Richard Brody

It’s among the most visually extravagant films ever made.

Ford depicts a working-class solidarity based on morality, tradition, and community; he conveys his nuanced and tender sociology with surprising sound effects and expressionistic tableaux that feature the sort of angles that made Welles famous (and which the younger man borrowed, in turn, from Ford’s Stagecoach).

The unusual power of “My Father’s Shadow,” for all its subjectivity, comes from its elements of impersonality—from the seemingly scriptural authority with which memory is sublimated into myths and relationships into destinies.

Though “Afternoons of Solitude” shows only the present tense of bullfighting, it looks deep into history and spotlights the tragic contradictions of modern life itself.

Its core of information is largely a footnote to Aaron Sorkin’s drama “Being the Ricardos,” but, with access to previously unreleased audio tapes recorded by Ball and Arnaz, Poehler vividly and poignantly evokes their offscreen personalities.

Along with the documentation of material destruction and displacement, the movie is a record of psychological warfare, of the effort to demolish morale, suppress energy, break will. This, as much as the physical violence that it documents, gives the movie immense moral authority.

Serge Bozon’s sharply political comedy—a giddily imaginative reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale—stars Isabelle Huppert, who revels in its sly blend of dissonant humor, intellectual fervor, and macabre violence.

Lodkina borrows one of the most familiar of young filmmakers’ tropes—the drama of a film student struggling to complete a thesis film—and transforms it into something as original as it is personal.

The director Anthony Mann fleshes out the intricate story with vigorous and subtle attention to its disparate elements—political, psychological, and brutal.

With Old, facing the constraints of filming during the pandemic—on a project that he’d nonetheless planned before it—Shyamalan has created a splendid throwback of a science-fiction thriller that develops a simple idea with stark vigor and conveys the straight-faced glee of realizing the straightforward logic of its enticing absurdity.

This intense, furious melodrama, by the Filipino director Lino Brocka, fuses its narrative energy with documentary veracity.

The director Chris McKim incisively intertwines a generous batch of audio interviews with Wojnarowicz’s friends, family, and associates; a rich set of archival footage to conjure his time and place; and vigorous effects to evoke his inner world.

Its clarity and simplicity—and the outrageous, nearly humorous audacity with which its brisk mysteries conjure wide-ranging, complex, and turbulent stories—makes it among Hong’s most compulsively rewatchable films.

As the poor man of refinement, the overlooked wanderer despairing of romance, the survivalist imp of defiant pride, Chaplin is the apotheosis of the world’s despised and downtrodden, and also their hope.

For Wiseman, the “small pleasures” of the title are highly concentrated distillations of mighty exertions, from the grand and carefully catalogued tradition of French cooking to the immediate tradition of the Troisgros family restaurants (now in its fourth generation).

No Ordinary Man challenges the very basis of cultural production, eschewing the familiar accumulation of biographical and historical information and instead questioning the process by which such information is gathered.

In peeling away the myths of pop culture and its lovable celebrities, Sorkin reveals the source of its mighty and lasting power.

While displaying the erratic workings of the law and the crucial importance of journalism, the movie’s legal focus narrows its imaginative scope; the drama, though infuriating and moving, sticks to its characters’ surfaces.

With Experiment in Terror, Edwards, working in the familiar genre of criminal depravity, does something that may well be, for Hollywood, unprecedented: he makes a virtual piece of film criticism in movie form.

An echo of an echo, a convergence of social-scientific cinema and stifled screams of pain that appears designed, urgently and precisely, to break the silence.

Ford is more than a witness—he is a crucial participant in the events of the film, and its elements of pain and guilt are reflected in his grief-stricken, self-interrogating aesthetic.

In “Oh, Canada,” Schrader realizes a tale of immense complexity with bold ease. He is helped by the sharp-eyed editing of Benjamin Rodriguez, Jr., and the variety of Andrew Wonder’s cinematography.

The movie is also sparing with metaphors and symbols—though the few that Rasoulof builds into the texture of the drama, such as a view of Javad’s wet military uniform hanging from a tree and an image of a fox prowling around a farm, are piercingly effective.

With one foot in the French New Wave and the other in the Ballets Russes, Cocteau fits a raging confession into a serene, sensuous neoclassical vessel.

