Richard Brody

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.

As in life, intelligence in movies isn’t one-dimensional; it may be woefully lacking from one aspect of a film but shiningly present in another. Although the fight scenes in Nobody offer clever touches, they are nonetheless too stiffly convention-bound to give the movie energy.

It is a grind, it is a slog, it is a bore—it’s a mental toothache of a movie, whose ending grants not so much resolution as relief.

The director Chris McKim incisively intertwines a generous batch of audio interviews with Wojnarowicz’s friends, family, and associates; a rich set of archival footage to conjure his time and place; and vigorous effects to evoke his inner world.

The new film finds a few of its most inspired moments where it revises the plot to reflect current sensibilities, but its strained efforts at reviving the characters and situations of the original make it feel both hollow and leaden.

An echo of an echo, a convergence of social-scientific cinema and stifled screams of pain that appears designed, urgently and precisely, to break the silence.

The two elements work against each other, each revealing the fault lines of the other: the fictional side remains bound to (and limited by) the most conventional and unquestioned observational mode of documentary filmmaking, while the documentary aspect strains against the simplifying framework of the drama in which it’s confined.

Judas and the Black Messiah needed a coup of casting in order to find a performance that’s up to the character of Hampton. Kaluuya’s seems, instead, to render the extraordinary more ordinary, to indicate and assert Hampton’s unique, historic character rather than embodying it.

The narrow and merely illustrative drama is matched, unfortunately, by an impersonal cinematography that fails to suggest texture or intimacy.

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.

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.

The dialogue is thin and the action is patchy, but Durra films Hana’s travels—and the places that she visits—with an ardent attention that fuses emotional life with aesthetic and intellectual exploration.

Two classic themes, the eternal triangle and a provincial’s big-city struggles, get distinctive twists in Philippe Garrel’s brisk yet pain-filled new drama of youth’s illusions.

Its effortful grandiosity transforms it into something hollow and even, at times, risible.

The film’s styles, tones, and moods are as distinctive as its approach to jazz.

Buzzes with the long-term historical power of the occasion, and notes the divisions that the organizers struggled to overcome.

The movie’s movingly confessional, even penitent look at private and public abuses of power is a glance askance at Hollywood mythologies, too.

In The Broken Hearts Gallery—Krinsky’s first feature—Viswanathan’s performance lends the movie its sole impression of vitality and spontaneity, to go with its one bright light of conceptual inspiration.

July’s aesthetic imagination is inseparable from her empathetic curiosity and emotional urgency; it tempers a howl of anguish at a world of pain into a kind of cinematic music that unfolds it in nuanced detail and extends a hand of consolation, even offers a note of hope.

Doucouré pays keen attention to Amy’s quest for a self-made identity—and to a sexualized, commercialized mainstream culture that deludes children, especially those raised in cultural isolation. The film’s ultimate subject is the ghetto itself; a remarkable symbolic ending redefines French identity.

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.

Kaufman seeks admiration for his warmhearted and gentle humanism and also for his extravagant creativity, even when the latter gets in the way of the former—when his cleverness stands like a child’s antics in front of the screen where the movie is playing, defying viewers to pay attention to what’s going on behind him while amiably indulging or ignoring his trickery.

Zlotowski crafts a distinctive style to distill and heighten the drama’s psychological complexities and societal analyses. No less than its young protagonists, the film dangerously brushes against the edge of modernity’s enticingly destructive glitz.

The movie dramatizes the constraints of the era, the imposition of a narrow and religion-based morality, the stern discipline that’s internalized as a result, the elision of women and their world from public life, and the firm expectations of family and society that Héloïse will endure in her unwanted marriage. Yet it does more than merely depict them—it embodies them, in the characters’ poised stillness, which makes the airy surroundings feel as rigid as stone.

Seimetz films this coldly ghoulish and derisive fable with quiet intensity and rage at the way of the world.