Richard Lawson

This period epic...is so full of dazzlingly intricate visual poetry, so teeming with sensory spirit, that trying to review it is a bit like trying to review all of life. Which may sound a bit grandiose, but Cuarón’s magnum opus provokes such turgid sentiment.

It is a frightening and galvanizing vision, Anderson putting away his complicated nostalgia for old (and more easily understood) days to confront, with disarmingly noble purpose, the here and now.

In Sciamma’s gifted hands, the film escapes cliché and becomes something glorious—a study of forbidden love that grandly highlights how much has been lost under the crush of hetero patriarchy.

The film isn’t merely some metatextual exercise, though. It’s deeply felt, a warm embodiment of a liminal time in life when our conceptions of ourselves and our loved ones come pinging into focus while also, somehow, drifting into new confusion.

I found myself reluctantly taken by the movie, and the way Scorsese uses it to maybe, just a little bit, atone for some of his own past blitheness about violence. In The Irishman, a merry darkness slowly becomes an elegy, ringed with guilt. And what could be more Irish than that?

Past Lives is not concerned with regret. It is instead a thoughtful, humane rumination on what may be fixed in personal history but remains forever fluid in the mind.

The steadily accumulated emotional weight of the film dissipates rather quickly as it reaches its abrupt ending. Still, Blue Heron is an affecting, promising debut feature.

For all its strife and sorrow, Marriage Story is a generous film. It sensitively acknowledges the ways people fail each other, and the ways they don’t. It’s well worth your time. Maybe don’t watch it with your spouse, though.

TÁR is breathtaking entertainment, beautifully tailored in luxe, eerie Euro sleekness by production designer Marco Bittner Rosser and cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, and ominously scored by Hildur Guðnadóttir (who gets a little meta shout-out in the film). That fine craftsmanship is all anchored by Blanchett’s alternately measured and ferocious performance, a tremendous (but never outsized) piece of acting that is her most piercing work in years.

It handles a tricky topic with so much persuasively unadorned compassion that it has the genuine potential to change hearts and minds about one of the country’s most contentious battles.

Zone of Interest is a prodigiously mounted wonder, gripping and awful and terribly necessary to its time.

It’s not a demure film, by any measure, nor does it shy away from hard truths. What it does is allow the Riches the loveliness and grain of their individual being, and lets that be enough. The rest of the film’s mission, then, is what we in the audience do with what Bradley, and Rich, have graciously shown us. Time appeals to heart and mind. It also, hopefully, convinces us of their capacity for action.

It’s a paean to the loving of a thing, rather than a movie that gives that thing an entirely new existence, free-standing and self-possessed in its own right, despite Gerwig’s narrative tinkering.

The Force is, to me, still silly Star Wars mumbo jumbo, but Johnson finds a way to underscore it with humanity, with a classical Greek rumble of true pathos. On that front, The Last Jedi is a pure success, accessing the molten core of its drama and grappling with it in nuanced ways.

Nickel Boys is perhaps a rebuke to the idea that violence must be plainly stated in order to be understood. Here, it is palpably present in every negative space. What Ross instead affords these young men is the dignity of a point of view, drawing the viewer into the bracing immediacy of mind and body.

The emotional punch of The Boy and the Heron is a heart-swelling assertion of cosmic purpose, even amidst sadness and ruin. But it’s delivered after a lot of digression, which can make this swan-song film seem like more a collection of Miyazaki’s disparate, previously unused ideas than a discrete film with a focused mission.

It’s a wild, profane blast. But Baker is also zooming in, very slowly, so that in the movie’s startling, disarming final scene we are forced to reconsider what we’ve just watched. Was it a raucous chase movie or a quiet tragedy?

The Favourite is a pleasure to watch. It’s weird without being alienating, dirty without being cheap. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a better acting trio this fall. What fun The Favourite is, while still striking a few resonantly melancholy chords here and there.

Brody and Pearce vividly manifest Corbet’s arguments about the clash between art and money, between the old world and the new. When they are blazing away on screen together, The Brutalist swells to epic size—two craftsmen prodigiously working to realize their architect’s flawed and awesome vision.

