Stephanie Zacharek

Remarkably Bright Creatures is a movie, like its cephalopod supporting star, with a gentle soul and an elusive spirit. It might not stick with you long, but it leaves a delicate print behind.

If you’ve come to The Devil Wears Prada 2 looking for laughs, be prepared for a feathery fringe of existential angst on the side. Yet I'd argue that that makes The Devil Wears Prada 2 more pleasurable than less.

Apex fails to work either as a vehicle for sick thrills or an excuse for lots of feminist butt-kicking.

To deny Jackson’s complexity only flattens his genius—as well as his kindness and fragility—into something manageable, explainable. In the end, Michael does the same.

Normal may not be groundbreaking, but it does come equipped with a wicked spirit and some great B-movie energy.

If Lorne is nothing else, it’s a portrait of a guy who knows when to zig and when to zag.

Mother Mary, arty and self-conscious, is just a slog. It works hard to impress us with its slinky weirdness, which isn’t the same as simply being weird.

Beautiful young people, stunning scenery, and—did I mention?—unreally gorgeous tomatoes: none of these are negligible movie pleasures, and You, Me & Tuscany—directed by Kat Coiro and written by husband-and-wife team Ryan Engle and Kristin Engle—serves them up unapologetically.

Reeves’ presence in any movie tends to be a sort of salve; even with bad material, he generally coasts by on his laid-back radiance. But not even Reeves can put an adequate shine on Outcome, a satire that takes one spindly premise and grinds it down to a nub.

Simultaneously meticulous and casual, it’s the kind of movie only a master filmmaker could have made—though it's doubtful Soderbergh, perpetually moving away from one movie and toward the next, thinks of himself as a master filmmaker at all.

It’s worth half your attention. You might use the other half to mourn the memory of what movies, even enjoyably mediocre ones, used to be.

Gosling is such a human, and humane, actor, that he can easily mirror the humanity of a creature who’s not even human—one who doesn’t even have a face. Together, these two are unbeatable, and they also represent an old-fashioned ideal of what the movies used to mean to us.

It’s an intellectual joyride without the joy.

Luhrmann has sourced some rare Super 8 footage from the Graceland archives. This newfound footage, painstakingly restored, forms the fabric of EPiC, which, despite Luhrmann’s penchant for hurtling over the top—or maybe even because of it—manages to feel profoundly intimate.

Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a bleak book, but it’s not an ugly one: beneath its cloud cover of misanthropy, there’s feral, wildflower grace. Fennell has tossed all of that out, substituting her own unimaginative vision, plus a bunch of crappy dresses.

Pillion is tender in a sneaky way: without judgment, it reckons with the things humans want, in bed or outside of it, and are sometimes afraid to ask for. It’s also in tune with the reality that we’re not born knowing everything about ourselves—and where’s the fun in that, anyway?

The Bone Temple is part satisfying triumph, part missed opportunity, and its pluses and minuses bump against one another in jangly discord.

The Dardennes’ movies have a gentle uniformity, which is why they often slip through the cracks among flashier pictures vying for our attention. But Young Mothers is among the best of their films, so empathetically understated that its full power may not hit you until hours after you’ve watched it.

No Other Choice is both too dully observed and too aggressively slapsticky to hit its mark. It’s a missed opportunity dressed up with proficient filmmaking.

The Testament of Ann Lee is unimaginable with any other actress—but then again, it’s unimaginable, period, a movie that takes big chances in a culture that, most days, seems allergic to them.

A bittersweet feel-good movie is perhaps the best kind.

It’s the kind of story that was made for the intimacy of the movie theater, and for the possibly lost tradition known as movie-date night. As ambitions go, that’s a pretty noble one.

Cameron’s vision is no longer the future, but a nostalgia trip, a very expensive form of deja vu. Movie magic can take many forms, but rarely is it as calculated as this, confusing awe with stupor.

As with the previous two Knives Out installments, the conclusion is almost beside the point. It’s the getting there that matters, and the twisty road of Wake Up Dead Man is dotted with offhanded jokes and one-liners that are occasionally extremely witty.

