Richard Lawson

[A] quiet and lovely film.

Fuqua’s chosen technique only undermines his solemn intentions, rather than using starkness to make a salient point. Emancipation is overthought to its increasing detriment.

With Creed III (opening in theaters March 3), Jordan takes full control of the reins, making his directorial debut in calm and confident fashion.

It’s an oddly moving film, this bright and quite literally stagey curio involving an extraterrestrial. At its best, Asteroid City evokes the memory of what it was to first see a Wes Anderson film, surprised and delighted by its singular vision of life on Earth.

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.

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.

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.

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

There’s a deep, and never pandering, empathy at work here, an allowance of confusion and moral error that keeps Monster from the smarmy and didactic lows of so many social-issues films.

Now 80 years old, Ford still glows with that unique charisma. It’s a shame, then, that Dial of Destiny doesn’t do right by its heroes—both Ford and Dr. Henry Jones, archeologist adventurer.

The movie is as engaging as it is sinisterly ridiculous. Its costumery is luxe and eye-popping, its courtly intrigue pleasingly low-stakes. The looming Revolution is only mentioned, in somber tones, in voiceover at the very end. Otherwise, Jeanne du Barry wants you to feel the fantasy.

Book Club’s four stars—and others like them—deserve material that’s specific, clever, surprising in some way. These plug-and-play movies have lost much of their charm at this point, feeling more like a slightly degrading duty than any kind of demographic triumph. Which may be overthinking it. But shouldn’t a movie about a book club feel at least a little bit literate?

It’s an odd, lumbering patchwork of a film, occasionally fascinating but otherwise bloated and aimless.

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.

Whatever LuPone is doing, it’s undeniable. Here, long into a meandering and fitfully rewarding film, is something worthy of fear—or maybe it’s awe.

Jordan’s absence from this film leaves a big, leaping void at the center. We’re forced to root for marketing executives instead of the phenomenon being marketed. Without its raison d’etre, there is not enough juice to sustain the film. It all feels a bit silly by the heartstring-tugging end.

What a welcome rarity Boston Strangler is, even in its limits: a sturdy, thoughtfully constructed movie featuring a compelling story and host of great actors.

It’s homage and gentle parody at once, seeking to capture the energy of playing the game with friends rather than trying to seriously literalize an expansive world.

Your Place or Mine occasionally gives off a glimmer of something interesting, but all too quickly snaps back to the featureless drudgery that has, sadly, come to define its genre.

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.

80 for Brady is a loosely structured hang movie, albeit one that culminates in a curiously affecting emotional climax.

The riskiness of that—the way Knock at the Cabin, accidentally or not, courts and even invites sympathy to one of the right’s most dangerous shibboleths—gives the film a surprising, alarming, but not unwelcome edge.

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

The movie is deliberately alienating, but Oldroyd has not done enough to earn our devotion before he pulls the rug out and flashes us a smirk. The movie is a provocative tease that doesn’t have the stuff to back up the joke, try as its game performers might to make it all mean something. I found myself wishing that Eileen was longer. Its fertile territory is woefully underdeveloped—so much of the film’s innate potential goes unutilized. At least there is Hathaway’s glowing star turn, both reminding us of what we knew she could do and introducing us to something new.

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.

Holofcener weaves these people and their problems together in delicate fashion, guiding us toward her thematic conclusions in a way that never feels starchy, didactic, too lesson-oriented. She’s got a light touch, a humane one too.

It’s a performance that’s so far afield of the loud flash and melodrama of Star Wars that Ridley seems almost introduced anew.

Fair Play is a film responsive to internet discourse but not acting in service of it. It’s a grim, dynamic thriller, one that sets workplace and home crashing into one another in a small symphony of beautiful disharmony.