Stephanie Zacharek

When it comes to dating, there’s no doubt we live in confusing times. But no one needs a confused movie about dating confusion, and Cat Person’s ideas are so blurry it’s impossible to know what its goals are.

You People stretches hard to make its points, but for the most part it’s terminally safe.

Eisenberg is a thoughtful filmmaker, devoted to showing his characters as multi-dimensional, flawed human beings.

Together, Kreutzer and Krieps explore the idea of female loneliness, a state that isn’t necessarily caused by men, but one that even so shuts them out of a woman’s world.

Like a fire made with mildly damp kindling, The Pale Blue Eye—adapted from Louis Bayard’s 2003 novel of the same name—takes a while to get going. Maybe, in truth, it never really does get going. But the story’s stately pace is part of the attraction, and perhaps key to its pleasurably somber tone.

In No Bears, the 62-year-old Panahi shows nothing more than the normal effects of aging: his hair is grayer than before, the lines in his face perhaps slightly more pronounced. But this is hardly a broken man. He knows one thing for sure: defiance is the ultimate act of survival.

The movie isn’t a melodramatic tell-all, or a total downer. But it manages, even while being unapologetically entertaining, to feel like an honest reckoning with all the things we didn’t want to know about Houston at her fame’s height. It’s a film that takes our failings into consideration, rather than simply fixating on hers, a summation of all the things she tried to tell us and couldn’t.

The triumph of Matilda, both as Dahl wrote it and as it’s interpreted here, is that one little girl finally finds her place among people who understand her. This is a story about the family you choose, versus the one you were born into. And for some people, the chosen family is the one that makes all the difference.

Babylon isn’t a film made with love, or even with any degree of exactitude; it pretends to be a movie about “loving movies,” but more than anything else, it seeks to reflect glory on its creator. It advertises its alleged extravagance and glamour, loud and hard, but only comes off looking tinny and cheap.

Avatar: The Way of Water is both more extravagant and dorkier than Avatar, which was pretty dorky to begin with.

The movie, which Mendes also wrote, doesn’t live up to its setting. There’s a lot going on in Empire of Light—and yet somehow not quite enough.

This loose retelling of Carlo Collodi’s weird and often unsettling 1883 fantasy novel (the screenplay is by del Toro and Patrick McHale) is a little too long, and hammers away too eagerly at its central idea: that fathers who expect too much of their sons can do untold emotional damage. Even so, del Toro’s creation is clever and lively and just strange enough to keep you guessing what’s coming next.

Though Lawrence’s views of sex overall were complicated and sometimes contradictory, and not always what you’d call progressive, Clermont-Tonnerre and her actors draw from his ideas with clear-eyed generosity, presenting them so that they feel fresh as a new crocus.

Writer-director Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is that plate of morsels in movie form, a breezy caper that mostly sustains its novelty, even if it stumbles a bit in the last third.

The picture still meanders and drags, and sometimes Iñárritu’s lofty ideas come off like a hot-air balloon that deflates and gets stuck in the trees. You wish he could just move on with things already. And yet there are some magnificent visions in Bardo.

There is no more beautiful-looking film this year; shot by Michal Dymek, it often looks lit from within, glowing as softly as a lantern. And even beyond that, EO may be one of the greatest movies ever made about the spirit of animals, as much as we can know it.

As reporters, they’re tireless. As moms, they’re tired. That’s what gives She Said its believable texture. That and the fact that, regardless of this story’s ultimately explosive impact, She Said is simply a story of journalists at work.

Wakanda Forever is set in a world that many people desperately want to revisit—in the first film, Wakanda and its citizens were so vivid it’s no wonder they took a hold on us. But Wakanda Forever feels a lot like Marvel business as usual, marred by the usual muddily rendered action sequences and ungainly plot mechanics.

Jenkins has made a movie that captures both the joy of Armstrong’s music and the distinctive nature of his personal charisma, though he doesn’t shy away from some of the more controversial elements of Armstrong’s legacy.

The picture could use a little more dramatic tension; in places it goes a bit slack, losing its way on the path to its conclusion. Even so, its refusal to push the usual buttons is one of its finest qualities. Back-alley scare stories serve their purpose, but Call Jane has something else in mind. This is a story about women getting the job done when they have no one to rely on but one another.

Though it works hard to make us believe it’s really a social statement about hospitals’ lack of scruples...its garden-variety true-crime roots are painfully visible.

What’s wonderful about Wells’ instincts, and her sense of craftsmanship, is that she never spells anything out for us. Yet we walk away feeling that we know these people, even if we aren’t clear on all the specifics of their lives.

If Clooney and Roberts are both wonderful actors, at this point they’re just not that good together, at least not in this setup.

Till is an affirmation of just how much Emmett Till’s life mattered, and continues to matter long beyond his last breath.

The picture is frisky and casual; it doesn’t try to be something it’s not.

The storytelling isn’t always straightforward. But stick with it, go with it, and revel in the pleasure of being spoken to as an adult.

Triangle of Sadness definitely looks like money. But it feels like a luxury item, a picture whose payoff isn’t as grand as you might have hoped. Östlund’s gifts are dazzling. If only he knew when to stop giving.