Through it all, we’re supposed to relish the emotional complexity of the story, or maybe even just its dark humor. Amorality can be fun, but Marty Supreme has no emotional core—though it does try to grab us in its final minutes, when Marty is unrealistically redeemed in a moment of mawkish sentimentality.

It's Mescal who gives the movie’s surprise stealth performance.

Train Dreams is stunning to look at, the kind of film where each blade of grass, each jagged tree branch, each mini ripple of a rushing river, seems to sing out as an individual. Yet somehow, none of these images come off as overdone or fetishistic. What Bentley keys into, above all else, are his actors, particularly Edgerton.

Life is too short for leaden fanfiction liked Wicked: For Good, an extravagant picture that’s not nearly as imaginative as it thinks it is.

The Running Man, directed by Edgar Wright and adapted from Stephen King’s 1982 novel of the same name, is dark all right. It’s also garishly obvious, and though it grabs for laughs here and there, it has almost zero wit.

Sentimental Value is a drama about one family, but it could also be a message in a bottle for the greater world. Larkin, a proto-punk, poked fun at the way humans, just by procreating, pass their worst traits to their children and beyond, through infinity. Trier has much more hope, and his tender punk manifesto echoes something the English clergyman and historian Thomas Fuller said more than three centuries ago: Charity begins at home, but it shouldn’t end there.

Peter Hujar’s Day captures that elusive feeling of the past catching up with the present, in a city alive with whispering ghosts.

Ballad of a Small Player is only modestly entertaining, its allure as false as the neon promise of the high-rolling city it’s set in.

Blue Moon is both a modest movie and a dazzling, generous work.

It often feels less than dynamic, perhaps a little inert. But then, sometimes it’s what a movie doesn’t show that matters. We all think we know the truth of Bruce Springsteen. Doesn’t he belong to us, after all? Deliver Me from Nowhere shows us another truth, the sound of a ghost captured on a length of tape.

If you’re not already familiar with the play, you may find yourself a little lost in Hedda—or perhaps just bored.

The movie's tone counts for a lot: it's silly and funny, and you never feel you're trapped in a civics lecture. Good Fortune is amiable, but it also has some bite.

The Mastermind is a sneaky, undulating movie; it’s perhaps even less direct than Reichardt’s usual brand of sly, behind-the-beat filmmaking. But O’Connor’s slippery charms hold the picture steady.

A seemingly straightforward story about an addict barely holding his life together on the streets of London, Urchin is effective because of all the things it doesn’t do: there are no grand revelations, no horrific bottoming-out or OD moments. We’re simply left alone with an addict and his feelings—or, occasionally, his seeming lack of them.

Derek Cianfrance’s based-on-true-life caper Roofman feels like a mainstream studio movie from 10 or 15 years ago, and that’s a good thing.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is hardly full-on punishment, and in places it’s bitterly funny. But in the end, it’s an enormous relief to walk away from Linda’s problems. Our own don’t seem so bad in comparison.

Kogonada’s spiky-sweet romantic fantasy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a case in point: perched halfway between crowd-pleasing Hallmark romance—not a pejorative, by the way—and loo-loo surrealist experiment, it’s not quite enough of either, a movie reaching for something beyond its grasp.

Over and over, Him both shows and tells, when one or the other would be enough. It’s the kind of movie that leaves you feeling indifferent rather than chilled to the bone, clobbered into numbness with good intentions.

This is a comedy with grim underpinnings, set in a society where violence seems to be the only answer. Anderson doesn’t find that exhilarating—if anything, he’s despairing about it—yet he soldiers on, pinpointing some truths so somber and dismal that it hurts to laugh about them.

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale transports you to a time and place that seems so much more glamorous than our own, and to see it all splashed out on the big screen is almost overwhelming. It’s a genteel fantasy worth leaving the couch for.

The good news is that Spinal Tap II mostly builds on the legacy of the earlier film, instead of just recycling its best jokes for nostalgia’s sake.

The picture is precise, potent, and ingeniously constructed. But even though it focuses on the nuts and bolts of how the United States government might respond to a nuclear attack, there’s something ghostly and unreal about it too. Without spelling anything out in detail, it lays bare all sorts of global realities we don’t want to think about.

These characters don’t always behave as we want them to; they feel lived-in, not written, with flaws and attributes that chime with things we see in our family, our friends, ourselves.

