Stephanie Zacharek

It’s worth seeing A Different Man for the two performances at its heart, given by Adam Pearson and Sebastian Stan.

My Old Ass is a bit crazy. It’s also winning, in the gentlest, sweetest way.

There are whispers of Chekhov and Shakespeare in His Three Daughters; both of those writers knew a thing or two about the fractiousness, and the durability, of sisterly connections.

Though Guadagnino is a gifted director, his style is sometimes showily baroque to a fault. (Exhibit A: Suspiria.) But Queer, stylish as it is, may be his most heartfelt movie, at least since Call Me By Your Name.

The colors of The Room Next Door are its secret message, a language of pleasure and beauty that reminds us how great it is to be alive. If it’s possible to make a joyful movie about death, Almodóvar has just done it.

The Brutalist is a kind of crazy space church, designed specifically for the communal moviegoing experience. It's a place to gather and give thanks.

Maria is a movie made with great respect, almost adulation, but very little that qualifies as real feeling.

Burton has just allowed himself to be silly and have fun; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is filled with low-stakes wisecracks and kindergarten-style one-liners, but the effect works. The movie carries you along on its wriggling magic carpet of mayhem—and features one sequence of creepy-elegant-funny cracked poetry that’s classic, old-school Burton.

Collias captures something gossamer here, a quiet shift into adult womanhood that happens, literally, overnight.

Movies can’t just be efficient feeling-delivery systems; they have to work on us in subtler ways. It Ends With Us makes all its points, all right, but in a way that’s more edifying than moving. And despite the prettiness of its Boston setting, it isn’t as visually alluring as it should be.

Trap isn’t the worst Shyamalan movie; no one would say it’s the best. It's suspended somewhere in the murky middle, but at the very least it has an amiable goofiness.

This is a movie of gentle but resonant pleasures; it slows the world down, a little, for the span of time you’re watching it. And couldn’t we all use a little of that these days?

To watch this movie’s actors, many of them playing versions of the men they used to be not so long ago—to see them incorporating classic pop-locking moves into their swordplay, or tinkering with the phrasing of Hamlet’s soliloquy until it rings true to their experience—is to witness a cautious but joyful reawakening.

When it sparkles, which is often, it’s perfectly enjoyable.

It’s a work that blends compassion with artistry so purely that there’s no way to separate them. This is bold filmmaking that makes us feel more courageous too.

This is a child’s-eye view of a parent rendered without a sheen of nostalgia—it feels less like a story being told by a thoughtful adult looking back than one springing directly from the fierce, untamed mind of a child.

Reverence can sap the life out of a film—that and too much acting. And boy, is there a lot of acting in The Bikeriders.

The movie’s lo-fi vibe is part of its charm.

This is a movie that feels, in the best way, like the last day of summer: radiant, bittersweet, redolent of memories in the making.

If it isn’t a great movie, it’s at least a fascinating and thoughtful one, an even-handed film that doesn’t need to resort to extremes to paint an accurate picture of what America and the world are up against right now, in terms of one particular past and possibly future president.

There are few filmmakers as open-hearted, as stone-soup inventive, as Baker is. In movies like Tangerine and The Florida Project, he’s always shown a knack for doing a lot with a little. But with Anora, so playful yet so emotionally fine-grained, he maybe does the most. It's his best movie yet.

The Substance is distinctive less for its nutso, over-the-top gore than for a single scene midway through the film that exposes a different kind of body horror—or, more specifically, the way insecurity can be its own kind of horror.

Horizon—while being at least somewhat culturally sensitive, handsome to look at, and reasonably engaging—still comes off as curiously undistinguished. It’s so tasteful, so careful, so eager not to upset or offend, that it reflects little sense of risk.

Kinds of Kindness is too parched and mannered to be either disturbing or funny or both—and not even its capable cast can rescue it.

This is what Arnold is so great at capturing: people just doing their best, which often means they surpass every expectation without even knowing it. Her generosity toward her characters is also generosity toward us. She hands us nothing, even as she gives us everything.

I found myself almost literally leaning closer to the screen during Megalopolis, trying to grasp exactly what Coppola is seeking to communicate. I might have caught about a third of it, at best, but I’ll take a messy, imaginative sprawl over a waxen, tasteful enterprise any day.

Furiosa, rife with explosions, savage masculinity, and lots and lots of driving, is all spectacle and no vision. Its heroine deserves better.

