Vince Mancini

Portrait of a Lady on Fire doesn’t shout at you. It whispers gently from the porch of another house, leaving its message to be carried on the breeze.

It’s a remarkable work of feral filmmaking that makes everything else feel domesticated by comparison.

Suffice it to say, there’s very little flash to Little Women and a whole lot substance. It doesn’t scream what it is. It nurtures our appreciation gradually so that when we finally realize that we’re truly in love, it feels that much sweeter. It’s one of the most successful adaptations I’ve seen in a long time.

I find myself at a bit of a loss when trying to explain exactly what about it had me so engaged, probably for the same reasons Julie can’t seem to decide on a career. The Worst Person In The World feels like life. And how do you sum up a life?

Licorice Pizza seems to further all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s pet themes while adding a personal twist, and at this early stage it’s hard to think of it as anything other than a masterpiece.

There’s a lot of beauty in First Cow, I just wish I could turn the volume up a little.

Through its personal approach and creative structure, Dick Johnson Is Dead manages to make reckoning with a loved one’s mortality not just entertaining, but oddly uplifting. The empathy and humanity it applies to death make it, above all else, life-affirming.

The Father is brilliantly structured and executed, but in the end it’s just a cleverly constructed way to depict the mundane. It never finds that level of the fantastic or allows for the kind of magical thinking necessary to escape its dreary reality. Ultimately it wallows in the pathetic. Who needs this?

Its power is in the way it says that injustice isn’t out of place in a heartwarming family drama; it’s part and parcel to these characters’ experience, to being black in America. Like the blues, Beale Street can soothe even as it tells a disturbing story. It’s easily one of the best of the year.

Mission Impossible: Fallout is not a triumph of literal realism, orderly plotting, or restraint, but it’s proof that thoughtful execution, comedic timing, and a true moral center count for much more.

Flaws aside, Gyllenhaal genuinely feels like a new voice as a storyteller, and not just an actor stretching, which is a rare thing.

Probably the most notable thing Infinity Pool does is solidify Mia Goth’s position as the undisputed scream queen of arthouse horror. Goth could never be accused of not “going for it,” and just like in Pearl, she consistently steals scenes in freaky and unexpected ways, sans visible eyebrows. It’s not quite enough to make Infinity Pool anything approaching great, but it’s enough to make it watchable.

First Reformed is bleak and bone dry, a little self-indulgent, and it screams neither “fun” nor “production values.” It is the opposite of a “romp.” But damned if it doesn’t stay with you.

The beauty of Green Knight is that it’s so fully realized on every level — score, cinematography, production design, acting — that even when you don’t know entirely what Lowery is on about you can’t look away. It’s almost as if every individual shot has a narrative arc unto itself. It’s so compelling on a micro level that the “big picture” becomes irrelevant.

Eighth Grade is both a stunning achievement in cinematic veracity and maybe not the best watch for anyone who’s spent their adult life trying to forget middle school. It’s so traumatic and awkward and embarrassing that there were times I wanted to retreat back inside my own body.

Ever the canny salesman, The Fabelmans is mostly a clever mix of things the audience has seen and expects, with enough new to tantalize without scaring anyone off. It’s nice to see Spielberg finally giving us a bit of himself, even if it could be more.

Once Upon A Time may be a more languid journey than usual, but it gets to a familiar place eventually. In a way Tarantino has turned himself into the kind of Spaghetti Western anti-hero that’s always obsessed him — flawed but ultimately triumphant. I’m still happy to be along for the ride.

Booksmart’s version of specificity mostly feels like old tropes sporting new stickers. It seems to take place in this weird bubble, where everyone is sexy and Yale-bound and achingly cool (even its supposedly uncool protagonist is the class president). That it never really acknowledges this makes you wonder if the filmmakers know it exists.

Toy Story 4 works overtime to find the humanity in all its characters, even the scary ones, despite the fact that it exists in a world of sentient toys and anthropomorphic garbage. That is not only endearingly sweet, but kind of wild.

If you always had a vague sense of Wes Anderson’s real-life inspirations, watching Fire Of Love is like seeing them suddenly rack into focus. It’s like the Kraffts sprung directly from his psyche. And if Anderson’s twee bullshit never worked on you before, this time it just might, because this eccentric love story with the bittersweet ending is more than just a style choice.

A lean heist movie with this cast could’ve been an incredible thing, and the performances alone keep Widows from ever being too boring. But the story got away from them on this one. A movie that’s about too much ends up being about nothing.

Turning Red is fun and sweet and strange, and really, what more could you ask of it?

Some of the men’s fancies are beautifully visualized (including what I will describe only as an extremely vaginal apparition), but they remain just that — fancies. It’s never clear that what’s happening in the men’s wizened heads alters the world outside it.

