Richard Lawson

For all of technology’s cold gleam, Ralph Breaks the Internet has real warmth, the kind born of compassionate, invested filmmakers. Who, yes, may be serving at the whims of a distressingly ever-expanding imperialist force, but have nonetheless done something rather nice under its watchful aegis.

From one vantage point, Stillwater may just be a sentimental and lurid riff on the infamous Amanda Knox case. But I think McCarthy has something bigger in mind, which he pokes at intriguingly throughout his movie’s considerable sprawl.

How to Have Sex is a vivid and heartbreaking depiction of what is caused by the willful, dehumanizing disregard of women. May its lesson be taken to heart by those who need to hear it most.

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.

Flora and Son played more charming than cloying to me. It’s a nice movie about people who are mostly nice—deep down, anyway.

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.

Sharper is sinewy and clever, a keenly acted and written B-picture of the sort that were once myriad but now only come around once every few years.

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.

Conclave whips itself up into high melodrama and then cuts through all the sturm und drang with sudden darts of humor. It’s a carefully calibrated thing, touching fingers with prestige greatness while keeping its feet firmly planted in the realm of rollicking entertainment.

All the conversational ramble and social intimacy of Matthias & Maxime has the murmur of truth. It’s textured and specific; it slows and quickens with the cadence of real life.

Shirley is a relentless film, ceaselessly in motion. Its actors, then, must go chasing after it, with Moss leading the fearless charge. She brilliantly maneuvers the film, moving in fluid response to Decker’s stimuli.

Directed by Wes Ball, Kingdom doesn’t reach the rattling grandeur of Dawn. But it's another worthy installment in a series that is pretty much unparalleled in contemporary times.

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.

Oldman does a wizardly bit of becoming, making all these changes in voice, bearing, and proportion without putting on too many actorly airs; for how complex it is, Oldman’s is a remarkably unfussy performance.

With Dillane’s invaluable help, Urchin paints a sad and compelling portrait of someone lost in the fringes, a victim of an often indifferent system and of the complex wiring of his brain.

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.

Poetic License is far from mere pastiche. It has a distinct, youthful sensibility and sources its comedy more from recognisably human behaviour than from profane, one-liner riffing.

Both goofy and edgy, the film may not land every punchline, but it satisfies in visceral, pleasurable ways that a more sophisticated comedy could not.

Though all three sections of the film have didactic bits when big ideas are plainly stated, the bulk of Monsters and Men renders huge issues with a fluid understatement. But that disarming pensiveness and interiority doesn’t forget the anger and sadness of the story—instead, it somehow heightens it, affording these characters a grounded texture that casts their struggles in a piercingly humane light.

It’s heady, strange stuff, perhaps not as emotionally resonant as TV Glow, but captivating in both its confusion and honesty.

While plenty of scenes in Maestro have their discrete power—teeming with insight and impressive artistry—it’s only in an appreciation of Mulligan and Cooper’s full-bodied work that the greater whole finds resonance. In them lies the film’s true majesty, its best and most convincing approximation of what it is to love and create and, in so doing, reveal something transcendent.

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.

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.

Sauvage is often difficult viewing, and Leo tries our patience and compassion as anyone habitually treating themselves so poorly can. Nevertheless, the film achieves a sort of grace, in moments of sweetness and stillness, when the fullness of Leo’s being—be it ravaged and weary—is palpable and, finally, undeniable.

Wicker is a warming, sometimes poignant pleasure, a film full of lively personality and possessed of a rather humane outlook on our petty foibles. It is not exactly forgiving, though; the movie has a harder, more merciless edge than one might expect.

Hawke and Byrne have a nice chemistry, handling an offbeat and initially epistolary romance with wary sweetness. Juliet, Naked is surprising in its emotional contours, hitting familiar beats from different angles or, occasionally, taking the story in wholly unexpected directions.

Bratton, though, is not solely interested in a litany of struggle. He fills The Inspection with style, with spiky humor and alluring edge. It’s a promising feature debut.

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.