[Anthony] turns a concluding sequence of civic pride and good cheer into a brilliantly light-hearted fantasy of grave import, a radical political utopia conjured with a deft artistic flourish. It’s one of the most extraordinary, visionary inspirations in the recent cinema.

The over-all tone of the drama—concerning foxhole friends who end up as partners in crime but rivals in love—evokes the flailings of unformed men whom a heedless society tossed in harm’s way and then cast aside.

The movie’s panoramic cityscapes teem with the gritty details of emotional life: romance and chores, hope and despair and loss, bitter resentments and rowdy reckonings with mortality.

Sinatra’s vocal swagger is as exhilarating as ever, on a stage that gives him room to strut. And the overall effect is to heighten the effect and the presence of Frank Loesser’s brash yet subtle and bluff yet intricate songs. It’s not filmed theatre, but the cinematic transfiguration of the theatrical experience.

Amid its tightly plotted action, it seethes with a rage that seems pressurized by the sealed-off grimness of the pandemic years.

Reginald Hudlin directs this historical drama, set in 1941, with an apt blend of vigor and empathy.

Yasujiro Ozu’s direction brings emotional depth and philosophical heft to this turbulent and grim family melodrama.

It may be a hectic, giddy, absurd movie—but, in its evocation of a conspiracy so logical that it is beyond belief, the film dramatizes the power of such an idea to attract true believers.

The movie, directed by Mark Robson and based on a novel by Budd Schulberg, packs the ambient violence of a sports world and a media scene that are infested with gangsters; it’s an exposé not just of boxing but of the American way of business.

Lady Bird, daring, distinctive, and personal in text and theme, is recognizably conventional in texture and style.

Diop does more in “Saint Omer” than create an original and far-reaching courtroom drama; she establishes an aesthetic, distinctive to the courtroom setting, that seemingly puts the characters’ language itself in the frame along with the psychological vectors that connect them. This spare and straightforward method gives rise to a film of vast reach and great complexity.

Misericordia is, fundamentally, a snappy and satisfying entertainment, a thriller that thrills.

The hallucinatory power of ayahuasca and the incantatory lure of rituals fuse with existential dread in this darkly hypnotic drama.

Even as the film abounds in behavioral details, rendering its four protagonists’ personalities in sharp outlines, it never presumes to know too much about them; the movie shows what Sasquatches are like without assuming what it’s like to be a Sasquatch.

For all the film’s roiling action, its inner life is in little grace notes that open enormous vistas of time.

Rarely have high spirits and theatrical energy seemed like such a tragic waste; an era and its myths seem to be dying on-screen in real time.

Along with the wild psychology of “Suburban Fury,” Devor evokes the era’s wild politics, which, for all its ideological phantasmagoria, create unimpeachable realities.

Farsi hasn’t made a rhetorical film of persuasion—anyone who needs a name and a face to be moved by reports of killings is beyond persuading—but a personal memorial for a friend and a public archive of that friend’s work.

It’s one of the great movies about the continuity of art and life, about the back-and-forth flow between personal relationships and artistic achievements—and about the artifices and agonized secrets on which both depend.

Master is a tensely effective, terrifyingly affecting drama that’s also a virtual vision of the power and the purpose of the modern right-wing war on truth.

The movie seems lived-in; its virtually tactile details and its trenchantly analytical dialogue feel like intimate aspects of the filmmaker's audiovisual, emotional, and intellectual experience.

Its raw and violent subject is matched by its hectic style; the thin production values take a backseat to Fuller’s rich imagination.

As the title promises, Full Time is centered on work. It’s one of the best recent movies about work, and it approaches the subject with sharply analytical specificity.

The director, Radu Jude, unfolds the horrific treatment, involving long needles, tight wraps, and a full-body cast, with an unflinching and fascinated specificity that contrasts with the teeming theatrical tableaux in which he films life in the lavish facility.

Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra is put together of the stuff of legend that the director experienced as personal reality, and he filmed the story as if he had been there. The film may be as close as Hollywood gets, outside the realm of Orson Welles, to a cinematic simulacrum of Shakespeare, less in its lucidly incisive, rhetorically reserved images than in its blend of coruscating language, rowdy comedy, and grand yet urgent and intimate performances.

