Richard Brody

In his new film, Casanova, Last Love... Jacquot, who is seventy-four, stands his artistic practice on its head in order to consider it retrospectively. It’s a classic “late film,” one that, with the contemplative distance of experience, approaches his deepest concerns with apparent simplicity.

The exceptional, often overwhelming power of the script that Polley wrote, based on Miriam Toews’s novel, is, if not undercut, not amplified by the filming.

The implied film is better than the actual one, and the implied one is the movie I found myself imagining with fascination as Saltburn unspooled.

Wiseman’s very subject is the difference between neighborhood and community—between the happenstance of urban geography and the commitment of self-identification.

Jude, with his multiple dimensions of inquiry and imagination, poses philosophical questions about conscience and consciousness, media consumption and social order, that reach far beyond the case and era at hand to challenge the deceptions and delusions of ostensible present-day democracies.

If the original “Little Mermaid,” in its effervescent way, talked down to its audience, the new one, bluntly but amiably, talks ever so slightly up to its young viewers. It adds hints of a complicated world beyond the narrow realms of fantasy; it delivers earnest cheer.

The Sky Is Everywhere is a movie of inner vision, of fantasy and symbol, that coexists with the drama even when it doesn’t quite coalesce with it.

Wondrous yet rueful views of the city, with its blend of grandeur and squalor, are anchored by the wanderings of an actress, Zhao Tao, whose mysterious role is clarified by one of the most anguished of testimonies.

There’s something in Schoenbrun’s sense of style that captures the alluring yet alienating essence of screen-centered lives: the feeling of not being where one is, the feeling that what’s happening elsewhere, on those screens, is more important, even more real, than one’s own life.

Though with little in the way of directorial originality, character development, or social perspective to recommend it, “Hustle” manages to turn a clattery plot and a treacly sentimentality into a refracted self-portrait, a work of personal cinema.

[A] brilliantly analytical and morally passionate documentary .

The story may sometimes come off as a ribald soldiers’ tale that Siegel, born in 1912, had been awaiting a sexual revolution to tell; still, his intense, intelligent breakdown of the film’s wild outbursts reveals subtleties of love, despair, and shame beneath the schematic luridness.

The dialogue is thin and the action is patchy, but Durra films Hana’s travels—and the places that she visits—with an ardent attention that fuses emotional life with aesthetic and intellectual exploration.

Listening to Kenny G subtly and surely teases out the mighty and overarching idea of the inseparability of the artist and the art, the notion of art as the embodiment of the artist’s personality—for better or for worse.

In Logan Lucky, Soderbergh, for all his felicitous exertions, falls back on a certain artistic facility. This doesn’t mean that the film was easy to make; it means that Soderbergh relies on what he knows rather than wandering off into what he doesn’t. He knows a lot, and it shows; his pleasure in sharing it is substantial.

For all its droll shading of the screenwriter’s art, “All of Us Strangers” is a screenwriter’s movie, in which the power of intention over observation, of the blueprint over the finished product, is asserted with a vengeance.

Above all, the movie offers the mournful thrill of new methods that Kiarostami didn’t live to develop further.

Zellweger’s singing here passes through to the other side. Suddenly, Zellweger herself seems to pass over to the other side of the character, to come out from behind the curtain and reveal that the cabaret performer and singer in question isn’t Judy Garland but Renée Zellweger, and has been all along. She leaves the movie behind, where it belongs, and heads off on her own, by herself.

This light-toned but thematically substantial autofiction is organized like a sequence of diary entries brought to life with Moretti’s wryly confessional voice-overs.

Burdge infuses her rigidly and scantly defined role with tremulous vulnerability, and Silver, aided by the splashy palette of Sean Price Williams’s cinematography, evokes derangement with a sardonic wink.

Haroun journeys through the country and films his travels to meet with the regime’s victims. He brings a profound compassion and a controlled rage to accounts of moral obscenities, while also recording accounts of deep solidarity among the victims, even under terrifying circumstances.

In short, the last half hour or so of the movie’s nearly three-hour span is giddily intense, swoony, swashbuckling, and sensational yet superficial fun. Right after I saw the movie, I couldn’t stop talking about that ending. It makes the rest of the movie worth sitting through.

Cassavetes films Rowlands, his wife, with self-deprecating adoration; the demanding man likens himself to the defenseless boy, and both are saved by this gloriously burdened woman who would kill for them.

The film is at the same time intensely personal and riddled with occasionally cringe-inducing clichés. No matter: Rockaway is an agonized and sharply moving film.

Despite situations aching for parody, Assayas is anything but satirical: as his characters give the book business, the Internet, and infidelity a vigorous but empty dialectical workout, he comes down squarely on the side of business as usual, which the film itself embodies. Yet Macaigne, quizzical and impulsive, invests a rote role with brilliant turns.