Just because a movie is based on a true story doesn’t mean you have to fully buy it: The Greatest Beer Run Ever isn’t terrible, and it’s hardly great. But the worst thing you can say about it is that it’s almost as dreamily clueless as its hapless hero is.

What’s wonderful about Bros is how un-different it is.

God’s Creatures is a story about women doing the best they can by one another in a place where the odds are stacked against them. It’s a chilly film but not a heartless one; sometimes the nature of forgiveness is captured best in a small sliver of light.

On the Come Up is a thoughtful and generous-spirited entertainment, and a reminder of how hard it can be, when you’re young, to figure out who you really are.

This is an ambitious, handsome-looking picture that strives to capture the essence of life in the deep South in the mid-20th century in a way that makes movie sense, without excessively romanticizing it.

The beauty of Brett Morgen’s velvet-and-facepaint collage Moonage Daydream is that it doesn’t try to be definitive. Instead, it’s a glide through Bowie’s career, hardly complete yet somehow capturing both the spirit and the genius of this most enigmatic and alluring artist.

This is an action spectacle with a beating heart.

The Eternal Daughter isn’t just a ghost story but a song, sung by a daughter to her mother across a small table at dinner, or across the space that remains when the people we love have left us.

Don’t Worry Darling makes a better entertainment than it does a serious parable.

Farrell brings extra layers of depth and mournfulness to the classic McDonagh pattern. He’s the character you want to protect, and the one who sends your heart sinking when you see him harden, out of necessity, against the world. He gives The Banshees of Inisherin its soul and its beauty. To look at his face is to understand the half-welcoming, half-unforgiving place known as home.

Sometimes an actor can help minimize a director’s shortcomings, and that’s what Fraser does here.

Tár, Field’s first film in 16 years, is extraordinary. It’s also, in places, disconcertingly chilly and remote, possibly the kind of movie that’s easier to love than it is to like. But people will surely be talking about it, and about Blanchett’s performance specifically.

Bones and All is fastidiously romantic. It’s so carefully made, and so lovely to look at, even at its grisliest, that it ends up seeming a little remote, rather than a movie that draws you close.

There’s almost too much going on in Honk for Jesus. The film jumps from one thematic thread to another without exploring any of them thoroughly, and even so, some sequences go on longer than they should.

It’s hard to know exactly what Baumbach is going for here, other than perhaps reminding us that the key to living is just going about your life. But you probably don’t need two hours and 16 minutes’ worth of movie to tell you that.

With the trillions of entertainment options available today, we can all afford to be a little more discriminating in how low we’re willing to stoop, and Me Time sets the bar around ankle height.

Funny Pages still feels slight and only vaguely shaped. Well-observed details are great, but they’ll only take you so far.

If Stigter’s film is at times somber, it’s more often ruefully poetic.

In the end Beast is, frankly, sort of dumb.

A filmmaker can do a lot with this Sliding Doors-style idea; there’s also plenty that could send it careering off the rails. But Look Both Ways has a mild sweetness that makes it go down easy.

Day Shift delivers everything it promises, which isn’t all that much. But Foxx goes above and beyond the call of duty, seemingly without even trying. Before you know it, his shift, and ours, is over, and the time has passed painlessly enough.

Bodies Bodies Bodies is one of those movies that wins you over scene by scene, before sealing the deal with its marvelous, ludicrous ending. See it with a group of friends you love. Or even just low-key resent.

It’s a shrill, razor-shredded mess, a fringy assemblage of action, cartoony violence, and allegedly snappy dialogue that has the soporific effect of white noise. This is proof that too much lousy action is worse than no action at all.

Luckily, we have the benefit of being able to read the future even as we watch Thirteen Lives, and that leaves us free to enjoy Howard’s crackerjack storytelling skills, not to mention the picture’s bracing, casually heroic lead performances.

Vengeance is a small but ambitious film, and the murder mystery is its weakest element: Novak has so many threads going that he doesn’t quite know how to tie them up. But he’s made a shrewd satire that’s a pleasure to watch.

Because Nope, enjoyable as a spectacle but conceptually barely thought through, is all over the place. Peele can’t take just one or two interesting ideas and follow their trail of complexity. He likes to layer ideas into lofty multitextured quilts—the problem is that his most compelling perceptions are often dropped only to be obscured by murkier ones.

This is a story about following one’s dreams and then learning there’s a lesson attached to those dreams—you might catch more than a perfume whiff of sanctimoniousness here. But it’s rare to find movies that value the mere idea of beauty, and this one—directed by Anthony Fabian—does so unapologetically.

The Gray Man inadvertently pulls off a mission you’d think would be impossible: rendering its stars nearly invisible, or at least just people you can’t wait to get away from.

This is a movie that seems to be striving to please a crowd, but its cornpone humility only becomes wearying.

Unfortunately, Persuasion isn’t a great movie, maybe not even a good one. But its problems are failures of filmmaking, not necessarily of adaptation: Cracknell, who has until now worked largely in theater, may make some choices that undermine her aims, but she gives no indication of being careless with the material—her affection for it comes through.