In BlacKkKlansman you sense Lee’s passion more than his technique. In a welcome surprise, it’s also funny. It’s easily Lee’s most crowd-pleasing movie in years, almost to a fault.

Palm Springs is the perfect kind of art-comedy. It comes on like a brilliantly silly little lark and eventually lands on you like a ton of bricks.

It’s an impressive movie in many ways, dizzyingly complex and intensely brainy, but if you don’t buy into the complex plot and its many (MANY) twists, they tend to be more tiresome than exhilarating. It’s a loving, labyrinthine homage to a genre I’m not sure deserves it.

The beauty of Pig, the new Michael Sarnoski movie starring Nic Cage as a bedraggled truffle forager, is that while it is utterly bonkers, it’s not bonkers in any of the traditional ways that we’ve come to expect. It’s quietly bonkers, meditative and subdued, rather than loud and frenetic.

Few directors are better at endings, at tying things up in a neat little bow like Wes Anderson, and Isle of Dogs, like many of his movies, ends strongly enough that you’ll forgive a little dragging, a bit of narrative floundering, throughout the middle section.

The Northman is Shakespeare, but it’s also a movie about muscular shirtless men growling at each other. For me, it was near to perfect.

What makes Everything Everywhere work is not that it’s zany, it’s that it actually finds a purpose for its zaniness, or least tries to. The Daniels are provocateurs, brilliant technical filmmakers. More importantly, they actually strive not to be full of shit. God bless them.

It’s the rare riff on Shakespeare that actually feels like a living story and not something to be tacked to the wall like a tapestry.

Can a movie be simultaneously infuriating and inspiring? Ad Astra (“to the stars” in Latin, because the kids love Latin) is director James Gray’s biggest, boldest, most ambitious and epic film to date, and easily his best. And yet… you know how some filmmakers seem simpático and others just rub you the wrong way? Gray is the latter for me.

7 Prisoners refuses to cheat, almost to a fault. (It’s art, you’re allowed to cheat a little). That makes it slightly disappointing in the end, but not enough to undo what an adroit snapshot it is of the way exploitation thwarts organization and dulls its opposition.

It proudly exists on a visceral, sub-verbal level; that’s part of the magic of it. It’s a movie that’s easy to spoil and hard to describe, where mystery is most of the point and interpretation tends to cheapen. Which is to say: just go see it.

The vague title is a tell. There’s the general tone of uncovering something shocking and nefarious, but Bad Education is far more interesting when it’s sympathetic toward its stated villains.

If you scratch the surface, Buster Scruggs gets to the root of what the Coen Brothers’ work is about, and what it’s always been about.

The Highwaymen seems to want to be reactionary but comes off merely crotchety.

Hustlers is solid, with fantastic performances, but it’s so similar to so many scam movies that came before it that it suffers a little from the expectation that it will go further.

Puzzle is one of those rare movies whose acting is so good it elevates a mediocre story.

It offers, mainly, the vague sense that this is all supposed to be a fresh and intriguing way of telling a story. And this intrigue is meant to be enough for us not to mind that the characters are all ciphers performing a series of illusory bits and homages amidst a frozen wasteland. This dearth of recognizable humanity and situations made me feel, presumably Kaufman-like, trapped inside my own head, both lonely and bored.

While Roadrunner is a love letter to Bourdain and a nostalgic watch for all of us who thought we saw something of ourselves in him, it’s also a comment on our inability to truly know anyone else. In that sense, it’s a fitting tribute to its subject, a man who tried assiduously not to present himself as someone who had all the answers.

Just when you think Barbarian can’t get any sillier or further from the promise of its intriguing premise, it does, in a way I had to sort of begrudgingly respect. It feels like Zach Cregger really had something here and couldn’t quite figure out what to do with it and then just started flailing. But that flailing is so transparent and unabashed that it’s almost a kind of performance art.

A movie with this strong of a message can easily come off preachy, self-righteous, and didactic, but Riley’s sense of humor and flair for absurdity save it from any of that. Boots Riley feels compelled to say but doesn’t presume to know. He has a way of dreaming rather than grandstanding, of pondering rather than prescribing.

1917 is a movie’s movie, more showpiece than insight, a kind of flashy sizzle reel of The Great War’s horrors. It will rattle your speakers but probably not your soul. Nothing wrong with that, but better to know going in.

Babyteeth, from director Shannon Murphy and writer Rita Kalnejais, always keeps us half a step off balance. Their film has that a sense of casual naughtiness, a straightforward love of innocent mischief common to the best Australian movies, which in this case serves to leaven the central tragedy.

We know what we’re getting with this particular genre, and The Marksman, starring Neeson as a Texas rancher protecting a young boy from drug cartels, is a perfectly adequate exercise in providing it. If it lacks some of the panache and grindhouse appeal of previous installments, it also avoids the xenophobia and general mean-spiritedness.

