Richard Brody

What’s most impressive about Top Gun: Maverick is its speed—not the speed of the planes in flight but the speed with which the movie dashes in a straight line from its opening act to its conclusion. The flights at the center of the film are vertiginously twisty, but the drama is a bullet train on a rigid track.

For all the film’s roiling action, its inner life is in little grace notes that open enormous vistas of time.

In excluding conversation, commentary, analysis, context, and personality, Frammartino is a cinematic Icarus: he strains high for sublimity and finds a deck of picture postcards.

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

Here, more than ever, Hong’s cinema is also revealed to be a philosophy—his method not a means but an end in itself, an embrace of the history of the art and a preservation of its future in the eternal present tense of creation.

Though the violence never uncorks and the story takes a sentimental turn, the deep shadows, the jarring angles and cuts, and the idiosyncratic whims of gesture evoke a sorry underworld that’s out of joint, out of luck, and out of time.

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.

It’s as daring and original a work of political cinema and personal conscience as the current cinema can offer.

Instead of the roots of Shakespeare’s play, The Northman merely serves up its raw material both half-baked and overcooked.

A work of practical realism that stands as a manifesto for the imaginative power of observation and for the political power of the imagination.

Audiard may know and understand something about romantic entanglements, family commitments, and professional lives. But by centering his characters’ desire and pleasure, and then filming these aspects of their lives with smarmy smugness, he sacrifices the realm of knowledge in yielding to fantasy.

If the movie has any merit at all, it’s in the seemingly unintentional mockery of the conventions and styles of far more purposeful and intention-laden films. In its chaotic whirl of tinsel images, it thumbs its nose at the kind of plain realism that too often passes as synonymous with sincerity.

Arnold, a major artist of cinematic fiction, has made characters’ self-presentation, their sense of performance in daily life, a crucial part of her most original drama, “American Honey.” In “Cow,” Arnold hasn’t considered her subjects or her place in their world as stringently or as originally.

The Bubble (which Apatow co-wrote with Pam Brady) is a sort of good bad movie, in which the aesthetic falls flat but the personal motive, the emotional core, is authentic, pugnacious, derisive.

Apollo 10 1/2 unites the inner and outer life in a form of cultural autobiography, and it does so with a unique sense of cinematic style and form.

With its bland and faux-universal life lessons that cheaply ethicalize expensive sensationalism, the film comes off as a sickly cynical feature-length directorial pitch reel for a Marvel movie.

For all the specific accusations and denunciations that Y—and Lapid—level at Israeli politics and culture, “Ahed’s Knee” is, above all, a work of cinematopoeia: it looks and sounds and feels like what it means.

Master is a tensely effective, terrifyingly affecting drama that’s also a virtual vision of the power and the purpose of the modern right-wing war on truth.

The movie’s solid dramatic architecture is essentially uninhabited—“The Batman” is a cinematic house populated only by phantoms with no trace of a complex mental life.

After Yang shows how easily the taste for beauty can be tainted, subverted, distorted, and abused by the powers that be.

The silences that overwhelm the movie’s confrontational rages and the suppression of backstory details, underplaying motives and emphasizing action, thrust “Fire” out of the realm of psychological drama and into shocking emotional immediacy.

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.

In Desplechin’s implicit view of his artistic heroes and milieu, he turns Roth’s personal story into his own.

Its core of information is largely a footnote to Aaron Sorkin’s drama “Being the Ricardos,” but, with access to previously unreleased audio tapes recorded by Ball and Arnaz, Poehler vividly and poignantly evokes their offscreen personalities.

Through Glassman’s diligent and empathetic investigations, it becomes a film of documents, in which the aura of the letters—the worlds that they contain in their text and evoke in their sheer physical presence—generates overwhelming emotional power.

Cyrano is a thuddingly dull film that sinks under the ponderous undigested mass of its own bombast, squandering the talents of a fine cast and a fine concept.

The sense of calculation makes the journey feel like a lockstep march; the movie’s sense of a story that’s dictated rather than observed makes its good feelings feel bad.

The principal story that The Automat tells is that of a commercial vision meshing with an aesthetic one, the transformation of cheap dining into a sort of theatrical experience, complete with a stage setting of authentic craft and luxury, in which the banal purchase of food becomes a tour de force of industrial ingenuity.