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.