[Guadagnino] has made some gorgeous, stirring movies—I Am Love and Queer among them—but After the Hunt feels more like an artistic thesis, and despite its needling provocations, it offers fewer cerebral pleasures than he thinks.

The grand scale of this Frankenstein is unavoidable; what it’s lacking is intimacy.

Cumberbatch and Colman make it all believable, their jokes pinging off one another with delightful, rancorous buoyancy.

There’s nothing overtly dislikable about the film, and there are a handful of scenes that are beautifully written, acted, and directed. But Jay Kelly feels more sentimental than truly thoughtful, particularly in the motif that resounds like a clanging bell in Jay’s brain: Why didn’t I spend more time with my kids?

The world isn’t pretty, and Lanthimos is sounding the alarm. If only he would tell us something we don’t already know.

It’s one of those movies you watch not necessarily for its whodunnit complexities, but for the pleasure of watching a group of actors having fun, in a storybook English-countryside setting complete with happy, well-kept flower beds and cemeteries dotted with gravestones both ancient and new.

Freakier Friday is a movie that manages to humiliate everybody. And it appears to exist largely for one reason: to grift off the fondness many adults have for the original, even though the sequel has none of that picture’s breezy, observant charm.

As a character, Siegel and Shuster’s creation deserves better than Gunn’s Superman. And that’s unfortunate, because we probably need a great Superman now more than ever.

Edwards (director of 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the 2014 Godzilla) and Koepp (who wrote the scripts for the first two Jurassic Park movies) know what they’re doing here: they locate the perfect ratio of human business to dinosaur antics, favoring the dinosaurs when in doubt.

[Hargitay]'s unruly secrets reflect the uncomfortable truths that are so often hidden in our own histories.

This is a sort-of comedy about personal trauma, a delicate line to walk—and Victor mostly pulls it off.

This is an ambitious picture, filled with grand ideas. Parts of it are wondrously beautiful; some sections are so mawkishly morbid they might make you groan. But at least you won’t be bored.

Materialists is more bittersweet than sweet—which is what makes it so wonderful, in a wistful, elusive way.

It all boils down to the actor, and how good he is at vibing with universal aging-guy feelings, including the realization that your grandest achievements may be behind you. Brad Pitt, at 61, has finally aged into roles like these. And sometimes, as F1 proves, they’re the best thing that can happen to a guy.

The pleasures of Ballerina are both blunt and fleeting; you’re not going to remember the plot—or any of the performances, perhaps save one—five minutes after the end credits role. But the picture’s cartoonish brutality is cathartic.

From its cute-fake soundstage-town setting to the authoritative yet chummy voice-over narration (courtesy of Nick Offerman), The Life of Chuck works doggedly to give you the warm fuzzies—and a little bit of that fuzz goes a long way.

What Lawrence does in Die, My Love is so delicately textured, even within its bold expressiveness, and its fiery anger, that it leaves you scrambling for adjectives. It’s the kind of performance you go to the movies for, one that connects so sympathetically with the bare idea of human suffering that it scares you a little.

It’s smart, hugely entertaining, and profound in a way that’s anything but sentimental.

The Phoenician Scheme has none of the lavish, kooky excess of, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel. And the plot, with its fixation on intricate, not-quite-cricket business deals, is—let’s just come out and say it—boring. But Anderson seems to be expressing an indistinct dissatisfaction with the current world order in the best way he can: in a parade of color that’s somehow less colorful than usual.

It’s a picture that stands strong on the side of art, of history, of working to solve the puzzle of things that maybe at first you don’t fully understand. It’s both a shout of joy and a call to arms. It’s all about the bold, muscular act of caring.

If this wigged-out modern Western doesn’t quite work, it’s at the very least a cry of vexation over what our country, messy at the best of times, has become, thanks to a virus that found its way not just into our lungs, but into our very lifeblood. Dr. Aster has listened in on America’s heartbeat; the diagnosis is that we’re basically a mess.

It’s big, extravagant, and at times very beautiful to look at. The story is the problem: packed with expository dialogue, it feels as if it were written to be digested in 10- or 15-minute bites.

How much Tim Robinson is too much? Maybe the exact amount you get in Friendship, the feature debut of writer-director Andrew DeYoung.

