Richard Brody

Oppenheimer sacrifices much of its dramatic force to the importance of its subject, and to Nolan’s pride at having tackled it—which is to say, to his own self-importance.

A Quiet Place Part II is filled with striking, clever details; it displays no sense whatsoever of the big picture. That failure is the difference between directing and just making a movie.

Ultimately, the true genre of “Love Lies Bleeding” is a Kristen Stewart movie. That genre, too, is one that the director neither expands nor reinvents.

Fiennes and Tucci, in particular, spin dialogue with athletic deftness, but they and the rest of the cast are burdened with embodying stock characters who exist only through a salient trait or two. Instead of rising to the awe-inspiring heights of their settings, the refinement of the performances is narrowed to monotony.

The characters don’t seem to exist outside the stilted drama of their individual scenes; the ambiguities of Balagov’s detached approach yield a sentimental tale of pride and reverence.

The over-all effect is of a striving toward a high style that isn’t achieved—and that undercuts the mighty import of the play.

The calculated silences and cagey revelations result in a movie of truncated characters, with truncated subjectivity, trimmed to fit the Procrustean confines of the script.

It’s a strange movie—far better as a concept than as a drama, though the concept is strong enough to provide a sense of inner experience, making up for what the outer, onscreen experience lacks.

The paradox is poignant: the movie is, at its best, so alive to its characters’ immediate experience that it’s all the more regrettable that we do not really know them at all.

The immensely empathetic view of Franz is overwhelmed by vague spirituality and vaguer politics; the impressionistic methods dispel the story’s powerful and noble specificity.

There’s a significant work of art lurking within “Anora,” but it’s confined within the limits of a potboiler.

It is not a great film—its form is less personal than its substance, its revelations and insights come only intermittently.

It’s as if a filmmaker’s quest for dramatic universality has deprived his characters of their particulars, has pulled them out of time and space and rendered them all too abstract. What remains is a mechanism of thrilling power that’s missing a touch of mere humanity.

As a creative work, it’s mild, but it’s audacious nonetheless, and its audacity lies in its very existence—its dramatization of the making of one of the most famous (and, now, infamous) movies of all time, its portrayal of two of the greatest actors of all time, and its reconstruction of the scene of a moral crime and the crime’s agonizing aftermath.

Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood has been called Tarantino’s most personal film, and that may well be true—it’s far more revealing about Tarantino than about Hollywood itself, and his vision of the times in question turns out to be obscenely regressive.

In The Broken Hearts Gallery—Krinsky’s first feature—Viswanathan’s performance lends the movie its sole impression of vitality and spontaneity, to go with its one bright light of conceptual inspiration.

Despite the deftness of the graft (thanks to a script that he co-wrote with Gillian Flynn), it remains, throughout, a graft—a conspicuous effort to rely on the simple emotional engagement of a crime drama to deliver didactic observations about political power relations.

The film’s pleasures and its frustrations, its energies and its enervations, are inseparable.

Desplechin and his co-writers have created an enticing set of characters who arouse a viewer’s curiosity not only about their connections to one another but about their relation to the world in which they live. But in “Two Pianos” there is no such world.

At its most persuasive, it conjures live-action versions of Chinese paintings, as if Hou were more at ease with the settings and stakes than with the personalities.

Coppola can’t avoid a dash of mythology when filming brutal killings, but he also looks grimly at the Mob’s role in popular artistry—and in enforcing racial barriers.

The filmmakers of Respect aim at a wide audience with an altogether more obvious and calculating contrivance. They don’t grant the person, the personality, the character of Aretha the same originality, complexity, or substance that the real-life Franklin had; they leave all the specifics on Hudson’s shoulders, and her energetic, detailed, and focussed performance nearly papers over the missing heart of the movie.

Reichardt films the workingmen’s friendship and their frustrated strivings sympathetically, and observes with dismay the official’s domineering ways and pretentious airs, but she reduces the protagonists to stick figures in a deterministic landscape.

Dumb Money, touching on questions of the authority of personality and the importance of nonfinancial—even completely irrational—motives in the investment world, offers a gleeful romp through strange and treacherous territory that merits a closer, more careful look.

Like Cooper, Shyamalan confidently sees through the vanity. His vision is a sardonic one, and it feels as if his cinematic smirks conceal rage at the impotence and banality of which ordinary life is made.

As impressive as the film is, the many thrillingly imaginative moments remain suspended and detached from each other, like scattered storyboard frames. The result is a film that’s accomplished but seemingly unfinished—indeed, hardly begun.

Creed III makes clear that Jordan, in directing and starring, has serious matters, personal and professional and societal, in mind. But the movie, produced as one briskly overpacked feature, doesn’t allow him enough time to explore them.

