Richard Brody

In short, [Showalter] can’t see Tammy Faye as a person, rather than as a character in a media drama. As a result, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, far from getting behind the public image, merely creates another one.

With a limited, intimate focus, Little Girl becomes a grandly diagnostic analysis of French society, distilling the country’s fault lines into a few indelible images.

Cry Macho doesn’t resound with the hectic astonishment of The 15:17 to Paris or the tragic imagination of Sully, but it delivers whispers of both. Its breezy, easygoing fable of late-life adventure and connection is also a story of an over-the-hill athlete who may meet his match on any street corner.

Above all, the film decries the impunity that the war’s masterminds and the country’s leaders enjoyed while William and other frontline grunts took the blame. It’s that notion of the prevailing order’s insidiously hermetic system of self-protection that gives The Card Counter its furious energy.

The films range widely in form—documentary, fiction, hybrid, and unclassifiable—as well as in tone, subject, style, and, for that matter, in originality and inspiration. Even the most ordinary of them is worth seeing, and the best of them, brevity notwithstanding, are among the most powerful films of the year.

For all its symbolic heft and keen-eyed flair, there’s a scattershot quality to Candyman that has to do with the seemingly inescapable demands of its genre source. The horror-film combination of constrained tautness and calculated gore keeps some of the themes from fully developing and leaves narrative loose ends dangling.

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.

For most of Annette, Carax films the actors singing mainly in long travelling shots that hardly reveal much personality on the part of either actor or director.

Jia’s restrained yet fierce X-ray of the ills of modern China also evokes a calm, intimate compassion for its struggling survivors.

In The Green Knight, Lowery revises a legend, in style and in substance, in order to evoke a way of telling different stories, and of telling stories differently. He takes the risk of perpetuating a deluded gospel of evil, or of seeming to do so, in a daring effort to dramatize a world in desperate need of artistic redemption.

It is not a great film—its form is less personal than its substance, its revelations and insights come only intermittently.

With Old, facing the constraints of filming during the pandemic—on a project that he’d nonetheless planned before it—Shyamalan has created a splendid throwback of a science-fiction thriller that develops a simple idea with stark vigor and conveys the straight-faced glee of realizing the straightforward logic of its enticing absurdity.

Though Space Jam: A New Legacy fails, woefully, as an aesthetic object and as a viewing experience, it somehow nonetheless succeeds as a conceptual representation of a Hollywood studio’s terror in the face of streaming domination, of the movie industry at large that, like Warner Bros., is in the process of being swallowed up in one Serververse or another.

The documentary is a mere encyclopedia-like info-product, which reduces its rich audiovisual archival material and its heartfelt interviews with people who knew and loved Bourdain to freeze-dried sound and image bites. It hardly deserves the attention it’s received—and Neville’s audio stunt, far from marring the film, merely serves as a brazen form of self-promotional publicity.

The film is redeemed only by the dour, weary, mournful, stubborn, and wise performance of Nicolas Cage, which is not so much a star turn as the project’s sole raison d’être.

No Ordinary Man challenges the very basis of cultural production, eschewing the familiar accumulation of biographical and historical information and instead questioning the process by which such information is gathered.

In his new film, Casanova, Last Love... Jacquot, who is seventy-four, stands his artistic practice on its head in order to consider it retrospectively. It’s a classic “late film,” one that, with the contemplative distance of experience, approaches his deepest concerns with apparent simplicity.

Even great and prolific directors have high points, and this film is one of Hong’s best; its form relies on disturbing ironies to approach one of the mightiest of subjects—the nature of happiness and, in particular, a happy marriage, from the perspective of a married woman.

It’s a miniseries’ worth of action that’s crammed into the procrustean bounds of a near-two-hour feature, without the compensating dimensions of symbol and implication.

The movie exemplifies the power of the cinema—even the popular and commercial and invigoratingly swingy cinema—to reflect the inner life through imaginative methods that, at the same time, reveal the fractures and complexities of public life with probing and passionate insight.

The American Sector is an exemplary work of cinema as political action, and proof (if any were needed) that the activist element of a film is inseparable from its well-conceived form.

The film’s view of a mind thrown back on itself, and the profound vulnerability, mental derangement, and physical degradation that result, is, true to form, a political horror.

A Quiet Place Part II is filled with striking, clever details; it displays no sense whatsoever of the big picture. That failure is the difference between directing and just making a movie.

Its script is junk—but junk brought to the screen with verve.

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.

In its depiction of Guruji’s mastery, The Disciple conjures the wonders and the mysteries of a life that is itself a work of art.

Her rhapsodic tribute to the teeming artistic apprenticeship that Paris soon offered her isn’t solely a vision of beauty: she also observed, and unsparingly recalls, the political and social ugliness with which she was confronted during her time there.

The film is garishly overloaded with splices and grafts from other movies, other genres, and other premises, including a mythical setting and an evil corporation. The result is a distracting jumble that reduces the stakes of the movie’s mighty showdown nearly to a vanishing point, and turns the title titans and their other colossal cohorts into the incredible shrinking monsters.