Richard Brody

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.

With “It’s Not Me,” Carax confronts the aberration of celebrity (even art-house celebrity) by means of a cinematic self-creation that’s both a matter of sincere reticence and an audaciously assertive work of art.

Blue Moon revels in a fine mind and a great soul, and Hawke’s embodiment of both is exalted and startling.

The filmmakers’ self-imposition of a pristinely clean aesthetic results in the kind of emptied, tranquillized, minutely calibrated experience that’s no less a matter of fan service than the latest installment of comic-book I.P., and offers no more meaningful a view of life.

Despite situations aching for parody, Assayas is anything but satirical: as his characters give the book business, the Internet, and infidelity a vigorous but empty dialectical workout, he comes down squarely on the side of business as usual, which the film itself embodies. Yet Macaigne, quizzical and impulsive, invests a rote role with brilliant turns.

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?...is an overwhelming experience. It fills the current American landscape with the hatred, oppression, and violence that also scars its history.

Boots Riley’s first feature is a scintillating comedic outburst of political imagination and visionary fury.

The so-called long take serves as a mask—a gross bit of earnest showmanship that both conceals and reflects the trickery and the cheap machinations of the script, the shallowness of the direction of the actors, and the brazenly superficial and emotion-dictating music score.

In Logan Lucky, Soderbergh, for all his felicitous exertions, falls back on a certain artistic facility. This doesn’t mean that the film was easy to make; it means that Soderbergh relies on what he knows rather than wandering off into what he doesn’t. He knows a lot, and it shows; his pleasure in sharing it is substantial.

The images aren’t only stripped of superfluities; they’re hermetically sealed off from anything that could impinge from offscreen, from the world at large. They feel designed, deadeningly, to mean just one thing.

A Man of Integrity is both a work of political defiance and of artistic audacity. The movie’s extreme contrast between the bland surfaces of daily life and the maddening pressures of ambient power looming beneath them turns its starkly realistic images into calmly furious denunciations, journalistic revelations, and even wildly disorienting hallucinations.

Above all, Till is a work of mighty cinematic portraiture, with a range of closeups of Mamie that infuse the film with an overwhelming combination of subjective depth and an outward sense of purpose.

Every step depends on stifled emotions and closely guarded secrets, resulting in a buildup of operatic passion that endows everyday gestures and inflections with grandeur and nobility.

The hard-won consolations of seasonal sentiment emerge in the searching performances as well as in the impressionistic handheld images.

Nope is one of the great movies about moviemaking, about the moral and spiritual implications of cinematic representation itself—especially the representation of people at the center of American society who are treated as its outsiders. It is an exploitation film—which is to say, a film about exploitation and the cinematic history of exploitation as the medium’s very essence.

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.

The film’s real charge lies elsewhere—in Preminger’s view of a jolting, disoriented age of rock and roll.

The exceptional, often overwhelming power of the script that Polley wrote, based on Miriam Toews’s novel, is, if not undercut, not amplified by the filming.

The hallucinatory power of ayahuasca and the incantatory lure of rituals fuse with existential dread in this darkly hypnotic drama.

The actors’ skill is in the foreground, and it’s impressive—it’s the one thing worth watching the movie for (remarkably, this is Zendaya’s first major dramatic-movie role). But Levinson spotlights that skill at the expense of emotional risk, including—indeed, especially—any of his own.