Working from a script by Justin Kuritzkes, Guadagnino takes pleasure in teasing us, toying with us, getting us all turned around. This is his most buoyant movie.

The real problem with Sasquatch Sunset is that it’s distancing, in an art-project way. The movie is just too coy, too overt in the way it signals when we’re supposed to be appalled and when we’re supposed to be moved; it advertises its weirdness even as it strives to convince us how much these Sasquatch are like you and me.

Shot by Garland’s regular cinematographer Rob Hardy, Civil War has the vibe of your standard desolate zombie movie with a modern American backdrop, but it's far less effective than your average George A. Romero project: sometimes a B movie with a sense of humor about itself says more about a nation’s despair than an overserious, breast-beating one.

Whatever Patel is going for, he's at least singing out with conviction—not just from the diaphragm but also from the muscle better known as the heart.

It may have been conceived as the kind of classy-but-ribald entertainment that might lure older moviegoers back to theaters. But insulting their intelligence probably isn’t the way to go.

Alice Rohrwacher's enigmatic and bracing La Chimera, its touch as glancing as a zephyr, asks more of us while demanding less. It’s the kind of movie you wake up from, as opposed to one you merely watch.

This new Road House appears at a time when so much of our entertainment has been shrunk down to a manageable size. Even on the small screen, may its unruly spirit prevail.

It’s bad-gal blasphemy of the highest order.

All this magical switcheroo plot nonsense is just a formality anyway: everyone who comes to Irish Wish—friend, foe or neutral observer—will have come for Lohan.

It’s one thing to dole out the happy pills that make an audience love you and another to earn their trust minute by minute. Sandler, it turns out, knows how to do both.

It tries to be sexy but isn’t; it strives for screwball energy but only ends up being insufferably madcap; it works hard to serve up lashings of black humor, in the tradition of older Coen Brothers movies like Raising Arizona, but you can hear the wheels whirring behind every joke.

It’s simply blissfully restorative, a movie that gives you back something you didn’t realize you’d lost, one that might even make you forget what year you’re living in. Its pleasures run quiet and deep.

There’s something inexplicably Wenders-like about it; he’s a filmmaker who looks for joy in the corners, and finds it.

Tótem offers a promise of light beyond the sorrow, a concept that’s hard for children to comprehend. But then, adults need to be reminded of it too.

You can’t ask for more from a winter diversion—even if you wouldn’t wish for less.

Everything that made the original picture so sly, funny, and affecting is gone. Musical numbers spell out the obvious, and loudly.

The movie is lively and fun, without betraying the heavy undertones of some of its subject matter. It’s a reclamation, but a buoyant rather than somber one.

American Fiction isn’t nearly as cutting, or as ultimately moving, as its source material—but that doesn’t make it dismissible.

The charm offensive that is Wonka toils way too hard for its meager pleasures. It may leave you feeling more worked over than invigorated.

It’s sometimes boring and pretentious and often a little silly, almost to the point—almost—of parody. But even with all its flaws tallied and noted like battlefield casualties, there’s still something mildly compelling about it.

Sometimes a movie reaches the unreachable in us, not because it’s a grand masterpiece but because it’s as quiet and intimate as air.

Saltburn begins with a mildly intriguing premise. But Fennell can’t seem to distinguish dark, transgressive pleasures from outright unpleasantness, and the whole enterprise ends with an acrid aftertaste.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, directed by Francis Lawrence, strives to offer spectacle, drama, and excitement. But it’s really just a tired rehash, albeit an extravagant one, this time with less appealing characters. As dystopias go, it’s a real bummer.

What Happens Later, directed by Meg Ryan, works so hard at trying to give us something fresh and novel that I couldn’t help wishing it were better: the cloud of dissatisfaction I felt after watching it kept trying to reshape its molecules into a better movie, albeit one that could live only in my head.

Like most of Payne’s movies (Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska), The Holdovers is merely coated with a thin veneer of misanthropy that Payne methodically buffs off to reveal actual human feelings. It's the mechanism that works for him, but that doesn’t make it a good one.

Triet’s approach to telling this story is decidedly tasteful; she layers one subtly intriguing detail atop another, like a muted accumulation of snowfall. It could all be a little too hushed and antiseptic—but Hüller’s performance gives the movie the vitality it needs.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is 2 hours and 48 minutes of an irresistibly shiny, shimmering Taylor Swift. She’s the lure skimming through the water; we’re the gawping trout, dazzled to the point of transcendence. All that for less than 20 bucks.

