Richard Brody

[Anthony] turns a concluding sequence of civic pride and good cheer into a brilliantly light-hearted fantasy of grave import, a radical political utopia conjured with a deft artistic flourish. It’s one of the most extraordinary, visionary inspirations in the recent cinema.

An intimate movie with a metaphysical grandeur, a detailed local inquiry that displays the crushing power of societal forces as well as the passion and vitality of those who endure.

Wondrous yet rueful views of the city, with its blend of grandeur and squalor, are anchored by the wanderings of an actress, Zhao Tao, whose mysterious role is clarified by one of the most anguished of testimonies.

As the title promises, Full Time is centered on work. It’s one of the best recent movies about work, and it approaches the subject with sharply analytical specificity.

Though the end of the film seems rushed—its seventy-nine minutes could have gone on for hours—it is nonetheless a cause for rejoicing.

Yogi unfolds the characters’ intimate stories and the region’s history in sharply textured details and rapturous images; he blends social practicalities and metaphysical mysteries with a serene, straightforward astonishment.

Rarely have high spirits and theatrical energy seemed like such a tragic waste; an era and its myths seem to be dying on-screen in real time.

Its raw and violent subject is matched by its hectic style; the thin production values take a backseat to Fuller’s rich imagination.

As admirable as some of the onscreen talk is, it’s mainly just delivered, along with the intentions and meanings that it contains; its precision leaves little overflow, little room for observation, little scope for imagination beyond the intimate purview of the story.

The Novelist’s Film is straightforwardly chronological and naturalistic, but that makes it no less intricate or sophisticated a reflection on the nature of movies, both intellectual and practical.

Pennebaker films Stritch’s first rendition, among the most celebrated outtakes in history, with a rapt devotion that’s as revealing of the limits of recording as it is of the thrills of live performance—and of the camera’s mediating creative power.

Its effortful attempts to craft and sustain an ominous mood comes at the expense of observation, which is too bad, because the film’s premise is powerful and its lead actors are formidable.

Misericordia is, fundamentally, a snappy and satisfying entertainment, a thriller that thrills.

Birbiglia films what he knows, offering ample and intricate scenes of improvisations performed onstage, along with an insider’s view of the industry.

For all its political determination, RRR is also a musical, and an electrifying one.

Ingeniously, Coogler has transformed “Rocky”—the modern cinematic myth that, perhaps more than any other, endures as a modern capitalist Horatio Alger story of personal determination and sheer will—into a vision of community and opportunity, connections and social capital, family and money.

If “Marry Me” plays with the obvious and brings it to obvious conclusions, its actors nonetheless invest its gestures and its dialogue, its broad lines of action and its closeup incarnations, with the spark of surprise.

De Sica, working with a host of screenwriters, builds a teeming story—involving broken friendships, families, institutions, dreams, and lives—in which elements of observation and research are concentrated into intensely emotional moments that heighten the film’s moral and mnemonic power.

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.

Sachs presents his characters’ intellect and emotion, their artistic energy, as inseparable from physicality: he avoids the cliché of talking heads and realizes the idea of talking bodies.

Linklater’s direction keeps “Hit Man” brisk and jazzy, as does the jovial force of Powell’s performance.

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.

For all its observational realism, Vortex is a message movie, a work of philosophical art that packs a grim view not merely of old age but of modern life over all.

The movie is also sparing with metaphors and symbols—though the few that Rasoulof builds into the texture of the drama, such as a view of Javad’s wet military uniform hanging from a tree and an image of a fox prowling around a farm, are piercingly effective.

Gerima films Jay’s intimate confrontations with an impressionistic flair that focusses attention on characters’ listening, thinking, and remembering; flashbacks and dream sequences infuse Jay’s tightening conflicts with the pressure of history—both social and intimate.

There’s neither pity nor sentimentality in Gomes’s populism; the highest strain of modern humanism faces up to the first person.

C’mon C’mon is a tender and turbulent melodrama that amplifies its power with a documentary current. The result is a film of an extraordinary amplitude; it’s both poised and frenetic, contemplative and active, heartily sentimental and astringently contentious, intensively intimate and expansively world-embracing, exactingly composed and wildly spontaneous.

The movie is constructed entirely of a remarkable array of archival footage, including Beckermann’s recordings, that spotlights unresolved national traumas and unabated anti-Semitism.