Richard Brody

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.