The Accountant 2 is not, and is not trying to be, a movie about the realities of autism. Even so, it challenges us to think about how our brains work, why we do and say the things we do—and to recognize that even though we may think there’s a normal way to respond to social cues, not everyone is wired the same way.

What makes Sinners, set in 1932 Clarksdale Mississippi, so effective—so chilling, so hypnotic, and occasionally so grimly funny—is the way it yields to mystery, never seeking to overexplain.

It’s a fun, open-hearted picture, and even if it lacks the wistful subtlety of the original, it ends up on the same landing note: the people we love best are always worth fighting for.

A movie that does little more than tick off a selection of action-movie boxes—though some of them are at least ticked off with a satisfying click.

If The Amateur is unremarkable, it’s also efficient and effective, and sometimes all you need is a movie that gets the job done.

If a movie can be elegant and brutal at once, this one is: the dissipating smoke from the grenade hangs in the air, a pinkish-gold mist; polka dots of sunlight stream through a scattering of bullet holes in a door.

It’s the kind of movie that miraculously makes you feel better about everything.

Mostly, though, Death of a Unicorn just feels like exhausting, enforced fun: its plot goes everywhere all at once for no discernible reason. All the actors are appealing and engaged with the task at hand, but they're at the mercy of an unfocused plot.

It’s convenient to grumble about updates that mess with the classics, but there’s nothing in the new Snow White that dishonors the earlier Disney version. If anything, it reminds us why we loved it.

The time may feel right for a wry dystopian sci-fi adventure-comedy. But as satires go, this one is more mild than habanero.

Black Bag succeeds on its chilly wit, and on the cool, nervy appeal of its two stars. Blanchett strides through the movie with lioness grace; Fassbender makes George’s robotic use of logic seem like an aphrodisiac.

There’s something safe and cozy about Mad About the Boy that made me long for the unruliness of the first film.

In an age of chaos, what we really need is focus, and You’re Cordially Invited chases down every distraction in sight.

Presence follows you home, long after the camera has stopped rolling.

There’s something about A Complete Unknown that pushes against traditional Dylan worship and cuts a path toward something far more beautiful, flawed, and human.

No matter what you take away from writer-director Halina Reijn’s daring, alluring, and ultimately joyful Babygirl, one idea flutters around it like a potent perfume cloud: both desire and the memory of it are what make us feel alive.

Nickel Boys is a picture on the move, a work that’s traveling forward, the thing we always ask for yet often don’t know how to accept when it arrives.

That’s the magic of Leigh; it’s white magic, not the dark kind, drawing out compassion we almost don’t want to feel.

The film’s rhythms occasionally falter—this is Malcolm Washington’s feature debut, and it's an ambitious project for a beginner. But the inherent strength of the material always shines through, largely thanks to Deadwyler.

Even if Gladiator II is essentially an unapologetic retread of its predecessor, all of these actors are fun to watch—though none stands taller, literally or figuratively, than Denzel Washington, as slave-turned-schemer Macrinus.

For a movie whose chief anthem is an advertisement for the joys of defying gravity, Wicked is surprisingly leaden, with a promise of more of the same to come.

Now that those rights are even more imperiled than before, a movie like Emilia Pérez—one that, instead of pleading for trans acceptance merely treats it as a given—feels even more like movie fireworks, fierce and glorious, a radical act of the imagination with kindness in its heart.

This is a movie about the way resilience can blossom from vulnerability. No child asks to be a victim of war; sometimes survival, with your soul intact, is the best possible outcome.

In Berger’s hands, it all works a treat, right up to the movie’s shockeroo surprise ending. Berger’s 2022 All Quiet on the Western Front won the Best International Feature Oscar, and he guides this film, too, with a sure and steady hand.

We need good melodramas, especially ones with elements of romantic comedy built in, and I wanted to love We Live in Time. But its cracks kept coming to the fore.

This is a story about a seemingly unforgiving landscape that’s actually giving back every minute, once Rona reopens herself to its windswept language.

Intentions don’t equal fully fledged works, and Folie à Deux stumbles on nearly all fronts. Even if the movie’s ambitions are admirable, you might end up too bored to care.

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