In excluding conversation, commentary, analysis, context, and personality, Frammartino is a cinematic Icarus: he strains high for sublimity and finds a deck of picture postcards.

The movie offers a more insightful view of the music business than of Baker’s art.

The movie’s dramatic framework is bound up tightly and sealed off, and Haynes doesn’t puncture or fracture it to let in the wealth of details that the story implies—of art and money, power and presumption. The result is engaging and resonant—but it nonetheless feels incomplete, unfinished.

Foster gives a taut performance despite the unstrung absurdities of the plot. The story is anchored in Paris’s Jewish community, but the context remains anecdotal and unexplored.

Ballerina—like the four John Wick films that it’s spun off from—is, strangely, far better at story than at action.

Crimes of the Future is, for better and worse, a conceptual film; it’s less an experience than it is an idea, less a drama of characters’ experiences than an allegory for Cronenberg’s despairingly diagnostic view of present-day crimes, ones that society commits against society.

What’s jolting about Shyamalan’s film is its call to capitulation. The director puts the onus on the liberal and progressive element of American society to meet violent religious radicals more than halfway, lest they yield to even worse rages, lest they unleash an apocalypse.

Despite Cornwell’s striving for reflexivity, for getting behind the onscreen talk to explore his relationship to Morris, nothing so dramatic takes place; the high-stakes mind games that he likes to think he’s playing never really occur. The Pigeon Tunnel is nonetheless an absorbing, colorful self-portrait.

It’s a contemporary story that feels as if it has been worn away to a featureless, atemporal perfection of the sort that has been handed down, in the industry, through producers’ dictates and story conferences, and which filters into the world of independent filmmaking by way of film schools and handbooks, rounds of workshops and mentoring.

Weapons is essentially a mystery, and a good one, if conventional...yet Cregger’s storytelling is slick and textureless, featuring characters whose personalities are reduced to their plot functions and a town that has no characteristics beyond its response to calamity.

Tsangari’s view of her world is blocked by her ideas; she is so concerned with what she has to say that she doesn’t see what she’s not showing.

Judas and the Black Messiah needed a coup of casting in order to find a performance that’s up to the character of Hampton. Kaluuya’s seems, instead, to render the extraordinary more ordinary, to indicate and assert Hampton’s unique, historic character rather than embodying it.

Within the carnivalesque atmosphere and high-spirited revelry of Moore’s show, there’s a master of political rhetoric at work, and he devotes that mastery to a high patriotic calling. At its best, Michael Moore in TrumpLand is a moving act of devotion, a motivating turn of rhetoric of potentially historic import.

The entire film is tinged with a cloying glaze that seeps into the interstices of the drama and limits his characters’ range of motion.

Unlike the films of such great modern stylists as Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and the three Ter(r)ences—Davies, Malick, and Nance—Wright’s movie offers an illustrated screenplay, in which images deliver and adorn the text rather than embody its ideas.

Despite its physical horrors, the movie is also a celebration of the body, of the bond between pleasure and pain, agony and ecstasy—and that fusion proves to hold for family bonds as well. But the psychology and the practicalities of the story are ultimately thinly sketched, the abrupt transitions calculated to elide reflection in repose. The movie is too specific and detailed to be starkly and abstractly symbolic, yet too vague and general to convey the complexity and density of a relationship.

Glazer’s movie is a presentation of nearly unfathomable horrors by way of bathos, alluding to enormities in the form of minor daily inconveniences. There’s conceptual audacity in the effort, yet Glazer doesn’t display the courage or the intellectual rigor to pull it off successfully.

Athena is a vision of political apocalypse, and it names the enemy while throwing its cinematic hands in the air, along with the camera. It turns its own story into just another figure in the mediascape that it decries. It offers no discourse, no practice, no options, no alternatives; strangely, in the process, it denies the residents of Athena agency. In the end, even its protagonists are mere extras in a nation-scaled drama.

With the help of blankly matter-of-fact yet omniscient voice-over narration (spoken by Madeleine James), D’Ambrose achieves the span and the depth of a cinematic bildungsroman in shards of experience and epigrammatic flickers.

The realization of her life online, as she interacts with a profusion of screens and windows, is extraordinarily complex and detailed, but the drama is thin and predictable; despite the quasi-documentary authenticity of the details of Alice’s work, the movie offers more prowess than perspective.

The story of young George’s childhood and rise to fame has a tense and turbulent charm, but the story of the professional heavyweight’s dash to the championship and everything that follows (up through the nineteen-nineties) has a whiff of a ghostwritten corporate autobiography.