Trier pulls a lot of stylistic tricks in the film, but they somehow never play like gimmicks, like adornments merely there to show off the talent of their creator. The film has a lilting, lively rhythm; the glimpses we see of months and years in Julie’s life ably provide a whole picture.

It’s a lively, messy coming-of-age story which turns the clashing elements of its title into reflections of a certain youthful folly and daring, a penchant for base gross-out humor and big, revolutionary thinking.

For all of its piercing insight and arresting performances, its steamy sex, its devastating conclusions, the film operates at a remove, from behind a pane of glass. Perhaps because Haigh gives Adam so little tether to the realm of the real; so much of the film is lost in plaintive reverie.

What initially seems like another alienating P.T.A. outing reveals itself, in quiet but glorious bursts, to be a wry and heartfelt love poem.

Mangrove is not a lecture, or a polemic. There’s a gracefulness to McQueen’s technique that gives the film a poetic lilt; even when the worst things are happening, or the biggest speeches are being made in court, McQueen manages to avoid the starchy stuff of so many political and legal dramas.

No matter its broader effect, Oppenheimer is a mainstream offering of uncommon resonance, sending the viewer out of the theater head-spun and itchy-eyed, ears ringing from all its sophisticated, voluble explosion.

Sorry, Baby is funny, sad, thoughtful, and specific, a keenly observed portrait of a woman blown off course by a traumatic incident.

There’s a bracingly alive quality to The Tale, as if it’s sentient and thinking in real time, giving the piece a gripping immediacy.

For all of the episodic ramble of Killers of the Flower Moon, not enough space is provided to restoring palpable personhood to people so relentlessly robbed of it. Scorsese’s film is nonetheless effectively rattling, a grueling delineation of events that gracefully eschews the melodrama and sensationalism of so much true crime.

As it unspools, Minari becomes a study in sober compassion. Chung has worked through the conflicts of his upbringing—his father’s stubbornness, the family’s rural isolation—and arrived at the grace of understanding, and all the forgiveness, regret, and affection that comes with that.

Its universality, if you want to call it that, can only be so headily conjured because The Farewell is about exactly what it’s about: this family and their city, their culture, and their complicated bonds. That’s where the film’s beautiful, affecting honesty is sourced: in its million grains of truth, generously offered up. What an honor it is that Wang has invited us in.

While the core narrative is plenty compelling in all its creeping dread and curiosity, The Power of the Dog is not too concerned with being about any one thing. The film’s secrets are revealed while new ones bloom into being. Life tumbles after life in the ecosystem of all of us, seething amid the dust clouds we can’t help but kick up.

The House That Jack Built is a tediously navel-gazing exercise in von Trier trying to explain, and make half-hearted atonement for, his “totally twisted, man,” worldview, an explication of his personal psychology that is almost heartbreaking in its conflicted self-regard.

It’s a pleasure seeing the pair reunited for another piercing character study, this time with Baptiste squarely in the lead role. It’s dazzingly complex, bracing work.

When it hits its highest, most resonant notes, Bradley Cooper’s remake of A Star Is Born—starring the director alongside pop icon Lady Gaga—achieves a triumphant, romantic ache that is often just what we want to experience at the movies.

The Father is an act of understanding, radical in its toughness and its generous artistry.

Granik works simply, but she doesn’t forego artistry. She’s made a film of grace and power, a story of people lost and found in America that often shows us at our noble and humble best. How rare and refreshing that is these days.

At its best, the film is indeed piercingly clever, proud of its peculiarity to a degree just shy of smugness. Though, the 140-minute film does begin to wear out its welcome in the last third, when the jokes have mostly all been made before and the only fresh additions are cumbersome matters of plot.

Phoenix has always been good at depicting this kind of pathetic tyranny, deftly (and swiftly) shifting from bratty, toothless insouciance to genuine menace. The actor seems to get both the joke and the seriousness of the film, though I wish Scott were better at communicating that tone to the audience.