Empire of Light, by and large, strikes me as one of those stories that maybe started out as a bit of a corny idea, the kernel of it something like this monologue, but in the course of writing it, the characters became real enough that they sort of took on a life of their own. Which is exactly what’s supposed to happen, at that point you can throw out the initial pitch. Empire of Light creates this beautiful relationship that defies all categorization.

Dolemite Is My Name is escapism, but it’s also not mindless escapism.

Baker’s indelible portrait has the natural rebelliousness of characters who refuse to perform the societal script they’ve been handed.

White Tiger subverts expectations right up until the very end, self-consciously commenting on what it doesn’t do as much as what it does. In that way White Tiger allows other stories to define it maybe more than it should.

If 1917 (and to some extent, War Horse) were stories of survival, gussied up with big technical gimmicks, All Quiet On The Western Front is an even more visually beautiful film that never lets you forget the main point about The Great War: that it was A Bad Idea That Ended Badly. Berger drives this point home studiously, meticulously, poetically, and by the end, a little repetitively.

Hand of God is a charming, frequently funny coming-of-age tale shot so exquisitely that it would make any Italian-American angry at his ancestors.

Spencer treats Diana as if she was kidnapped into all this, being held against her will. It depicts her life as such a demeaning, excruciating, maddening spectacle that you wonder why she doesn’t just leave. That Diana was a prisoner is a perspective meant to flatter that actually flattens.

As always, it’s impossible not to be impressed with Soderbergh’s ability to stage and shoot a scene, a talent he has historically put to use in some of my favorite stories (The Knick, for instance). But when he uses that talent to just sort of breeze through a rough draft story before flitting off to the next project, it’s a kind of disrespect to the subject.

King Richard is another kooky success story that never really interrogates what it means to be successful.

It’s not quite horror, crime, or comedy — it really just is “fantastic,” in every sense of the word.

Extraction is constant, hyper-stylized murders and maimings, shot clearly and intelligently without too much unnecessary plot. It’s exactly what I’d been missing about action movies.

There’s a gulf between Pacifiction‘s promise and the crushing burden it is to actually sit through — which is numbing and banal in a way that doesn’t inspire flowery prose. It mostly inspires curmudgeonly grumbling (foreshadowing…).

Mostly it’s just a joy to watch these two actors face off in front of grand tapestries and stunning frescos. Two Popes has a gentle but winning sense of humor, and the two make an adorable couple.

Fifty Shades Freed is meant to make us believe that a matching tea towel marriage doesn’t preclude shirtless Fabio romance novel cover sex, but everything is so catalog-ready and scrubbed free of humanity that it actually does the opposite.

The French Dispatch feels like a confident and even vulnerable exploration of Anderson’s own psyche; it’s his best film in at least a decade.

Benedetta is the rare, almost miraculous, really, two-hour-plus movie (131 minutes, to be precise) that only seems to get better in its second hour. The momentum builds and builds until the action comes to a glorious crescendo.

The Tully character is a perfect outlet for Cody’s writing. One of Cody’s most charming attributes is her flair for small wisdoms. There’s some sneaky trenchant life analysis happening throughout Tully, which is what keeps the every day family stuff from feeling mundane or self-indulgent.

Blindspotting excels at capturing a feeling and expressing it with style and kitsch, but there are times when you wonder what new insight they’re offering beyond the rhymes.

I’m not entirely certain I understand what Titane is, but I’m convinced that all movies could stand to be a little more like Titane.

To say that I was mildly disappointed in Jackass Forever is true. To say that I spent the entire movie screaming, stomping my feet, covering my face with my hands, and squealing with joy, and would’ve happily sat through another 90 minutes of it is also true.

It’s an imagery-first kind of film, and it delivers quite a few that are probably going to stick with me for a while.

It’s an immersive, transporting, intriguing, fully-realized world that we can enjoy spending time in without rating against our ideas of which characters should “win” in that world. I don’t know how this story plays out but for now I’m content to bask in the spice glow.

The movie glows. And yet, something about this coming-of-age tale feels transparently self-preserving, trapped in an adolescent’s point of view. It offers a story about race where everyone gets off too easily, where it seems the most important thing a white person can do is to acknowledge that racism exists while carrying on.

It ends up being pleasant enough and occasionally pretty funny but not quite a romp.

Sylvie’s Love is heartbreaking and heart melting in almost equal measure, a film about professional disappointment and the importance of timing as much as it’s about love. I haven’t been so emotionally wrecked sitting alone at a festival movie since Brooklyn. Sylvie’s Love is damn near perfect

Crazy Rich Asians is just really easy to watch. It’s formulaic, but doesn’t cheat; has insanely low stakes, but transparently so. It’s a kitschy pop song done very well.