A peculiarly hollow, centerless blend of theatre and literature, from which what’s missing, for the most part (though not entirely), is precisely the cinema...It isn’t so much that The Third Man is a bad movie—far from it. But it’s far from being a great one, too.

The filmmakers keep to the surface of the bluntly rowdy story while conveying apolitical layers of regret and exasperation, in wanly comic and affectingly melodramatic action alike.

This movie (directed by Sam Wrench) hardly adds another level of experience to the performances, because its visual composition, moment to moment, is burdened by convention and complacency. This doesn’t get in the way of the music, but it disregards the authenticity of Swift’s presence, the physical side of her performance.

The late Harry Dean Stanton, in one of his last roles, infuses the slightest gesture and inflection with the weight of grave experience, but this maudlin drama mainly renders his grit and wisdom wholesome and cute.

The images of Wakanda Forever allow for little creative interpretation; the performances are slotted into the plot like puzzle pieces. The script is the main product, and it’s engineered with the precision of a high-tech machine, with all the artificial artistry to match.

The movie persuasively depicts the appallingly casual reduction of a woman’s body to a commodity and the oppressive inequalities of a justice system that clobbers the poor and the nonwhite into desperate submission. The power of these premises makes the movie’s vain sensationalism all the more unfortunate.

Ford creates a title character, played by Aubrey Plaza, who seems to carry a world with her, and he sets the action in a shadow realm of workaday grifters which emerges in fascinating detail. Yet that core of cinematic power gives rise to a modestly engaging but undistinguished, mundane movie, one that speaks as much to the givens of film production as to Ford’s own ambivalent achievement.

Its big idea, though vague, is at least a fascinating curiosity. But with its jumble of clichés, its blatant word-bubble declarations, and its hectically rushed impracticalities, the movie—which is based on a comic-book series—invites an air of antic exaggeration and revved-up stylization. It hints frustratingly, throughout, at a comedic impulse that the direction of its actors suppresses.

Its script is junk—but junk brought to the screen with verve.

The resulting film is a kaleidoscopically shifting—and dazzling—collage of elements that have their irony built in and that, jammed together, meld intense sincerity with self-parody (above all, Perry’s own) in an artificial artifact that nonetheless proves more authentic than a plain and unadorned recording.

Setting aside the woeful omission, though, and considering the film outside the realm of preëxisting facts, as if it were a work of fiction about a fictitious character, “Michael” still counts as only a modestly noteworthy achievement, enjoyable yet flawed—because it contains other, artistic blind spots that keep the drama thin and narrow.

For all its turbulent action and extravagant expressiveness, Maestro is hollow; even its strongest moments play like false fronts, like veneer far fuller, stranger, more struggle-riddled lives.

The tangled plot is decorated in gaudy colors (thanks to the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro) that contrast sadly with the sordid doings.

The movie is so tautly constructed that not a single idea can seep in; it’s a mechanism made with an eye to spare elegance so obsessive that it runs without functioning, like a watch without hands.

The shaded black-and-white cinematography and the dialectical romances mimic the styles and moods of nineteen-seventies French classics without their intimacy, rage, or historical scope.

The director looks empathetically at lives of convention and duty that stifle romance and desire, but she reduces the fiery literary lovers to ciphers.

The result is a mere yarn that, lacking any sense of meaningful retrospect at a quarter century’s distance, remains untethered at either end of its time line and merely goes slack.

The movie offers no details about any conflict between domestic and artistic life—because Trier and his co-screenwriter, Eskil Vogt, display no interest in Julie’s artistic development or activity. The Worst Person in the World is driven by a relentless focus on Julie’s personal life, but it’s a focus that remains obliviously impersonal.

The writer and director, Ana Lily Amirpour, delivers this imaginative tale as a simplistic allegory of the haves and the have-nots; she ruefully delights in the wasteland’s postindustrial wreckage while leaving characters’ thoughts and motives blank.

Audiard may know and understand something about romantic entanglements, family commitments, and professional lives. But by centering his characters’ desire and pleasure, and then filming these aspects of their lives with smarmy smugness, he sacrifices the realm of knowledge in yielding to fantasy.

Black Adam feels like a place-filler for a movie that’s remaining to be made, but, in its bare and shrugged-off sufficiency, it does one positive thing that, if nothing else, at least accounts for its success: for all the churning action and elaborately jerry-rigged plot, there’s little to distract from the movie’s pedestal-like display of Johnson, its real-life superhero.

This dramatization of the last stages of Vincent van Gogh’s life, directed by Julian Schnabel and starring Willem Dafoe as the ill-fated genius, lurches between the ridiculous and the sublime.