It’s a freestanding, freewheeling work that relies on familiar characters to tell a story closer in substance and tone to the sexual fury, social outrage, wild humor, and outlaw freedom of John Waters’s films, and it has a vociferously didactic streak that’s playful yet focussed.

The extraordinarily imaginative new feature by Christopher Munch, The 11th Green, stakes out a genre unto itself: poli-sci-fi, a fusion of science fiction and the history-rooted political thriller.

For all the movie’s kinetic thrills, “The Fall Guy” is a romantic comedy, and it succeeds in delivering that genre’s patterned gratifications in a fashion that does more than reheat them.

Most of Lindon’s fellow-actors are nonprofessionals who do their real-life jobs onscreen, and the intrinsic fascination of their performances—and of the world of work itself—opens exotic speculative vistas.

Jerry Schatzberg directs the film with a sleek yet relaxed precision that mirrors Joe’s own breezy confidence.

The impasse implied in “The Novelist’s Film” gets a strenuous and sardonic dramatic workout in "Walk Up," which is both a work of art and a theory of art—or, rather, several theories, which emerge in the course of the discussions between characters who are themselves artists or former artists.

Linklater’s direction keeps “Hit Man” brisk and jazzy, as does the jovial force of Powell’s performance.

Amanda Rose Wilder’s nuanced and passionate documentary, about the first year of a “free” elementary school in New Jersey, reveals the glories and the limitations of unstructured classrooms and observational filmmaking alike.

In Desplechin’s implicit view of his artistic heroes and milieu, he turns Roth’s personal story into his own.

Betzer’s view of the family’s pathologies goes far beyond troubled nature and lack of nurture to probe haunted American landscapes. Violence and tenderness, piety and crime unite in a terrifying tangle of stunted emotions.

The best parts of “Moonfall” feel like a sharp and cogent reproach to the corporate stolidity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other superhero-franchise movies. The ridiculous proves occasionally sublime.

For all its symbolic heft and keen-eyed flair, there’s a scattershot quality to Candyman that has to do with the seemingly inescapable demands of its genre source. The horror-film combination of constrained tautness and calculated gore keeps some of the themes from fully developing and leaves narrative loose ends dangling.

For all the specific accusations and denunciations that Y—and Lapid—level at Israeli politics and culture, “Ahed’s Knee” is, above all, a work of cinematopoeia: it looks and sounds and feels like what it means.

Yost is a veteran of historical documentaries, and his experience handling information is apparent; the film tells an enormously complex story of financial fine points and political maneuvering, along with the underlying social and personal backstories, with a deft touch and a brisk sense of wonder.

Eastwood’s subject is wasted lives and wasted talent; Wilson’s charisma and Hollywood’s money prove irresistible, and their sheer power brings noteworthy results—but they emerge from a needless vortex of ruin.

Green’s direction and dramatic sensibility are blunt, but the film’s laboratory-like microcosm of scenarios pointedly similar to recent widely publicized events in the movie business is shocking and effective.

The film’s real charge lies elsewhere—in Preminger’s view of a jolting, disoriented age of rock and roll.

Caught Stealing is a grand entertainment for a time of shame and guilt and corruption, of treacherous authority and brazen hypocrisy.

The ultimate deflation of the movie into a pointed drama of norms and ethics doesn’t, however, dispel its glorious hour of theatrical spectacle and artistic mystery.

The film’s relentless intensity, its concentration on highs and lows, on extremes of sensation and emotion, is in itself a profound view of the very nature of trauma.

Though the violence never uncorks and the story takes a sentimental turn, the deep shadows, the jarring angles and cuts, and the idiosyncratic whims of gesture evoke a sorry underworld that’s out of joint, out of luck, and out of time.

The pugnacity of Walsh’s comic direction infuses turbulently free enterprise with tragedy.

It’s a romantic, erotic drama that’s told with an unusual blend of rapture and coldness, of overwhelming yearning and clinical detachment — and, above all, the movie has images that go far beyond the recording of performances and the framing of action in order to make a melancholy and mysterious visual music.

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson bring joyful energy to Song Sung Blue.