Black Panther works best as a dynastic drama, and as a musing on global politics from a perspective we don’t often get. Despite familiar action-scene wobbliness, it’s easily the most engaging Marvel film in a long while. Because—finally!—it has something new to say.

The movie belongs wholly to Ronan, who at just 20 years old is such a remarkably poised and confident performer. She's a great actress to watch, and Brooklyn is a wonderful, if low-key, platform for her talents.

Chasing Summer often plays as the most peculiar Hallmark movie ever made. I want that to be a good thing, but it unfortunately is not.

It doesn’t wring its hands with grief and beatify its rumpled subjects. Instead, it arrives at a place of humble, true understanding. Which means more than mere forgiveness ever could.

In ragged times, the sophisticated derring-do of Fallout is a welcome gift, a slick and studio-polished adventure that nonetheless has the undermining wink of transgression. The movie’s nerve and moxie successfully make us forget its corporate overlords, and all those other oligarchs grinding millions of American lives into nothing.

Nomadland, which is really more character study than surveying sociology, approaches Fern’s circumstances, and those of the people she encounters on her travels, with a fluid, un-judging sensitivity.

Those wary of McDonagh after the bulldozer that was Billboards should seek out this film; at its best, The Banshees of Inisherin whispers and laments and amuses the way McDonagh’s best stage writing does. And it offers the invaluable opportunity to see Farrell in his hangdog element, as Pádraic scrambles about trying to find purchase in the world, ever creaking and groaning in motion.

Writer-director Ari Aster, making a promising feature debut, has created plenty of forbidding atmosphere; there’s almost no shot in the film that isn’t filled with creeping dread. But Hereditary ultimately engages on a more emotional and intellectual register than it does on the visceral.

Coen and his acting troupe make dense language wholly legible, bending famous phrases into intriguing new shapes. The film moves at a pleasant clip, eschewing cinematic digressions and driving, like a dagger, to the heart of the story. It’s an efficient little film, despite its fussy aesthetics.

While grandly moving at the close, too much of this Color Purple relies on memories of Color Purples past.

[A] quiet and lovely film.

The film is among the most profound—and, yes, important—pieces of trans fiction that I’ve yet seen, vividly staged with bold, declarative style while remaining beguilingly elusive. It is open for all kinds of assessment, containing multitudes of meaning. I Saw the TV Glow is a great film to talk about, to pick apart with a friend or fellow traveler over dinner afterwards, to study and reflect on.

May December feels like a return to Haynes’s outre origins, a stylish character study that, when inspected closer, may actually have an entire culture—its art, its sexual mores—on its nimble mind.

Sentimental Value is yet another rich and humane look at existence from a filmmaker wise to the endless nuance of being a person in the world, for better or worst.

The film is sturdy, galvanizing, the sort of movie that might help rouse people out of despair and into the good fight. The spirit of revolution—righteously angry yet full of bonhomie, demanding but generous in its reach—is alive and well in the film. As, one hopes, it is everywhere else.

It’s an elusive film, in its plotting and allusions, but is still potent and immediate, as resonant as any of our own late-night quests toward the far reaches of our self-conception.

This new take on the material is more sinewy and sensual. It balances the property’s inherent melodrama with added grit, but not so much extra scuzz that it feels like an overly modern provocation.

I love the way Jia grapples with large social shifts in such metaphorical and yet still intimate ways, peering in on individual people caught in the churn of time and growth and framing them in the defining context of their surroundings.

Eighth Grade is an exciting directorial debut for Burnham, a precocious teen phenomenon who seems to have grown into a thoughtful adult—one who intimately knows of what he speaks. He’s made an alarmingly perceptive film that only rarely goes for the easy joke or verges toward cliché

The beauty of Pillion is that those of us watching on the sidelines are not voyeurs, but rather witnesses to something powerfully complex and human.

Decision to Leave no doubt deserves a repeat viewing. Even if the finale is still a slightly hard to parse bummer, there is all the other meticulous craftwork to appreciate and discover anew. In this instance, maybe there is no getting too close to the case.

