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.

I liked Death on the Nile a fair bit more than Branagh’s previous Christie film, partly because it’s a less predictable and schematic narrative to begin with, and partly because Branagh the actor has a way of outfoxing his own pedestrian direction.

First hour: pretty lousy and not much fun. Second hour: pretty lousy but more fun, and the movie has the benefit of getting stranger and stranger as it gyrates.

It’s tough-minded and tender-hearted in equal measure. It’s also slyly insightful on the theme of chance elements in solo travel, and unexpected, emotionally tricky connections along the way.

This is one of those poetical nonfiction eyefuls determined to make its primary subjects seem like they were alone with their thoughts, their camera equipment and their expectant yearning.

Even when it’s outlining its own ideas more through rhetoric than character, France keeps us on our toes regarding what’s around the corner. Seydoux’s the chief but hardly the only reason to find out.

It boasts the filmmaker’s usual high level of unassuming craft; a superb cast; and a couple of limitations, though not flaws, worth noting.

I wish this movie offered a little less running commentary and a little more running — anything, really, to get itself off the treadmill of self-critique and self-congratulation and actually going somewhere new.

The star, again, is Mizoguchi's favorite actress, Kinuyo Tanaka, and the style is magisterial, exquisitely controlled--with Mizoguchi moving the story inexorably to an almost sublimely redemptive climax. [24 Mar 2006, p.C7]

Now and then The 355 sticks a landing.

Gyllenhaal’s work with her actors is quietly spectacular, and she takes the best of Ferrante’s fearlessness while letting Colman and Buckley unfold the character’s secrets through action and reaction.

Stripping “Macbeth” for parts, keeping the focus on the main narrative lines of political assassination and what Macbeth himself refers to as “supernatural soliciting,” Coen turns out to be ideally suited to a straight-ahead, let’s-get-on-with-it rendition.

The first hour is terrific; the second one, disappointingly, grows weaker and more conventional.

The film operates on a peculiar, somewhat languid rhythm, and there are times when the story’s needs take a back seat to the visual detail. But “Nightmare Alley” has nerve and relentless, fantastic style.

Holland provides the glue and the webbing for the latest Spidey outing Spider-Man: No Way Home. He’s physically nimble — he’s soon to play Fred Astaire in a biopic — quick-witted with his darting comic timing and an all-around easygoing presence. When the movie treats the mayhem and brutality for real, he’s there with the right degree of anguish.

Sorkin’s approach is to focus on the things that are happening rather than to inquire as to the contours of Lucy or Desi’s internal monologues, and so they remain unknowable, moving through a biopic that offers little more than an exercise in re-enactment.

For a century and more, film directors have explored crosscurrents between art and life, and how one informs the other. Hamaguchi makes that exploration a fully humanized one. His actors, one and all, are so good, you’re simply grateful for their screen company.

Whatever this new adaptation’s popular reception, it’s five times the movie the ‘61 movie was. Spielberg has never made a musical before, but this one looks and feels like the work of an Old Hollywood master of the form — someone who knows when, where and why to move a camera capturing bodies in rhythmic motion.

It’s a beautiful film to soak up as a visual and musical memory of a place that remains, and a time long gone.

It’s somewhat challenging and methodical in its pacing, but if you respond to it — as I did — this ghost from Iran’s 1970s New Wave is a reason to give thanks.