Cry Macho doesn’t resound with the hectic astonishment of The 15:17 to Paris or the tragic imagination of Sully, but it delivers whispers of both. Its breezy, easygoing fable of late-life adventure and connection is also a story of an over-the-hill athlete who may meet his match on any street corner.

The method is effective; “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” is no radical advance in documentary form, but its emphasis on the auditory over the visual subtly suggests the disconnect between a private individual and her public image.

The director, James Wan, sends cars repeatedly airborne and seems himself to marvel at the results; the movie’s real subject is the stunt work, but its stars’ authentic chemistry lends melody to its relentless beat.

Losey’s strongest critique of the times emerges with a unique stylistic flourish in his wide-screen, black-and-white images, featuring slow glides, skewed angles, standoffish perspectives, and hectic striations. These images seem adorned with quotation marks, as if Losey placed his own movie in the mediatized madness that he was criticizing.

After Yang shows how easily the taste for beauty can be tainted, subverted, distorted, and abused by the powers that be.

Invention is a film about pollution—media pollution, the despoiling of the American mind along with the landscape.

For all the authentic thrills that the film eventually delivers, it leaves the feeling of a terrific idea that’s been left on the drawing board.

Washington delivers the dialogue with a thrilling range from purrs to roars, all imbued with an authoritative swagger. In the few moments when his swagger falters, he nearly rends the screen with anguish.

Coppola observes the connection of big ideas to fine details, the power of intensive collaborations, and the ultimate creative helplessness once the show starts.

Wood lacked both the dramatic sense to unfold his speculations in action and the technique (as well as the money) to embody, in any plausible way, his spectacular fancies, but their crude approximations vibrate with his stifled exaltation.

Above all, the film decries the impunity that the war’s masterminds and the country’s leaders enjoyed while William and other frontline grunts took the blame. It’s that notion of the prevailing order’s insidiously hermetic system of self-protection that gives The Card Counter its furious energy.

If “Marry Me” plays with the obvious and brings it to obvious conclusions, its actors nonetheless invest its gestures and its dialogue, its broad lines of action and its closeup incarnations, with the spark of surprise.

A frankly practical look at professionalism and its blurry borders.

Locy infuses the film with empathy and wit, and his grandly bittersweet imagination pulls the story toward tragedy, but he also plays loosely with stereotypes better left behind.

For all its tenderness, empathy, warmth, and verve, The Fabelmans has the feel of mythmaking—a feature-length promotional video for an authorized biography of a filmmaker who, if far from self-made, is in any case self-propelled. What’s missing is a sense of history.

In its hectic, scattershot way, Padre Pio feels very much of the desperate present day.

Artistically, what Babylon adds to the classic Hollywood that it celebrates is sex and nudity, drugs and violence, a more diverse cast, and a batch of kitchen-sink chaos that replaces the whys and wherefores of coherent thought with the exhortation to buy a ticket, cast one’s eyes up to the screen, and worship in the dark.

Sachs presents his characters’ intellect and emotion, their artistic energy, as inseparable from physicality: he avoids the cliché of talking heads and realizes the idea of talking bodies.

In Sharp Stick, Dunham forces a flood of experience and pain into a compact vessel.

In a sense, “Flipside” is a hoarder’s tale, in which objects, by summoning the past, generate intense emotions in the present.

In The Adults, the wry and vulnerable simplicity of the musical numbers and the comedy routines suggests not just a realistic musical but an anti-spectacular one; the antics mesh with the drama not merely at the level of tone or style but at a conceptual one.

As admirable as some of the onscreen talk is, it’s mainly just delivered, along with the intentions and meanings that it contains; its precision leaves little overflow, little room for observation, little scope for imagination beyond the intimate purview of the story.

What’s most impressive about Top Gun: Maverick is its speed—not the speed of the planes in flight but the speed with which the movie dashes in a straight line from its opening act to its conclusion. The flights at the center of the film are vertiginously twisty, but the drama is a bullet train on a rigid track.

Baker revels in the power of clichés and the generic energy of his low-fi cinematography, which is done with a cell phone. The results are picturesque and anecdotal.

There’s a different, far more substantial movie lurking within, yet the virtues of efficiency, clarity, surprise, and wit that enliven the one that’s actually onscreen leave its merely implied substance tantalizingly unformed.