Stephanie Zacharek

As an amusement designed to take the world’s mind off its problems for a few hours, Wonder Woman 1984 is perfectly suitable. But it’s also OK to wish for less noise and more wonder, especially in a world that’s filled with the former and sorely in need of the latter.

Your enjoyment of Black Bear will depend on your tolerance for cerebral game-playing for art’s sake. But if the movie is sometimes a little too hung up on its somewhat tortured premise, it still offers some subtle, dusky pleasures. Chief among them is Plaza’s performance.

Hillbilly Elegy isn’t as terrible as the trailers make it look, but as an enterprise it’s just all-around sad, a movie that courts sympathy for its characters yet ends up only as a requiem for itself.

Mangrove, too, tells a sometimes harrowing real-life story. Yet it has a lightness of touch that McQueen hasn’t shown before. Mangrove, as is all of Small Axe, is personal for McQueen — he is of West Indian descent himself — and his affection for these characters, as well as his passion for their cause, ignites his telling of their story.

The surprises of The Life Ahead are the gentle kind: There are no wild revelations or transformations, no hyper-dramatic turnabouts. But the movie has a quietly enjoyable power.

For all its intelligence, Mank isn’t anything close to a masterpiece; it’s more a pleasurable feat of derring-do, a movie made with care and cunning and peopled by actors who know exactly what they’re doing.

There’s no tortured drama, no grand revelation. The movie is funny in the gentlest way, and how could it not be? Coppola’s script is built around Murray’s deadpan savoir faire, with Jones’ forthright radiance as a foil.

If Borat Subsequent Moviefilm makes you laugh, what does your laughter say about you? My laughter told me — reminded me — how angry I am. As 2020 rounds to a close, I have zero sympathy for white Americans who are happy to show kindness to a stranger — just as long as that stranger, too, is white.

Wheatley — who specializes in thrillers with a macabre vibe, like "Kill List" (2011) and "High-Rise" (2015) — overhandles and overworks the dough of Du Maurier’s basic story. His movie is sometimes dumb, sometimes dull and sometimes entertaining; it just doesn’t know what it wants to be, and that lack of vision drains its potential power.

With seamless grace, Zimny matches vintage footage of Springsteen and the band with their current-day versions; we see how the young faces have blended into the old. Aging, because it means surviving, is the best.

A work of great joy and expressiveness, a tower of song with room for everybody.

It’s a love letter to the gorgeous, disorderly patchwork that is New York. It’s also a story about how we all need to reinvent ourselves as we age, and part of that is to be more forgiving of ourselves.

Charm City Kings lands on an elegiac, bittersweet note rather than a happy one, and doesn’t feature as many crazy, exhilarating bike stunts as you might hope. But in its view of a world where kids make their own fun and also, sometimes, their own bad choices, it rings true. Sometimes becoming a man is the hardest stunt to pull off.

Johnson and her father share a sense of humor, and the bond between them informs the finest moments of Dick Johnson Is Dead. Yet I can’t stop thinking about the friend crying, alone, in the church, so verklempt he forgot he was in a movie — one place where this documentary’s joyful dark humor isn’t as amusing as it should be.

Save Yourselves! was completed well before the pandemic hit—it played at Sundance in January — but it’s one of those works that has magically landed at the right time. It takes itself just seriously enough, but not too seriously.

The Boys in the Band is anything but a relic. This version, produced by Ryan Murphy and performed by the same cast that appeared in the play’s 2018 revival on Broadway, is like an unusually strong telescope, giving us a clear and vivid view into a not-so-distant past.

Its thoughtfulness somehow shines through its heavy-duty stylistic quirks. And it has a breezier, more relaxed vibe than either of July’s earlier movies thanks to one glorious, effervescent performance: when Gina Rodriguez appears, she turns the picture around — it begins to truly breathe — and she carries it along straight to the end. If you see Kajillionaire for no other reason, see it for her.

Sorkin takes a rather dense, complicated court case—one peopled with figures who clung to stubborn differences even in the context of their shared ideals—and keeps it aloft every minute, as if he were following the aerodynamic principles of hang-gliding rather than moviemaking. Best of all, he brings out the best each actor in this enormous ensemble cast has to offer; every character is rendered with jewelers-loupe clarity.

Bush and Renz keep careful control over the tone: this is a tense, thoughtful picture that seeks both to entertain and provoke, rather than to simply punish its audience. It’s also very clearly a work of cathartic fantasy-horror with an underpinning in history, not a historical document, and it leans hard into its pulp sensibilities.

The Devil All the Time is just a pileup of awful people doing terrible things, for no reason other than to prove how wretched humans can be. The template is pure Southern Gothic, but without the subtlety of top-drawer practitioners of the genre, like Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.

Nomadland isn’t a manifesto — there’s nothing dutifully somber about it. And although it doesn’t romanticize life on the road — for one thing, it shows that you need to be comfortable defecating in a bucket — joyousness is its chief characteristic. Like "The Rider," it’s a window into a specific world, with one key character as a guide.

Unpregnant is ultimately about the people who have our backs when the rest of the world seems to be pushing against us — in other words, the families we choose for ourselves.

Brings honor to its predecessor, but it’s somehow lacking in joy.

For every moment of raw, affecting insight there are zillions of milliseconds of Kaufman’s proving what a tortured smartie he is. I’m Thinking of Ending Things must have been arduous to make, and it’s excruciatingly tedious to watch.

What people want from Bill & Ted Face the Music matters a lot less than what it actually is, a crazy, imperfect but deeply gratifying burst of optimism at the end of what has been — inarguably — a terrible summer. Its ramshackle earnestness, its certainty about nothing beyond the fact that we need to get our act together as human beings, is its great strength.

Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield may not be perfect, but it is alive, at least partly because of its perceptive, jaunty casting and fine performances.

Lingua Franca — which made a splash at the Venice Film Festival last year, the first film by a trans woman to be featured at the festival — is a gorgeous and delicate picture, an understated work that opens a window on an intimate world.

Chemical Hearts never pretends that getting through teenagerhood is easy or fun. But if Grace and Henry can survive the perils of first love, there’s got to be hope for the rest of us. Reliving all that anxiety makes adulthood in the modern age look better — at least a little.