Not all memoir is generous. It can be intriguingly solipsistic, or maddeningly vain. But because there’s always been a curious blankness to Spielberg’s public persona—cheerful and engaged but never quite known—The Fabelmans does feel like something of a gift.

The film . . . is at once light and serious, a warm and sensitive tribute to the book’s themes that avoids any unnecessary updating. Fremon Craig, whose last film was the excellent teen dramedy The Edge of Seventeen, gives the material just the right spin, letting Margaret and her friends exist wholly in their age.

Judas and the Black Messiah is missing that deeper personal aspect, some sense of the emotional force yoking O’Neal and Hampton together, dragging them toward ruin. The film is resonant regardless. Still, there’s such an opportunity presented here—to see these two sterling actors really working in harmony—that goes frustratingly unseized. As is, Judas and the Black Messiah is richer and more engaging than a standard biopic, but is not quite the Shakespearean tragedy of double allegiances and backstabbing that it could have been.

This curious fairy tale may not be the truth, and it may prattle on too long. But when its stars align, and they let loose with their unmistakable shine, Hollywood movies do seem truly special again. And, sure, maybe TV does too.

Sinners is propulsive and stirring entertainment, messy but always compelling. The film’s fascinating array of genres and tropes and ideas swirls together in a way that is, I suppose, singularly American.

This is a sad and frightening story about a family’s undoing, but Rasoulof ekes out some hope too.

If the film is uneven—with such an exuberant beginning and disappointingly rote climax—that may simply be because Kahiu wanted to communicate as many truths of her home country as she could.

Toy Story 4 not only delivers plenty of gonzo-funny moments and genuine thrills, but also interrogates and complicates the series’s core themes.

Basking in the film’s ceaseless swirl is as intoxicating a moviegoing experience as one could want these days, a burst of communal joy (and sorrow) that serves as an effusive welcome back to the world.

Zhao is a good fit for the material. She, too, is a close observer of nature and of the many aching, yearning people passing through it. But she has previously not made anything as traditionally tailored and refined as this.

McQueen has made a film that’s sleek and muscular, a polished product that has a barb-wire ribbon of tenacious political fury running through it. It’s somehow both heavy and light, a giddy entertainment that still urges at deep social ills.

Boys State is a grim lesson—a painful allegory—in the realities of American politics, in who so often wins campaigns by running platforms built on red-meat shibboleths while ignoring or barely addressing the pertinent ills of the country.

There are indeed stretches of the film—particularly its gripping and just a little miserable opening sequence—when it soars (argh, sorry) to cinema heaven (ack, sorry again). But a lot of the movie has a curious drag, scenes repeating and repeating in slightly tweaked shapes until you just want to yell at the screen, “Get to the moon already!”

Leviticus has a enough gore and jumpy moments to qualify it as a proper horror film. But its true scariness is of the forlorn kind.

Its moral identity aside, this is a staggering piece of filmmaking. The Rosses have a keen command of picture and motion; their film is riveting from the jump, swiftly and totally enveloping us in the bonhomie of Michael and his bleary company. Maybe the non-reality of it all isn’t worth fretting about.

There needn’t be some deeper theme or intent behind a movie like this, but The Lighthouse is an awfully trying experience to end with such a sneering shrug of the shoulders. I couldn’t shake the feeling that The Lighthouse is simply an exercise, an overeager writing class project from a guy who’s just read Sartre, Beckett, and, I dunno, Stephen King.

Lee uses Blaxploitation motifs playfully but with purpose, honoring an era of discourse and activism while urging for the necessity of a similar film language now. If we are not keen to the past, we’re likely to find ourselves mired in its ills again. We already are, of course.

As is true of Baker’s plays, Janet Planet envelops its audience with a lulling mood before delivering a closing punch of meaning, a kind of summation of theme and intent that casts a clarifying light on all that you’ve just watched.

