may not have been written with great depth, Hussain’s performance as Mirza is richly layered.

If we are being asked to regard BlacKkKlansman as more than a movie, this may be another way of admitting that, on some fundamental level, it falls down as anything but revue sketch agitprop.

It takes awhile to get going but, still, it’s rather sweet.

The documentary is an attempt, in the words of those behind the film, to “investigate the very nature of family itself.” That this attempt is overreaching and diffuse does not detract from the film’s sporadic power.

Dark Money should set off warning bells for even those who believe that the Citizens United decision, equating corporations with people and money with speech, was a First Amendment victory for free speech.

Burnham avoids most of the “Mean Girls”-style tropes in favor of a more gently humorous and nuanced approach.

As summer franchise movies go, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is near the top of the heap.

What rescues the film from melodrama is that Legrand drew on extensive interviews with psychologists, emergency police personnel, female victims, and batterers. The bone-deep chill of real, observed experience cuts through this film and gives it a verity that at times reminded me of Frederick Wiseman’s harrowing documentary “Domestic Violence.”

The film cuts back and forth between the present and 1979, when Donna, blandly played as a young woman by Lily James, met her three beaus and went gaga for Greece. Scenery-wise, I can see why she did. I trust that everyone connected with this film had time to work on their tans.

It’s a rote piece of work that, oddly, also feels dated even at a time when the press and the White House have rarely been more at odds.

It’s a perplexing, fascinating, maddening movie, not quite like any other film biography of a famous painter, most of which tend to be equal parts ho-hum and hokum.

Most of the film, which also has links to Spike Jonze’s "Being John Malkovich," plays like a variation on some of Spike Lee’s more scabrous racial fantasias like “Bamboozled.” It’s also very much in the vein of films like “Get Out,” which also mixed horror, racial comedy, and social consciousness, though here to far less effect.

It brings the nature versus nurture debate into shattering focus.

Everybody connected to this movie appears to be operating on the same wavelength: They want to do justice to the lives of the people that we see. To a remarkable degree, they do.

McKay is very good where it counts the most: He understands these immigrants from the inside out, and, against all odds, he allows us to rejoice in their hopes.

Zahs, a genial obsessive, is a lot of fun, and so is the movie.

It’s another one of those films, like “Book Club,” in which the cast far outshines the material.

The Catcher Was a Spy, directed by Ben Lewin and starring Paul Rudd as the Ivy-educated Berg, who was fluent in seven languages, is a much more pallid experience than this eminently juicy subject deserves.

Pratt brings a wry derring-do to the mayhem, and the escape from Isla Nublar has its modicum of thrills.

Morgan Neville’s movie is more than just a chronicle of Rogers’s career. In some not-quite-definable way, the film itself is all of a piece with Rogers’s principled gentleness. It’s a love letter, but the sentiment and affection that pour through the film is honestly arrived at, even when, near the end, the film threatens to turn into the cinematic equivalent of a group hug.

Debbie’s assemblage of her crack team has its sly amusements, especially when Cate Blanchett, as Debbie’s hypercynical best friend, and Rihanna, playing a master hacker, show up. But Rihanna, along with Mindy Kaling, who plays a jewelry expert, are vastly underused, as is Awkwafina as a world-class pickpocket. On the other hand, hammy Helena Bonham Carter, as a cash-strapped fashion designer, is overused. Her hats are funnier than her dialogue.

What is missing here is any real sense of what it must have been like for two great writers to be living together, especially in that era, with its push-pull of progressivism and parochialism. This is a movie about fireworks where nothing ignites.

It’s questionable whether this film needs narration at all, or at least whether it needs the faux biblical lyricisms served up here. The panoramas are so glorious that I didn’t ache to hear any highfalutin hoo-ha on the soundtrack.

Rodin, directed by Jacques Doillon and starring Vincent Lindon as the great Parisian sculptor, does not, to put it charitably, add to the very small roster of Great Artist movies (such as “Lust for Life” and “Vincent & Theo”).

Of all the Star Wars-themed movies, this one is the closest to a Saturday afternoon serial/western. Don’t expect more than that. But it could have been less.