Even though there were moments in The Magic Flute when I wondered if Branagh hadn't truly gone off his rocker, I found its audacity exhilarating. [11 Sep 2006]

As for Green’s Exorcist: Believer, which starts out strong—evoking all the reasons demons in search of a body to possess can’t resist the hormonal lightning rod of adolescent girls—and ends in a dumb jumble of generic-looking zombie-girl Blumhouse special effects: I’ve already forgotten it.

Dicks is so in love with itself and its own overworked kooky world that it treats the audience like the outsider in a threesome. Sometimes the self is the least interesting part of self-expression.

Writer-director Chloe Domont’s skillfully constructed debut feature Fair Play is neither a horror movie nor a corporate thriller, though it bears earmarks of both, with some dashes of erotic-thriller intrigue tossed in.

As Bernal plays him, Cassandro is a hero for our dismal times, not just because he crashes through norms, but because he makes it look fun, even when it most certainly isn’t. This is a performance filled with truthful joy, and it floods this modestly scaled but open-hearted movie with light.

Reptile just feels wayward and listless.

Origin works as a visual summation of Wilkerson’s ideas. But it’s also a movie about a woman striving to bring her ideas to the world, even in the midst of her own personal crisis. The life we plan and hope for is rarely the life we get. Origin is an exhortation to use every heartbeat wisely.

Have you ever had an intense experience—fallen madly in love, say—only to look back years later and feel it had happened to a different person, a person who had walked through a dream, and survived it, to get to the self you were destined to become? That’s the feeling Sofia Coppola captures in her quietly extraordinary Priscilla.

Fincher seems to be having a great deal of fun with The Killer. Though he takes it seriously as a piece of action craftsmanship, there’s nothing overserious about it.

This is a complex and sophisticated picture, the kind of grown-up love story we see all too rarely these days, especially when it comes to starry, big-ticket moviemaking. It’s entertaining and robust and forthright; it’s also tremendously sad, not necessarily in a bring-your-hanky way, but in a deeper, more truthful way.

Poor Things might have benefited from some trimming—it takes a little too long to get cooking—but it’s Lanthimos’ finest movie so far, a strange, gorgeous-looking picture that extends generosity both to its characters and the audience. And Stone—so dazzling in The Favourite—provides its thrumming pulse.

Mann is a fantastic technician, but his perpetual coolness is a liability. He seems to want us to understand this complex, deeply private man, one who was both revered and reserved. But in the end, he’s more interested in Enzo Ferrari’s mystique than in his humanity.

Bottoms, though it presents itself as a sort of sideways heir to comedies like Heathers and But I’m a Cheerleader, simply runs its jokes into the ground.

Heart of Stone is quite glossy and beautiful to look at, and though there’s not much that’s dynamic about her, Gadot at least has a charming insouciance. Even if you’ll be hard-pressed to remember any of it three hours later, the runtime of Heart of Stone flies by quickly enough.

This isn’t just a movie about reawakened ambitions, but about how our teenage hopes inform our grownup selves, or perhaps haunt them. It’s a lot to pack into a seemingly unassuming little movie, but Pohlad—who also directed 2014’s superb Love & Mercy—pulls it off.

This is a smart, lustrous film, and a bracingly honest one, the kind of movie that leaves you feeling both invigorated and a little blue.

Nolan shapes Oppenheimer’s story into something like an epic poem, focusing not just on his most famous achievement, but on everything that happened to him afterward; Nolan is maybe even more interested in Oppenheimer as a complicated, questioning patriot.

It’s true that Barbie does many of the things we’ve been promised: there is much mocking and loving of Barbie, and plenty of skewering of the suits. But none of those things make it subversive. Instead, it’s a movie that’s enormously pleased with itself, one that has cut a big slice of perfectly molded plastic cake and eaten it—or pretend-eaten it—too.

Cruise, still in love with what big mainstream movies used to be, has become a chivalric dreamer, striving to ensure their survival by sheer will. Maybe he can pull it off and maybe he can’t. But at least there’s some pleasure to be had in watching him try.

The movie ripples with the quiet melodrama of real life, the way big things often happen in the margins, and small things gradually come to mean the world.

