Richard Brody

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.

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

Cassavetes captures the gambler’s fatalistic joy in playing out a tragedy of his own making to the bitter end, and, revelling in the romantic solitude of the hunter and the hunted, presents a gun battle as a metal-and-concrete ballet.

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

[Willis’s] heavy trudge on a game leg suggests weariness of historical dimensions; the harmonious mysteries of the urban landscape are themselves the essence of his art. A brilliant sequence of musicians at work gets away from familiar modes of filmed performance and into the depths of inner experience.

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.

This impersonal exaltation of heroic exploits leaves an unexplored dilemma at the foundation of the film.

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.

Aster is so intent on using ripped-from-the-headlines events that he fails to make proper use of them, and ends up cynically debasing them all.

The bare script seems written by telegram, reducing the characters to pieces on a historical chessboard, and the portentous pace and lugubrious tone of Cooper’s direction take the place of substance.

From the start, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., an independent film made on a very low budget (reportedly a hundred and thirty thousand dollars), is a polyphonic work of multiple voices and consciousnesses.

Only Johnson’s committed, precise, and vigorous performance suggests the power that inherently surges through the story and that the movie leaves nearly untapped.

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

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.

For his first thriller set in America, from 1942, Alfred Hitchcock runs loopily through a gamut of genres, filming in a range of settings, from California to New York, to depict a country that lives in the image of its movies. His set pieces take on the blue-collar drama, the Western, the high-society mystery, the urban police story, and the circus melodrama, while capturing the paranoia of a country newly at war.

The movie offers a more insightful view of the music business than of Baker’s art.

Elvis is a gaudily decorated Wikipedia article that owes little to its sense of style; it’s a film of substance, but of bare substance, a mere photographic replica of a script that both conveys and squanders the power of Presley’s authentic tragedy.

The Braggs pull off the vertiginous intricacy of this narrative with playful cheer and breezy charm, which is carried along by the performances, and also by the heartiness of the story itself.

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 movie is grandiose but not impressive, elaborate but not eye-catching; its most poignant simulation is the effort to make it feel like a movie for adults, with grownup concerns, which remain dramatically undeveloped but are delivered with a thudding earnestness.

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.

In its depiction of Guruji’s mastery, The Disciple conjures the wonders and the mysteries of a life that is itself a work of art.

As in life, intelligence in movies isn’t one-dimensional; it may be woefully lacking from one aspect of a film but shiningly present in another. Although the fight scenes in Nobody offer clever touches, they are nonetheless too stiffly convention-bound to give the movie energy.

The supporting performances, impressive as they are, only sketch characters, rather than embodying them—because Abbasi’s merely efficient direction leaves the actors little time and little space onscreen to delve into their roles.

Bezinović presents the story of D’Annunzio’s autocratic rise, reign, and fall in a way that’s as unusual as it is revelatory.

The film strains to achieve a breathless panache and a lurid swagger for which David Leitch’s direction is too heavy-footed and literal.

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.

The Zellner brothers, David and Nathan, wrote and directed this Western near-parody; though methodically conceived and occasionally tense, it’s slight and sluggish.