Rafaela Sales Ross

Although the narrative is faithful to the book, del Toro rewrites the dialogue almost completely, an exercise whose only chance of success relies on his ingrained understanding of Shelley’s writing and tonal cadence. The result is a stunning piece of text, acutely aware of the labyrinthine nature of our most primitive emotions, and zigzagging through musings on love and loss and want with the careful rhythms of a writer who gets that tackling the grandiose often merits delicacy.

Urchin puts forward a sensitive, promising director. And an even more promising writer.

Not only is the film’s portrayal of Felicia tainted by ethnically inappropriate casting, but her character itself is often reductive—she is but the modern wife of a modern man, coming forth with a loose agreement on fidelity that inched Leonard across the finish line of a lengthy road towards marriage.

Corsage succeeds precisely by ditching the myth of objectivity in favor of portraying a woman eternalized by the glory and dolor of her imperfections.

The horror comes from seeing seismic consequences closer to newspaper headlines than history books. Figureheads die, but words live on, with grifters always waiting in the wings, spouting the same hate.

Briones and Mara are perfect dance partners in this waltz between reality and possibility, stark opposites and doomed lovers united by a hope they know to be foolish.

Romería is loyal to its sense of withholding almost until the very end. It is then, finally, that Simon reaches the grand apex of her journey of self-reflection, one that holds in the stunning clarity of carefully chosen words a moving encompassing of how one can only build a sturdy foundation for the future after lovingly repairing the unrectified cracks of the past.

The arresting visual competency of Scarlet, which includes the clever use of archival footage previously seen in Marcello’s Venice darling “Martin Eden” and the beautifully composed textures of its cinematography, can’t salvage its muddled pace.

The director is an expert in this precise kind of world-building, one intricately related to yearning – for another, for belonging, for redemption.

There is so much beauty in Bird, both within the relationships unraveling onscreen and on the screen itself — bright reds and whites and blacks lusciously captured in the film, the edges of the image burnt and remade, almost like yet another bird, the phoenix.

It is Clooney, of course, that anchors and crowns this dramedy milimetrically envisioned to tug at the hearts of cinephiles (and, for the sake of addressing the elephant in the Netflix room, awards voters).

David Fincher is rarely dull, and The Killer cannot take the director’s filmography in that direction, but it won’t push itself toward the top of his work, either. A competently realized crime thriller made by a technical team just as sharply attuned to details as the director at the ship’s helm, the Netflix production is entertaining but a little orthodox.

Leaning away from blood-pumping thrills and towards family drama, Ferrari benefits from another great turn by Adam Driver and a handful of masterfully choreographed race scenes but is ultimately too risk-averse.

Anchored by its competent trio of protagonists, The Adults would have been a lovely time if not for the overused mishmash of twee gimmicks.

If in his previous films about the regime Larraín often opted for subtlety, in El Conde elusiveness is a foreign notion. It is thrilling to watch the director repeatedly hit the nail in the head without much desire—or care—to engage with subtext.

Society of the Snow humanizes the gruesome tale of a group of rugby players trapped in the Andes.

Lawrence is the undeniable propulsive force of “Die, My Love,” a performer whose rare ability to swing from the effortless charm of the classic movie star straight into the dark abyss that houses the odd and the grotesque lends itself perfectly to a role as tangled as Grace.

What is grief if not a non-linear, mood-spanning, incongruous mess? In this, The Shrouds feels like one of the greatest encapsulations of loss and one we might look at more and more fondly as time goes by.

There is something not quite right about this one Almodóvar film, a dramedy that emulates all that makes a story Almodovarian but bypasses its essence entirely.

As it is, the enormity of these feelings is trapped, lingering unexplored with nowhere to go, and the frustration felt as a viewer eventually gives way to disengagement.

Despite the mid-runtime ebb and an overlong runtime that works against the film’s firm grasp on the slippery tautness of good action, Hope still proves one hell of a time.

Earnest, pulpy fun at the movies is always a welcome sell. Still, it’s hard to settle into the easy rhythms of amusement when looking for answers not to the film’s central mysteries but to the nagging gaps in a story that seems carelessly scribbled together to accommodate a character that, although compelling enough, has very little to chew on.

While the first act feels dynamic despite its stationary setting, the latter sections unravel oppositely. The gags that played so well the first time around grow tiresome through repetition, and the mystery around the big event that seems to lead them all into doom takes center stage to the detriment of the relationship between the characters.

Subtlety proves a scarce commodity as the debuting duo chops at this cautionary tale until its fragile narrative bones are fully exposed, dialogue stripped of any valuable nuance.

Gainsbourg is riveting in her portrayal of the intricacy of this pattern, her hands grasping for the tangibility of doorframes when words seem far too futile, her back arching and contracting to respond to ecstasy and sorrow.

The result is a visually rich film that finds moments of entertaining inspiration but suffers from a frustrating lack of focus.

Whenever it leans into these poignant metaphors to ask questions of guilt and duty, A Private Life grasps at something real and raw. It’s a shame Zlotowski so willingly refuses to take her finger off that pulse, even if the result remains a pleasurable ride.

The film feeds into the very power structure it sets out to debunk, a frustrating miss that threatens to cloud Comer’s poignant performance.