This is a movie that at its most sensitive is about loneliness, and at its bleakest and most searching is a look at the mechanics of sexual predation.

The movie’s messaging is solid and persuasive, and Spielberg’s finely honed filmmaking, his sense of movement and controlled spectacle, does not fail him here.

Little clarity can actually be wrestled out of Cooper’s dank creation, a shallow, dour film that pays rote adherence to the mandate that horror must and should offer profound personal or social commentary.

Beyond that interesting character profile, Free Solo also operates as a sort of meta criticism of this kind of documentary filmmaking. We see Chin and his crew, most of them friends or at least affectionate admirers of Honnold’s, grapple with the difficult realities—and the potential trauma—of what they’re doing.

It’s all rather lovely, a patient and affectionate consideration of a person who has no idea that his small observations will be closely listened to 50 years later, long after he’s gone.

Hit Man is determined to be fun above all else, and it largely succeeds in that honorable, populist mission. It entertains, and generously pushes two game performers closer toward the movie-star pantheon.

Rather than weak imitation, You Won’t Be Alone is a bold and compelling—and reverent—repurposing of Malick’s technique, turning its gaze on matters more squishy, profane, and fallibly human than Malick’s high-minded considerations of the divine.

Mills makes this genre feel new and insightful, as if he’s one of only a few filmmakers who has tackled the complex dynamic between adult and child.

There is something undeniably exciting about seeing a polished piece of studio-ish entertainment like this be cognizant of the world it exists in.

But the real star of this thing is Clemons, so natural and expressive, whether speaking or singing.

It is a true star vehicle that asserts Faist and O’Connor as new leading men and gives further dimension to Zendaya’s already well-established profile. The humble ambition here is to charm and entertain, to arouse and amuse. This is, in that way, a refreshingly sincere and uncynical movie. Challengers may tire toward the end, but it’s scored enough points by then that a few double faults probably don’t matter.

Funny and rueful, The Holdovers seems beamed in from another time in cinema history, when wordy and thoughtful little movies like this were in healthier supply.

Eggers’s action sequences are swift and brutal, filled with the crunch of life extinguished and tossed into the bone pile of time. Skarsgård, hulking and seething, is a fine vessel for the film’s opulent menace. He’s a fearsome, yet elegant, creature of destruction as he hacks and slashes away.

While it certainly stimulated and overwhelmed my senses, Blade Runner 2049 rarely got my mind whirring the way one always hopes this kind of artful, serious-minded sci-fi will.

It sounds strange to say of a film about such impossible sorrow, but Mass is thoroughly entertaining. Or maybe engrossing is a better word. Its incisive dialogue and nuanced performances demand our attention, inviting us into a roiling weather system of guilt and sadness. The experience proves oddly nourishing, clarifying.

American Fiction, a sharp and clever film, could be all the more so if it felt better connected to the present tense. As is, the reflection is a bit warped; contemporary subtleties are missing.

It pains me to say this. I spent a good deal of Us straining to like it, to get on its slightly preening wavelength, to be nourished by its heady stew of tropes. I couldn’t get there, though. As loaded up on stuff as Us is, there’s not enough to grab onto; it’s an alienating idea piece that lumbers away just as it’s about to reveal its true nature.

Without the Shakespearean language, this is just an ahistorical story about a king and a battle. ... But it’s nothing fancy, really, nothing newfangled or inventive. This is a pretty straight-down-the-middle period war-king film, a true Boy Movie of respectable pedigree but no real distinction.

Once the politics of food and gas and guns have finally been sorted, Furiosa revs its engines and goes chasing after the grandeur of its predecessor. It doesn’t quite catch up. But it comes close enough that we can at least glimpse Fury Road’s tail lights in the distance.

His intricate craftsmanship is a pleasure to watch in motion, though a bad symptom of sequel-itis stalks the film: Johnson, facing all that daunting follow-up pressure, has decided to go bigger.

That McQuarrie and Cruise are eventually able to get this hurtling, heavy plane level and pull off a rewarding climax is a testament to the fierceness of their commitment to these projects.