Richard Brody

Maria gets lost in a tangle of clichéd bio-pic narrative stuffing, and runs superficially through the protagonist’s reminiscences by way of an embarrassing contrivance.

To set up the movie’s cagey diminution of the protagonist, Aster diminishes the protagonist’s world, too—he suppresses Beau’s identity in the interest of stoking synthetic effects and inflating a hollow and shallow spectacle.

The action and the effects, so gleamingly creative in the original trilogy, are now C.G.I. commonplaces and “John Wick” retreads—and are approached as such. The duels and battles are whipped up with a sense of obligation and filmed with little verve.

This boldly confrontational and journalistically probing documentary, by the director Nanfu Wang, goes beyond the slogan of China’s longtime “one-child policy” to reveal the system of violence, corruption, propaganda, and silence on which it depended.

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

[Silver's] densely textured images have many planes of action, which he parses with pans and zooms, revealing the volatile bonds of a group on the verge of combustion as well as the howling horrors of unremitting solitude.

The movie’s plush, cozy aesthetic and unintentionally funny melodrama are at odds with its subjects: revolt, theory, originality, and observation.

Large in conception, it comes across as small of spirit, cramped in its sympathies and crabby in its attitudes.

American Dharma succeeds neither as journalism nor as portraiture, neither as political critique nor as cultural survey nor as psychological study.

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.

Two classic themes, the eternal triangle and a provincial’s big-city struggles, get distinctive twists in Philippe Garrel’s brisk yet pain-filled new drama of youth’s illusions.

The writer and director, Ana Lily Amirpour, delivers this imaginative tale as a simplistic allegory of the haves and the have-nots; she ruefully delights in the wasteland’s postindustrial wreckage while leaving characters’ thoughts and motives blank.

The exemplary figure of Ropert’s film is Solange’s retreat into a sharply expressive silence, captured in poised and precisely composed images, that resounds as clearly as a cry of agony.

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson bring joyful energy to Song Sung Blue.

Artistically, what Babylon adds to the classic Hollywood that it celebrates is sex and nudity, drugs and violence, a more diverse cast, and a batch of kitchen-sink chaos that replaces the whys and wherefores of coherent thought with the exhortation to buy a ticket, cast one’s eyes up to the screen, and worship in the dark.

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.

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.

Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra is put together of the stuff of legend that the director experienced as personal reality, and he filmed the story as if he had been there. The film may be as close as Hollywood gets, outside the realm of Orson Welles, to a cinematic simulacrum of Shakespeare, less in its lucidly incisive, rhetorically reserved images than in its blend of coruscating language, rowdy comedy, and grand yet urgent and intimate performances.

The involvement of a stylish horror-film director, Sam Raimi, in this tawdry slog of corporate constraint is as fascinating as it is disheartening.

There’s a significant work of art lurking within “Anora,” but it’s confined within the limits of a potboiler.

[Hong's] tightrope-long takes of scenes filmed in settings ranging from the picturesque to the banal (restaurants and apartments, café terraces, Mediterranean beaches) have an intricate dramatic construction, replete with glittering asides and wondrous coincidences, to rival that of a Hollywood classic.

Over six seasons The Sopranos at least compensated for its reductive aesthetic with complex patterns of narrative information. The Many Saints of Newark, by contrast, reduces characters of potentially mythic power to a handful of defining traits and pins them to a diorama-like backdrop of historical readymades.

Lavishly detailed yet dramatically vague, opulently produced but blandly depicted.

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.

Dumont films Joan’s spiritual conflicts and confrontations with playful exuberance but avoids frivolity; the ardent actors infuse Joan’s spirit of revolt with the eternal passions of youth.

Rather than reconsidering history by intimate acquaintance with a lesser-known hero, it turns its hero into a stick figure no more personalized, complex, or contextualized than a comic-book creation. Far from arousing curiosity, the movie forecloses it.

Beatty packs the movie with labored period references and unsubtle allusions to Donald Trump. He delights in Hughes’s high-handed wisdom, his high-stakes gamesmanship, and his petty idiosyncrasies, while looking ruefully at his paranoid reclusiveness.

Serge Bozon’s sharply political comedy—a giddily imaginative reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale—stars Isabelle Huppert, who revels in its sly blend of dissonant humor, intellectual fervor, and macabre violence.