Some Kind Of Heaven is a surreal, visually sublime slice of life that offers escapism and subverts it in the same breath, an enduring portrait of a particular subculture the likes of which I haven’t seen probably since Wildwood, NJ. I spent virtually the entire 83 minutes laughing, slapping my forehead, or both.

Miss Juneteenth is a promising debut feature in a lot of ways, but like a lot of tweener indies, it has trouble transcending its own pitch.

Some movies provoke and challenge, others are just fun as hell. The World Is Yours is firmly among the latter, feeling “Hollywood” in all the best ways, though it’s also sneaky smart. If you have any friends that hate arthouse movies and refuse to read subtitles, this is the movie to convert them.

A lot of movies are funny, but very few are funny on a cellular level. Few announce themselves as something different from the very first frames. Even most good comedies are mostly built from familiar situations and people, but Funny Pages is that rare breed; bewildering and strange before its characters even begin speaking and projecting its inherent twistedness with every aspect of its construction.

Honey Boy crystallizes everything Shia Labeouf’s performance art persona from 2009 until now seemed to be trying to say: that authenticity and authorship are dull considerations compared to insight and emotional truth.

M3GAN is a pretty pitch-perfect satire, of both parenting in the age of predatory technology, and of the tech industry itself. Both of which tend to pit convenience and luxury against mental health and a right to privacy.

The Death Of Dick Long is a fantastic movie but also a wonderful lesson in storytelling. Every person believes deep down that they’re the hero of their own story. Treating them that way, as people and not punchlines, paradoxically makes for much better punchlines.

Only The Brave (or, The Granite Mountain Hot Shots, the vastly superior title by which it was originally known), feels like the world’s best two-hour beer and/or pick-up truck commercial, and I mean that as a compliment.

Candyman is certainly elevated in terms of acting and of composition (with fittingly spooky shots of the Chicago skyline), it was just hard to appreciate much of the action on a visceral level.

Every shot in Midsommar is such a feast for the senses that you’re happy to go wherever it takes you — a sunshine-and-flowers-filled waking nightmare.

What started as this slightly subversive send-up eventually descends into the usual convoluted savin’-the-world nonsense.

Movies that make you think are great, but most of our finest filmmakers attempt that (even sometimes when they shouldn’t). With Leigh Whannell, we have a hyper-competent craftsman who seems like he’d rather make us shit our pants. It’s nice.

The Batman wants so badly to be hard boiled, to be “a vibe,” but it attempts to squeeze in so much that it feels frantic.

Searching has a big performance and a big gimmick, and it’s hard to say which is the bigger discovery.

It’s a perfectly-cooked cheeseburger of a movie, which isn’t trying to be foie gras seared on a hot rock over a bed of foraged botanicals, but in which every element — bun, patty, cheese, veg — is lovingly prepared, perfectly executed, and working together in perfect harmony.

Onward is a perfectly fine movie made up of elements of Guardians of the Galaxy, Zootopia, Coco, Wall E, and assorted other Disney products that it doesn’t employ quite as well. Your kids probably won’t notice, but you will.

The plot makes you study each frame intently, and the execution of each shot is so effective that your eyes never get bored. It’s just fundamentally sound, meat-and-potatoes filmmaking.

A pleasant enough and consistently chuckle-worthy comedy while it lasts that could maybe use one or two more ingredients.

At times, watching Nic Cage over emote every single line and bad guys get iced by killer monkeys is as sublime as it sounds.

It’s not the kind of film you watch waiting for “the answer.” Saulnier isn’t going to solve the equation for you in Hold The Dark. But he is going to kick your ass.

Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe feels not only like logical product, but something that should exist. In a weird way, Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Universe feels even more timely than their last movie. If that was a way to capitalize on the cartoon while its popularity was peaking, Mike Judge’s latest effort is a reminder of how comedy can be.

Weird is constantly riding that line between too-stupid-to-be-funny and so-stupid-it’s-hilarious.

In Men, Garland has a lot of great little ideas, with brilliant performances and viscerally compelling imagery, but lacks one big idea to tie them all together.

Green Book certainly paints a rosy picture of race relations, but ultimately I don’t think its little white lies are a bad thing. Like my father did with me, it’s telling us a story that makes our grandfathers seem better than they probably were. But it does so as an example of how we should be, as an aspirational ideal that maybe we’ll live up to one day even if we didn’t yesterday.

It still has the scary masks and jump-scares, but whether through its creators’ cleverness or current events, it is now disturbing on a much deeper level. The social commentary no longer feels like fake sloganeering.

It’s content to be what it is — a bit of silliness, really. It’s an excuse for goofy slapstick and wordplay. And it’s the rare light fare that can be light without feeling like chintzy gift shop pandering.