Even the glorious colors of Asteroid City become eyeball-numbing after a while, and the novelty of its Tinkertoy sensibility wears off practically within the first 10 minutes.

May December could have more fire; it could be even more twisted. But it’s seductive enough to keep us following along, one betrayal after another.

The Zone of Interest is possibly the least overtly traumatic film about the Holocaust ever made, yet it’s devastating in the quietest way.

There are so many chase sequences in Dial of Destiny that the movie seems held together with slender bits of plot, rather than the other way around. Worse yet, they’re so heavily CGI’ed that they come off as grimly dutiful rather than thrilling or delightful.

There’s a fantasy element to Master Gardener that bolsters the movie’s convictions rather than weakening them.

There’s no way to put a positive spin on Parkinson’s. But how we handle the cards we’re dealt is everything, and Davis Guggenheim’s remarkable documentary Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie reminds us that a person stricken with a disease doesn’t become that disease.

The Mother would be more effective if she could wink at the audacity of the material instead of just playing it all straight. But then, Lopez can get away with things that other mere mortals can’t, and if you approach it in the right spirit, The Mother could be ridiculously good fun.

The wonder of Kelly Fremon Craig’s film adaptation of Are You There God? isn’t just that it deals directly, and without condescension, with the vagaries of preteen awkwardness. It’s that it speaks so ardently to the adolescent in all of us—particularly, maybe, women who are going through menopause or already on the far side of it, an event that in some ways returns us to a lunar landscape whose contours we’d forgotten.

This movie makes being young look like the opposite of fun, a spell you’ve got to break out of. Maybe that’s the ultimate revelation of the story of Peter Pan—but it shouldn’t be drudgery to get there.

There are no surprises here, just the pleasant ectoplasmic shimmer of a formula you’ve seen a million times before, vanishing almost as soon as the end credits start rolling.

It’s the most magnificent act of oversharing you’ll see all year, a banquet of all the TMI you can eat, just for the price of a ticket. Though when you think about it, shouldn’t Aster be paying us?

The on-the-surface modesty of Showing Up is a kind of sorcery. It’s in the days afterward, when you’ve left its spell and gone back to the world, that its essence is more likely to take shape—a shape you could almost trace with your thumb, as if it were made of clay and not images, air, and feeling.

Air, Affleck’s fifth movie as a director, may sound like a bore if you don’t care about business, basketball, or athletic shoes. But Affleck, working from a script by Alex Convery, uses classic stealth means to make you care.

Watching Tetris, you’re likely to feel lost now and then, even though director Baird and screenwriter Noah Pink lay out this increasingly convoluted story as clearly as humanly possible. But it’s still a lively and, at least for a computer-game origin saga, strangely charming picture.

As a kooky fantasy, it’s all fine, if just fine is what you’re after. But at what point does just fine become soul killing, or at least just soul numbing?

With his charming, sympathetic picture The Lost King, Stephen Frears digs into the fairly recent rehabilitation of the misunderstood monarch’s legacy—as well as the 2012 discovery of his long-lost bones beneath a Leicester parking lot.

Knightley, in a performance as crisp as the corners of an envelope, makes McLaughlin’s perseverance—and the pressures she faced as she also tried to be a good wife and mother—deeply believable.

Inside is essentially a one-man extravaganza for Dafoe, and he shoulders its complexities ably, with zero vanity.

With Champions, director Bobby Farrelly returns us to the late 1990s, a time when there were fewer sorely needed guidelines, but also fewer gatekeepers just waiting to catch well-meaning people who happen to trip up.

This is a movie about close family bonds and a more universal web that connects us, infinitely precious and worth preserving at all costs.

The mere presence of Elba’s Luther, with his haunted gaze, his voice as plush as the finest antique Persian carpet, is enough to keep The Fallen Sun from sinking.

We know relatively little about the woman who wrote Wuthering Heights, but Frances O’Connor’s directorial debut, Emily—which blends fact with fanciful fiction—paints a haunting and sympathetic portrait of the person she might have been.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance only partially rekindles the spark of the earlier movie, or that of its rambunctious sequel, Magic Mike XXL.

Directed by Australian filmmaker Sarah Spillane, the picture is appealingly breezy, though it does have its share of tense moments involving killer waves and charcoal-toned stormy skies. Mostly, it’s an anthem of teenage independence and daring, the story of one young woman who set her sights on a dream while still a child and willed it into reality just a few years later.