Richard Brody

In disclosing the secret of engineering, Mann also offers a passionate and personal word on the secret of the cinema itself.

With “Daughters,” Dash places Black Americans’ intimate dramas in a mighty historical arc with metaphysical dimensions; with his “Color Purple,” Bazawule acknowledges Dash’s work as a landmark in that history and a fundamental inspiration in his approach to historical drama.

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.

For all its turbulent action and extravagant expressiveness, Maestro is hollow; even its strongest moments play like false fronts, like veneer far fuller, stranger, more struggle-riddled lives.

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.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers’ incuriosity about Willy is matched by their incuriosity about the star’s range and depth.

DuVernay embraces Wilkerson’s work wholeheartedly and rises to the artistic challenge with one of the most unusual and ingenious of recent screenplays.

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

What matters in Monster isn’t the gamesmanship built into its structure but the imaginative richness, the emotional immediacy, and the vital performances that are concentrated in its extended third section.

For Wiseman, the “small pleasures” of the title are highly concentrated distillations of mighty exertions, from the grand and carefully catalogued tradition of French cooking to the immediate tradition of the Troisgros family restaurants (now in its fourth generation).

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.

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.

There’s enough going on in The Marvels—enough situations with dramatic potential, enough twists with imaginative power—to develop several decent movies. Unfortunately, they’re snipped and clipped, jammed and rammed, dropped into the movie (and swept out of it) with an informational indifference that doesn’t even have the virtue of speed.

The calculated silences and cagey revelations result in a movie of truncated characters, with truncated subjectivity, trimmed to fit the Procrustean confines of the script.

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.

There’s a way of looking at this movie, a colossal tale of the sociopathy of American history, that’s a matter of listening to what’s said and what isn’t. The movie raises the idea of silence to a nearly transcendent pitch of passion.

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.

As the cinematic equivalent of an airport read, Anatomy of a Fall is adequate—not brisk but twisty, not stylish but unobtrusively informational. But the artistic failings are obvious and distracting throughout.

Dumb Money, touching on questions of the authority of personality and the importance of nonfinancial—even completely irrational—motives in the investment world, offers a gleeful romp through strange and treacherous territory that merits a closer, more careful look.

The experience of watching Bottoms is weighed down by the movie’s thin drama, hit-or-miss comedy, and merely functional direction—pictures of actors acting.

In The Adults, the wry and vulnerable simplicity of the musical numbers and the comedy routines suggests not just a realistic musical but an anti-spectacular one; the antics mesh with the drama not merely at the level of tone or style but at a conceptual one.

Simon films the lives of others with an empathetic passion that transforms observation into deep and resonant subjectivity.

Oppenheimer sacrifices much of its dramatic force to the importance of its subject, and to Nolan’s pride at having tackled it—which is to say, to his own self-importance.

It’s a film that’s energized throughout by a sense of artistic freedom and uninhibited creative passion greater than what Gerwig has brought to even her previous projects made outside the ostensible constraints of studio filmmaking.

[Leaf] reinvigorates one of the basic elements of movies, the closeup, and restores its centrality as the beating heart of the cinema.

Asteroid City demonstrates (for anyone who ever doubted it) that, far from being a mere stylist, Anderson is a far-seeing and deep-thinking political filmmaker.

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.

In its hectic, scattershot way, Padre Pio feels very much of the desperate present day.