Richard Brody

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.

The realization of her life online, as she interacts with a profusion of screens and windows, is extraordinarily complex and detailed, but the drama is thin and predictable; despite the quasi-documentary authenticity of the details of Alice’s work, the movie offers more prowess than perspective.

The story of young George’s childhood and rise to fame has a tense and turbulent charm, but the story of the professional heavyweight’s dash to the championship and everything that follows (up through the nineteen-nineties) has a whiff of a ghostwritten corporate autobiography.

A peculiarly hollow, centerless blend of theatre and literature, from which what’s missing, for the most part (though not entirely), is precisely the cinema...It isn’t so much that The Third Man is a bad movie—far from it. But it’s far from being a great one, too.

The filmmakers keep to the surface of the bluntly rowdy story while conveying apolitical layers of regret and exasperation, in wanly comic and affectingly melodramatic action alike.

This movie (directed by Sam Wrench) hardly adds another level of experience to the performances, because its visual composition, moment to moment, is burdened by convention and complacency. This doesn’t get in the way of the music, but it disregards the authenticity of Swift’s presence, the physical side of her performance.

The late Harry Dean Stanton, in one of his last roles, infuses the slightest gesture and inflection with the weight of grave experience, but this maudlin drama mainly renders his grit and wisdom wholesome and cute.

The images of Wakanda Forever allow for little creative interpretation; the performances are slotted into the plot like puzzle pieces. The script is the main product, and it’s engineered with the precision of a high-tech machine, with all the artificial artistry to match.

The movie persuasively depicts the appallingly casual reduction of a woman’s body to a commodity and the oppressive inequalities of a justice system that clobbers the poor and the nonwhite into desperate submission. The power of these premises makes the movie’s vain sensationalism all the more unfortunate.

Ford creates a title character, played by Aubrey Plaza, who seems to carry a world with her, and he sets the action in a shadow realm of workaday grifters which emerges in fascinating detail. Yet that core of cinematic power gives rise to a modestly engaging but undistinguished, mundane movie, one that speaks as much to the givens of film production as to Ford’s own ambivalent achievement.

Its big idea, though vague, is at least a fascinating curiosity. But with its jumble of clichés, its blatant word-bubble declarations, and its hectically rushed impracticalities, the movie—which is based on a comic-book series—invites an air of antic exaggeration and revved-up stylization. It hints frustratingly, throughout, at a comedic impulse that the direction of its actors suppresses.