Schrader’s chief influence here, as in many of his other films, is the great French director Robert Bresson, especially his “Diary of a Country Priest.” But Bresson’s spare stylistics achieved a sublimity while Schrader’s, though intermittently powerful, too often feel schematic.

The film’s thesis is that the struggle to survive did not end with the camps. Each of the women profiled recounts, with varying degrees of intensity, the difficulties in creating a “normal” life in a world where the concept of “home” can no longer fully resonate.

The film makes clear that the soft-spoken, diminutive Ginsburg fought early and hard for gender equality in the courts in her own steadfastly clearsighted way. She’s the opposite of a late bloomer.

The movie is all a bit more airy than it needs to be, but Isabelle’s startlements are like a double take that never lets up.

A privileged sanctimony clings to this movie that is not fully recognized by its filmmakers: After all, not every distraught new mother can afford a self-help guru.

It takes a while to get into the ruminative rhythm of this film. But it’s worth it.

Some of the sequences are undeniably thrilling but, at about 2-1/2 hours, overkill sets in early.

It transcends its genre even as it fulfills it.

I was afraid at first that I would be watching a sobfest. I needn’t have worried. Nothing very grand is being attempted here, but there’s a core of feeling to what we are witnessing that keeps the sentimentality in check.

Spielberg wants us to drop the techno-gadgets and join hands, but it’s the VR world that really juices him. He’s the ultimate fanboy making a movie about the need to move beyond being a fan.

Tomb Raider, sloppily directed by Roar Uthaug, would not be worth watching without Vikander, who darts, leaps, and pummels her way through this mediocre escapade with a winning fierceness that makes you wish she had paired up with Indiana Jones in his heyday.

In a supporting role as Giacometti’s beleaguered wife, who endures her husband’s penchant for prostitutes, the great, undervalued French actress Sylvie Testud strikes the film’s most resonant note.

There is so much to look at in Isle of Dogs that a second viewing is almost mandatory. You can forgive its fetishism. Mania this dedicated deserves its due.

Each man is sharply characterized, and the performances are expert, right down to the cook (Toby Jones).

The central conceit of The Death of Stalin is that what is funny is not always just funny. In this sense, the film is closer in spirit to “Dr. Strangelove” than, say Mel Brooks’s “The Producers.” The latter was a jape; the former was a cautionary howl.

The most powerful scene in the movie, and the one that most fully encompasses its meaning, belongs to Mrs. Morobe (the marvelous Thandi Makhubele).

What follows is a phantasmagoria that is more cheesy than transporting.

Setsuko’s pathetic attempt to claim a new life for herself is touching. The film never makes fun of her.

It’s an indication of how much this film needed a bright break in all the grim oppressiveness that when Mary-Louise Parker shows up in a giddy cameo as a foul-mouthed boozer, the audience suddenly lit up with laughter.

The Young Karl Marx disappointingly resembles for the most part a conventional biopic. It has little depth, either political or psychological.

A brisk, black-and-white, worst-possible-case dinner party scenario overflowing with good actors and bad vibes.

Garland is great at setting a tone of creepy ominousness, and the women’s foray into the swampy terrain is an unnerving blend of lustrous loveliness and split-second horror. But the visual effects throughout the film are often disconcertingly cheesy, and the pulp elements pile up with an extra serving of gore.

It’s easily the best of the Marvel superhero movies but it’s also a film that foregrounds a cornucopia of powerful black faces, garbs, traditions, and conflicts. It’s a stealth movie: Like “Get Out,” it’s a genre film jam-packed with social relevancy.

Zvyagintsev would have done better, I think, to include more of the beauty that has gone out of this world, if only to heighten its loss.

If Pedro Almodóvar, especially in his early days, had directed this film, he might have brought out the black comedy inherent in the piece, which would have made both the blackness and the comedy more fully resonate.

In the end, the film’s most nuanced summation comes from Wajdi, who says, “No one has a monopoly on suffering.”

The film is frustrating because so many of its best possibilities are missed. But Bening keeps you watching, and, to a lesser extent, so does Jamie Bell as Peter Turner.

The actors, who also include Rosamund Pike as a woman whose family was massacred by the Comanche, and Ben Foster, as a member of the military who killed an American Indian family, are all strikingly good.

