Richard Brody

The diverging paths and seething conflicts of two lifelong friends, now young Brooklyn professionals, are explored deeply and poignantly in this deceptively calm melodrama, written and directed by Dan Sallitt.

Reichardt films the workingmen’s friendship and their frustrated strivings sympathetically, and observes with dismay the official’s domineering ways and pretentious airs, but she reduces the protagonists to stick figures in a deterministic landscape.

For all the authentic thrills that the film eventually delivers, it leaves the feeling of a terrific idea that’s been left on the drawing board.

The many characters’ distinct perspectives on the action are multiplied by chilling views from surveillance cameras, prompting deceptive displays—including romantic ones—in which tipped-off targets fool those who are watching.

Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and performances are embedded in the lugubrious pace and tone of Pedro Costa’s modernist fusion of classic melodrama and documentary.

The emotional repression and intellectual stiffness that suffuse Angela Schanelec’s melancholy new drama are as much a matter of style as of substance.

In its modest, forthright warmth, “Cane River” is a work of visionary artistry and progressive imagination.

The hermetic logic of the plot is as impeccable as it is ridiculous. It’s a drama crafted with robotic insularity for the consumption of viewers being rendered robotic at each moment of the soullessly uniform spectacle.

The characters don’t seem to exist outside the stilted drama of their individual scenes; the ambiguities of Balagov’s detached approach yield a sentimental tale of pride and reverence.

Green’s direction and dramatic sensibility are blunt, but the film’s laboratory-like microcosm of scenarios pointedly similar to recent widely publicized events in the movie business is shocking and effective.

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.

The film’s pleasures and its frustrations, its energies and its enervations, are inseparable.

These basic failures of taste and sensibility are a subset of Hooper’s over-all failure of literal vision: he doesn’t really see what he’s doing, and the virtual invisibility of his own movie to himself is reflected in an odd set of metaphors that result from his casting.

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 the end, The Souvenir is a movie about experience that doesn’t itself offer much of an experience.

The immensely empathetic view of Franz is overwhelmed by vague spirituality and vaguer politics; the impressionistic methods dispel the story’s powerful and noble specificity.

While displaying the erratic workings of the law and the crucial importance of journalism, the movie’s legal focus narrows its imaginative scope; the drama, though infuriating and moving, sticks to its characters’ surfaces.

Uncut Gems jitters and skitters and lurches and hurtles with Howard’s desperate energy. Sandler’s frantic and fidgety performance provides the movie with its emotional backbone, and he’s not alone.

The director Todd Haynes’s artistry is hardly detectable in this environmental thriller, yet the film, based on a true story, nonetheless offers a stirring and infuriating story of brazen corporate indifference to employees, neighbors, and the world at large—and the obstacles faced by those who challenge it.

Coppola can’t avoid a dash of mythology when filming brutal killings, but he also looks grimly at the Mob’s role in popular artistry—and in enforcing racial barriers.

Diop films the characters and the city with a tactile intimacy and a teeming energy that are heightened by the soundtrack’s polyphony of voices and music; she dramatizes the personal experience of public matters—religious tradition, women’s autonomy, migration, corruption—with documentary-based fervor, rhapsodic yearning, and bold affirmation.

The intensity and the lyrical fervor of Kasi Lemmons’s direction lend this historical drama, about Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery and her work with the Underground Railroad, the exalted energy of secular scripture.

American Dharma succeeds neither as journalism nor as portraiture, neither as political critique nor as cultural survey nor as psychological study.

Lapid’s sense of form is more modest than his impulses; his direction falls short of Mercier’s clenched intensity and unhinged energy.

Even though the target of satire in Jojo Rabbit is clearly the Nazis, the movie sharply but unintentionally satirizes itself, as well as its makers and the movie industry at large that saw fit to produce, release, and acclaim it.

The result is a movie of a cynicism so vast and pervasive as to render the viewing experience even emptier than its slapdash aesthetic does.

Zellweger’s singing here passes through to the other side. Suddenly, Zellweger herself seems to pass over to the other side of the character, to come out from behind the curtain and reveal that the cabaret performer and singer in question isn’t Judy Garland but Renée Zellweger, and has been all along. She leaves the movie behind, where it belongs, and heads off on her own, by herself.

The canniness of Gray’s procedure is matched by the boldness, even the recklessness, of the extremes to which he pushes it—along with his characters, his story, his emotions, and his techniques. The result is to turn Ad Astra into an instant classic of intimate cinema—one that requires massive machinery and complex methods to create a cinematic simplicity that, for all the greatness of his earlier films, had eluded him until now.