Richard Brody

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

With its blend of terrifyingly intense family bonds and the howling furies of the world outside, this is a great American political film.

A crucial episode of the nineteen-sixties, centered on both the space race and the civil-rights struggle, comes to light in this energetic and impassioned drama.

The film’s styles, tones, and moods are as distinctive as its approach to jazz.

Schatzberg doesn’t romanticize addicts’ troubles; with a tender but unsparing eye, he spins visual variations on shambling degradation and transient relief.

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

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

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.

With audacious leaps of time and intimate echoes spanning a quarter century of intertwined lives, the director Jia Zhangke endows this romantic melodrama with vast geopolitical import.

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.

It’s a revealing view of an industry of enormous personalities—and the indulgences that feed them.

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.

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.

It’s not the whole story, of course; it’s resolutely on the side of decorum and falls far short of the inner and outer postwar apocalypses envisioned in film noir. But the intensity of its liberal romanticism is utterly gripping.

Beba is an intimate film with a grand scope; Huntt recognizes herself and her family as characters in a mighty drama. She conceives the complex course of intertwined personal experiences and public events as a kind of destiny.

The movie’s movingly confessional, even penitent look at private and public abuses of power is a glance askance at Hollywood mythologies, too.

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.

The Iron Claw is as exuberant as it is mournful, and the high spirits of performance and achievement are inseparable from the price that they exact.

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.

By means of ferociously intimate images, tensely controlled performances, and a spare sense of drama, Ashley McKenzie’s first feature, about two young drug addicts in Nova Scotia, conjures a state of heightened consciousness.

Hong’s deft artistry is an attempt to get past the habits of issue-oriented, advocacy-besotted political cinema to work out just what a political cinema would be. And his answer is: first of all, it’s cinema. In this regard, he connects with Mankiewicz, Resnais, and other great filmmakers for whom politics is an important, interwoven part of life—and of art.

Scorsese infuses this tale with the passionate energy of New York street life and wonder at the powerful workings of show business and studio craft. Yet his main subject is the ineffable factor of genius, which Jerry has, Rupert lacks, and no desire or effort can replace.

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.

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.

The movie’s substance remains largely implicit; its pleasures are partial, detached, and superficial. It offers little context, background, personality, or anything that risks distracting from the show.

Psychologically resonant, visually transcendent film.

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.

Whatever sense of obsession drives Robert’s art and whatever emotional freedom inspires Miles’s, neither is found in the cinematic aesthetic of “Funny Pages”; the movie is merely a conventional vessel for Kline’s ardent ideas, which pass through the cinema without leaving a trace.