At 88, Christopher is at the top of his game. He turns Getty into a dastardly miser with an aggrieved core. There hasn’t been such a lonely mogul in the movies since Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane expired with “Rosebud” on his lips.

Elba is one of those actors who radiates his own force field even if he’s sitting still, or just tying his shoe. His no-nonsense performance helps to eradicate some of Sorkin’s nonsense.

The eroticism is all in the fittings of fabric and the power plays of a couple who make Mr. and Mrs. de Winters in “Rebecca” seem like Ward and June Cleaver from “Leave It to Beaver.”

This is pretty standard-issue Great Man of History psychobabble, and it’s insufficient, though somewhat satisfyingly so. The clichés go down easy.

Downsizing never quite goes where you think it’s going, and normally, I’d say that’s a plus. But confounding expectations only goes so far. You still have to get to a place worth getting to.

As is true of most movies about “important” topics, The Post is least successful when it’s glorying in its own righteousness. If the movie has any shelf life beyond the current historical moment, I suspect it will be because of Meryl Streep’s performance.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is the eighth movie in the series and one of the better ones. I’d rank it behind “The Empire Strikes Back” (still by far the best) and the first film, but it’s about on par with the enjoyable last episode, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” which also awakened the long-moribund franchise.

It’s a good bet that the director had “High Noon” in mind when he made this film, but the comparison ends there. As a compact study of wartime guilt, the film has the look and feel of a waking nightmare.

Janney knows how to nail a line like few others in the business. It helps that, in this film, she has most of the best ones.

Movies don’t become great by association, and Wonder Wheel is a far cry from “Streetcar.” There are ample flaws in this film, but they certainly don’t rise to the level of tragic.

The best parts of The Shape of Water, a fantasy fairy tale set in 1962 in a top-secret aerospace research center, are marvelously rhapsodic in ways that recall films like Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” without ever seeming slavish.

The sensuous atmosphere often preempts the drama. Neither Elio nor (especially) Oliver are quite rich enough as characters to outshine their surroundings, and, although it’s rare to see a movie of this sort that is so markedly nonjudgmental, the lack of sharp conflict doesn’t make for a terribly invigorating experience.

It lacks the delirious inventiveness and irreverence of the best Pixar movies (which for me would be the “Toy Story” trilogy, “The Incredibles,” and the first 10 minutes of “Up”), but there’s always something spacious to look at, and the songs, mostly by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, aren’t bad either.

The movie is admirable in its ambitions; in its execution, less so. The difficulty in making an “intimate” epic is that the characters have to fill out the frame in ways that are both highly individualized and symbolic. They have to be both lifelike and larger-than-life. In Mudbound, this combination works only fitfully.

McDormand is a bit too spartan and sealed off in the role. Her steeliness doesn’t have enough emotional levels.

The bromance often seems generic, too. Fishburne gives a highly nuanced performance, one of his best, as he allows us to see in this man of God flashes of the rogue he once was. But the movie ultimately must be defined by Doc, and we never really get inside his head.

Frisky and oddball in ways that are sometimes annoying and more often ingratiating.

It’s the sort of poetic conceit that needs a filmmaker far more rapt and intuitive than Haynes, whose jeweler’s precision keeps everything at an emotional remove.

Suburbicon, directed by George Clooney, grafts two distinctly different types of genres: the socially conscious race relations movie and grisly film noir. It’s an uneasy combo made even more so by the fact that the film noir stuff has all the juices.

The film does drag on, though, without a great deal of visual distinction, and as the familial complications pile up, the movie seems less like a full-scale dramatic rendering and more like a smartypants comic contraption.

Brett Morgen’s documentary Jane brings Goodall’s ineffable and incredible story to vivid life, starting with the aforementioned anecdotes as, now in her 80s and still seraphically beautiful, she recalls with an almost ethereal calm the extraordinariness of her days.

Ultimately “Ex Libris” demonstrates that libraries are about people, and what gives the film its great and accumulating force is that people are infinitely complex.

An astonishingly fine movie about the vagaries and frolics of childhood as seen largely through the eyes of its pint-sized protagonists.

There are flashes of visual grandeur in Blade Runner 2049, which was shot by the always-inventive Roger Deakins, but there’s not much reason for this film to exist outside of its fan base.

Camping it up, Jackson is hilarious.