Rees uses voice-overs to bring the many characters to life, but the text is thin; the movie’s exposition is needlessly slow and stepwise, and the drama, though affecting, is literal and oversimplified.

Instead of suggesting depths of thought and feeling lying below the surfaces of busy lives, the movie’s exaggerations and artifices merely serve Audiard’s vigorous yet narrowly deterministic approach to the story.

The movie is a slew of illustrated plot points and talking points but, between the shots and the slogans, neither its protagonist nor its world seems to exist at all.

The supporting performances, impressive as they are, only sketch characters, rather than embodying them—because Abbasi’s merely efficient direction leaves the actors little time and little space onscreen to delve into their roles.

The action and the effects, so gleamingly creative in the original trilogy, are now C.G.I. commonplaces and “John Wick” retreads—and are approached as such. The duels and battles are whipped up with a sense of obligation and filmed with little verve.

Unfortunately, Garfield isn’t a musical force of nature or anything close. His mere sufficiency in that department is the wavering note to which the entire movie is tuned and which, for all its many virtues, makes the film slip away from its emotional center.

Arnold, a major artist of cinematic fiction, has made characters’ self-presentation, their sense of performance in daily life, a crucial part of her most original drama, “American Honey.” In “Cow,” Arnold hasn’t considered her subjects or her place in their world as stringently or as originally.

The movie sinks, fast and deep, under the weight of dramatic shortcuts, overemphatic details, undercooked possibilities, unconsidered implications.

Only Johnson’s committed, precise, and vigorous performance suggests the power that inherently surges through the story and that the movie leaves nearly untapped.

The movie’s solid dramatic architecture is essentially uninhabited—“The Batman” is a cinematic house populated only by phantoms with no trace of a complex mental life.

Despite some memorably painful moments and underlying artistic urgency, the film’s implications remain unprocessed and unquestioned.

In the end, The Souvenir is a movie about experience that doesn’t itself offer much of an experience.

As a form of wish fulfillment, it’s fascinating if unpersuasive; as a vision of its subject—high-school life—it’s as faux-sweet and faux-innocent as the films of the Frankie Avalon era.

The bare script seems written by telegram, reducing the characters to pieces on a historical chessboard, and the portentous pace and lugubrious tone of Cooper’s direction take the place of substance.

The new comedic drama Blinded by the Light feels designed to be heartwarming, and does a depressingly good job of defining by example that innocuous quality

McCarey plays the shipboard courtship for generous and tender laughs—the wryly staged first kiss is one of the sweetest in all cinema—but the comedy that follows on dry land is mostly inadvertent.

This impersonal exaltation of heroic exploits leaves an unexplored dilemma at the foundation of the film.

The trouble with Mendes’s film is in the effort to combine the pieces in a way that feels natural, in an artifice that’s devised to be nearly invisible. It’s a synthetic that presents itself as organic. In the process, the film smothers its authentic parts, never lets its drama take root and grow, never lets its characters come to life.

Instead of the roots of Shakespeare’s play, The Northman merely serves up its raw material both half-baked and overcooked.

It’s a miniseries’ worth of action that’s crammed into the procrustean bounds of a near-two-hour feature, without the compensating dimensions of symbol and implication.

In trying to do too much in its mere eighty-seven-minute span, “Kim’s Video” does too little. For all Redmon’s self-described passion for movies and obsession with the Kim’s Video trove, the film has little to say about a wider view of video-store life and its relationship to the movie-viewing experience.

Reed, a comedic wizard, generates some moments of giddy wonder, but the earlier film’s freewheeling, low-key loopiness is replaced by a dull and dutiful plot that, with its forced references to other Marvel installments, squeezes the action to fit the franchise.

The experience of watching Bottoms is weighed down by the movie’s thin drama, hit-or-miss comedy, and merely functional direction—pictures of actors acting.

The Bubble (which Apatow co-wrote with Pam Brady) is a sort of good bad movie, in which the aesthetic falls flat but the personal motive, the emotional core, is authentic, pugnacious, derisive.

Cedar plays Norman’s story for tragedy but never develops his inner identity, his history, or his ideals; the protagonist and his drama remain anecdotal and superficial.

Lavishly detailed yet dramatically vague, opulently produced but blandly depicted.

The failure of topicality in “Don’t Look Up” is, not least, that the movie’s cynically apolitical view of politics contributes to the frivolous and self-regarding media environment that it decries—starting with the very celebrity power that the movie marshalls to score its points.

The formulaic drama is of a piece with the movie’s action sequences, which exhaust their ingenuity from the get-go, with the Matera chase and shoot-out.