Allen has suggested that “Coup de Chance,” his fiftieth feature, may be his last; if so, he goes out with a self-excoriating bang.

In contrast to the typical stoic masculinity of fifties Hollywood, this is “A Doll’s House” for the sensitive, passionate married man.

Above all, Pryor emphasizes (with deft compositions involving mirrors and effects) Jo Jo’s elusive selfhood—the fundamental problem of what performers who feel fully alive only while onstage or on camera do with the rest of their time.

A wider range of interview subjects might have broadened the perspective, yet before criticizing a tradition, it’s useful to define it, and Jones (a superb critic who now heads the New York Film Festival) offers deep insight into the watershed moment and the enduring forms of Hitchcock’s canonization.

The story fits together too neatly and the characters remain ciphers, but scenes of news reports of the high-profile deals—in which the protagonists see themselves—evoke an eerie air of plausibility and alienation.

The entire construction of The Souvenir: Part II, the connection between its drama and Julie’s student film, reflects an earnest and principled, if simplistic, didacticism about the pain and the privilege that allow aesthetic pleasure to be created.

John Ford’s bluff and sentimental comedy, from 1952, set in the Irish countryside, is as much an anthropological adventure as a romantic rhapsody.

Vincente Minnelli directed two of the best movies ever made on the subject of Hollywood filmmaking—“The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Two Weeks in Another Town.” But he made a third, “Goodbye Charlie,” from 1964...which is, in a way, the most daring and original of them all.

Despite clichéd depictions of Nazi atrocities, the movie persuasively evokes, with its wealth of details, the slender threads on which historical events—and historical truth—depend.

May directs with bristling restraint: the camera runs at length, keeping the characters trapped in the excruciating moment, and, with the central trio of typecast actors tightly held on this side of parody, the humor oscillates between sour comedy and droll tragedy.

Van Peebles tells the story with ferocious vigor and unsparing brutality, entering Jesse’s haunted memory and dramatizing the farsighted schemes and improvisational daring on which the men's survival depends.

Lou breaks apart the veneer of narrative perfection, in order to show where the power lies.

For all its observational realism, Vortex is a message movie, a work of philosophical art that packs a grim view not merely of old age but of modern life over all.

The film’s self-undercutting subtleties and its big dramatic reveal serve a greater purpose: its depiction of oppression in an out-of-whack, past-tense America calls to mind the country’s current-day political pathologies. “Don’t Worry Darling” serves that purpose with a cleverness to match its focussed sense of outrage.

This takeoff on the children's-book series refreshingly balances sweet and bitter tones; Pooh's innocence irritates Christopher before it redeems him, and Madeline undertakes a bold adventure to gain her father's attention.

The vigorous cast enlivens the conventional action, and brilliant comedic sallies by Awkwafina, as Rachel’s college friend, and Nico Santos, as Nick’s cousin, knock it for a loop.

The sculptural physicality of the images, a 3-D explosion without glasses, embodies that violence while preserving the antagonists’ innocent grace; love smooths things out to a dreamy and reflective shine.

Lapid’s sense of form is more modest than his impulses; his direction falls short of Mercier’s clenched intensity and unhinged energy.

The no-holds-barred, extravagantly playful methods by which Audley and Birney conjure the audacious yet coherent tale of supernatural menaces and splendors are the movie’s prime achievement.

Without sacrificing his critical judgment, Schrader retains a remarkable sympathy both for Hearst and for those who wrenched her from her life and made her—even if in deed only—one of their own.

What’s concrete in the film are its bluff and energetic performances. Tomei is, as ever, a wonder of passion and imagination. Burr is a dynamo of roaring invention. And, above all, Davidson himself, with his blend of blank comedic aggression and bare-nerve vulnerability, provides the film with an emotional complexity that surpasses the bare storytelling.

Though the story goes a country too far and gets lost in its dénouement, the movie is, for the most part, a playful and giddy delight.

As deceptions and disguises pile up, the layers of mystery grow thicker, and the lurid symbolism of material objects is thrust to the fore.

With special effects of a startling simplicity—the filmmakers launch the action into cosmic realms.

Perhaps a filmmaker whose powers were less orderly, less morally driven to soothe and pacify, could have pushed Fabienne—and Deneuve—to tragic and stylistic extremes that would have rendered the film’s reconciliations as mighty as its conflicts. Instead, he offers half a film of magnificent fragments.

Filmworker amounts to yet another rite of devotion in the ongoing cult of Kubrick—a cult that worked its power not just on Vitali but on all of modern cinema.

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.