The movie is a straightforward nuts-and-bolts affair of no particular consequence, except for Neeson’s performance, which rightly does not resolve the question: Was Felt acting nobly or vengefully?

The fact that this movie, with its 65,000 painted frames, was even attempted, is daunting. It’s the kind of folly that demands a measure of respect, for the effort, if not altogether for the result.

Cruise gives his energetic all to the role, but he, too, doesn’t seem to be quite aware that Seal was morally compromised far beyond the shallow confines of this film.

Too much of this movie is a conventionally rendered gloss that, in its own way, also attempts to cast Bauman as an inspirational icon. He is, but we can see in Gyllenhaal’s looks of grief and panic the makings of the more complex movie this might have been.

Best not when it is preaching to us but, rather, in those moments when both King and Riggs drop their public faces and reveal the roiling underneath.

Her social activism often left her children, some of whom are interviewed, in the lurch. It’s a contradiction the film could have more sharply explored.

Trophy is a documentary that can make the stomach turn and the head spin. It’s about the big-stakes world of hunting and conservationism, and what’s surprising is how morally intertwined the two activities are.

Both as a writer and as a man, Salinger was nothing if not unconventional. Rebel in the Rye is so tasteful that it practically slides off the screen.

The movie often seems on the verge of being interesting but repeatedly retreats into a formless vapidity.

Barely engaging spy thriller.

Marjorie Prime, which has a soulful score by Mica Levi, is essentially a chamber drama, and yet it rarely feels stifled or stagey.

It’s often enjoyable and very forgettable, which may be as good as it gets for movies released in August.

The overlong but charming documentary California Typewriter is an ode to the iconic writing instrument. I have to say I feel kind of guilty celebrating it on my word processor.

The funny thing about this series is that, although we are regularly shown the most exquisite dishes, neither Coogan nor Brydon has much to say about them beyond the mandatory oohs and aahs. Winterbottom works in some midlife crises material, as he also did in “The Trip to Italy,” but to less effect here.

The film is gracefully directed around the edges, but the core story, a kind of existential murder mystery, is swallowed up by a series of increasingly outlandish plot devices involving drug runners and Tarantino-esque shootouts.

One aspect of this story that could have been more deeply underscored: The steroid use that ultimately banned so many Russian Olympians was not just about winning. It was about winning under threat of disgrace or death.

The direction is fairly formulaic, the special effects are nothing special, and except for Elba and McConaughey, who square off against each other in a series of ho-hum set pieces, the cast is forgettable. So is the movie.

If the film had focused on more than the Algiers Motel incident, if, as it starts out to do, it had attempted to convey a comprehensive and incendiary portrait of a city in crisis, it would have rendered far more justice to those times – and our own.

Hayek gives one of her better performances, though – she makes it clear that Beatriz may be righteous, but she’s also more than a bit unhinged – and Lithgow is so good at playing CEO oiliness that you have to smile. He’s the man you love to hate.

The documentary is like the cinematic equivalent of humblebragging. But it does provide one great “told you so” moment.

What is strikingly brought home in “Rumble” is how the vast stew of influences in American music, rather than diluting everything, makes the music all the more powerful.

Dunkirk, with its scaled-to-be-a-masterpiece visual grandiosity, aims to be an epic of the spirit, but there is something weirdly underpowered about it. It’s a series of riveting tableaux, but the human center is lacking.

It’s a great introduction to French cinema for all those who have yet to make its acquaintance.

The film could have been improved by dropping a few battles, and I wish Caesar were not the only ape with the power of human speech. I, for one, would love to hear what Maurice the orangutan sounds like spouting the King’s English.

At times, “Homecoming” resembles a very good after-school special embedded in a cacophonous franchise flick. That’s probably not the demographic the filmmakers were most hoping to please.

A nutty, awkward, oddly impassioned parable that mashes together so many different genres that calling it “unclassifiable” doesn’t really explain very much.

The “what if?” aspects of this true-life drama are so tantalizing that the movie’s workmanlike execution is doubly dissatisfying.

A few of the performances, especially Nicole Kidman’s, as the lady in charge, and Kirsten Dunst’s, as the teacher pining to flee with the corporal, have some bite, but not enough to make much of an imprint in this brittle, vaporous chamber piece.