Rhythmically Crimes of the Future maintains a rigorous sense of calm throughout, which can get a little pokey in some scenes. But Mortensen, Seydoux and especially Stewart invest fully, so some of us, anyway, can too.

It’s not quite an airball; you won’t find yourself returning to it again and again, either. But there’s a part of me that’s just happy to see non-blockbuster movies about human-scaled dilemmas still getting made.

It’s a pretty good time, and often a pretty good movie for the nervous blur we’re in right now. It’s cozy.

The film is organic, all of a piece and, for Garland, somewhat on the nose and didactic. It’s also haunting in ways you can’t easily categorize.

At the moment, far too many true crime documentaries function as little more than an episode of “Dateline.” They report information but lack analysis or even thoughtful ideas about how to use the medium of film to tell a story at once shocking and infuriating. Such is the case with Our Father on Netflix.

Operation Mincemeat takes liberties. All historically based movies do. Call Madden’s version a civilized shell game that accomplishes its mission, more or less in the spirit of how things actually got made up and went down.

Heavily influenced by Sternberg's "Underworld," this is one of Ozu's oddest, most enjoyable departures; it reveals him as a first-rate noir director. [09 Jan 2005, p.C11]

The script’s a messy sort of mess. There are also clear signs of a nervy director at work.

Even if this sex-forward comedy-drama is slightly miscast, directorially, and always slightly favoring the male gaze, the actors are excellent.

It’s a hearty stew of influences and rewards and, yes, some gristle.

I suspect the Cage fans who will enjoy this movie won’t care if it’s fundamentally sloppy and lazy moviemaking. The star of the show is neither.

What good is a movie that can’t stop moving, or screaming, long enough to pace itself?

All the Old Knives settles for all the old tropes.

No one seems particularly good at their jobs, but that’s beside the point. They’re silly and self-absorbed — mildly obnoxious more than anything — but rarely is their desperation funny.

True to the egalitarian allure of the restaurant chain itself, Lisa Hurwitz’s documentary The Automat is both a touching farewell and a fond hello-again for those old enough to remember the salisbury steak, creamed spinach and peach pie behind those little windows of nickel-fed discovery.

In every design detail, the physical production and realization of You Won’t Be Alone really does take you somewhere. However unsettling, it’s a film that knows what it’s doing.

In “Morbius” the actor’s willful disinterest in figuring out the rhythm of a scene, what’s important in it and how to bounce off his scene partners — well, it’s acting in a vacuum. What he needs is a director who can steer him away from his favorite scene partner, i.e., Jared Leto, long enough to activate the material at hand, even if it’s just a third-tier Marvel franchise hopeful.

This one rolls right over any doubters, powered by Bullock and Tatum, in a film that lets them play to their strengths.

The movie has a good shot at a huge streaming audience. But does it have the creative instincts of a good movie? An OK one, yes. It’s too bad The Adam Project is only that, since the cast isn’t dogging the assignment for a second.

Turning Red is pure Pixar in its imaginative clash of genres and impulses. Yet it’s something new, too, its own cultural- and gender-specific creation. I’m eager to see what Shi does next, metaphorically and every other way.

There are moments in the second half of After Yang when some of the narrative beats get a little confusing or vague. Kogonada’s steady, often still, but never static compositions may not be enough for some viewers. Whatever. Clearly, actors respond to what he’s after.

The relationship at the film’s center remains a combustible mystery.

There’s real filmmaking here in The Batman. Matt Reeves, the director and co-writer, has a serious interest in the tantalizing Batman/Catwoman dynamic. His script, in collaboration with co-writer Peter Craig, parcels out the action sequences carefully, and when they arrive, they’re both visually lucid and excitingly reckless.

The movie expresses so much, so delicately, about precarious young hearts, the storm clouds of nationalist politics and, most of all, the possibility and necessity of artistic freedom.

I like this film for many reasons. Its sensibility is truly a gentle one. The screenplay may not cohere in ways designed to please the dream-logic-averse, but its wit is neatly matched by the wit of the visual landscapes.

Typically, movies about dogs are unrelenting tear-jerkers, but Tatum and Reid resist sentimentality, resulting in a film that’s refreshingly frank and surprising when the emotional moments do hit (and do they ever).

I don’t know if this was due to the budget or COVID, but Marry Me feels small in ways that a big commercial rom-com frequently doesn’t and maybe that’s why you can’t fully shake the feeling that this Universal Pictures project is really just a marketing scheme cooked up to highlight Lopez’s real-life music career and some NBCUniversal properties, including the frequent cutaways to a decidedly unfunny Jimmy Fallon, which may be, ironically, the movie at its most honest.

Director Jason Orley (”Big Time Adolescence”) handles it all well enough. It’s Day and Slate who make the very best of it.