What’s more, the literary and philosophical bon mots are not only name drops, but instead woven into the story in meaningful ways. Unfortunately, a male, heterosexual paranoia underlines the plot proper and ultimately usurps the unsatisfying finale, making Metropolitan an intriguing debut rather than a triumphant one.

A bit more investigative work on the part of the filmmakers might have gone a long way, especially because there is something of a black hole at the center of Fyre: McFarland is depicted as ground zero in terms of responsibility, but we never get a real sense of who the guy is, what drives him, or how he was able to pull the wool over so many eyes.

This is another sad-sack Anderson movie, with perhaps the saddest collection of actors we’ve seen. And yet, this being Anderson, The French Dispatch is also absolutely delightful.

Even while understanding that much of Belfast is supposed to be from the perspective of Buddy (Jude Hill), a young boy who witnesses the beginning of Ireland’s “Troubles” in his working-class neighborhood (and serves as something of a stand-in for writer-director Kenneth Branagh), I still felt a type of artistic naivete at work—a belief that all you need is black-and-white cinematography and a cute kid to create something of deep meaning and emotion.

The reprieves are what elevate the film, including a mournful moment in the coda – I shouldn’t give it away – that was almost shocking in its starkness and bravery. Such thoughtful touches are far quieter than a dragon’s roar, but they speak volumes.

This is a movie I was somewhat dreading—its premise just seems too possible in these fractious days—yet Garland managed to imbue Civil War with a solemnity and maturity that made me grateful for it. Let’s hope it remains a warning, not a weather vane.

It’s a great conceit, with abundant potential. But the movie gets off to a shaky start by failing to flesh out, so to speak, the central couple.

Little context beyond that narration is provided, a wise choice that provides the sort of self-imposed restrictions that a good biopic—fictional or documentary—needs.

You can argue with the movie in your head, even while you admit—say, when Dick and Jo dance their way across a stream by lightly stepping onto a floating raft—that your heart is having all sorts of fun.

Thoroughbreds has a brazenness that’s promising, then, even if it also seems to be a bit too taken with its characters’ amorality. The movie works hard to make your eyes open wide, but doesn’t seem to realize that a squinting introspection can have its own sort of edge.

This is handsomely made (cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth lights the reunion as if it were already part of some magical realm), but what lingers about the movie are the quieter, actorly moments.

The screenplay, by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman, shows sophistication both in its characterizations and as a trauma narrative, although I was a bit unclear on the mechanics of Laura’s grand scheme, especially during the gonzo climax.

Black Girl gathers a forceful and lasting emotional power.

This is never really scary, but it isn’t quite funny either. The movie strikes its own demented chord.

While the ensemble cast is laudable—Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Tracy Letts, Jared Harris, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Greta Lee—there isn’t a Henry Fonda to anchor things.

Ducournau’s insistence on taking this scenario to unimaginable extremes may occasionally distance us from the humanity she’s also clearly interested in, but there’s no denying that her handling of craft and form—particularly the way the reddish-pink glow of a fire-truck’s flashing light filters much of the imagery—is masterful.

What Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh did for Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Burton and Taylor do for Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They remind us that sometimes writing and directing must simply step aside and concede the power of performance.

Most of the picture takes place on a luxury cruise liner – on which Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo are stowaways – and the setting makes for a wonderful comic playground. Racing up and down decks and in and out of cabins, the brothers exhibit a more sophisticated sense of staging and interplay than they did in something like Animal Crackers.

Key Largo belongs to its villain, through and through.

Bottoms—which puts a queer spin on teen sex comedies like Revenge of the Nerds, American Pie, Superbad, and (the partially queer) Booksmart—is at its best when it is at its most anarchic.

A triumph of design, Raya and the Last Dragon is held back by a lackluster story, one cobbled together from various influences (Indiana Jones, Star Wars, an array of Southeast Asian cultures) and bent in service of a tortured—and somewhat confused—lesson about learning to trust.

Burning Cane doesn’t resolve things as much as it makes poetry of them, right from its opening shot of the radiant beams of the sun shining upon the drifting smoke of a smoldering sugarcane field. Sometimes it seems as if there’s no escape from the stain of sin.

The Heartbreak Kid is a war of the sexes comedy that leaves no side unscathed, thanks largely to the combined sensibilities of screenwriter Neil Simon and director Elaine May.

Mary and the Witch’s Flower turns homage into a richly rewarding adventure.

As long as the movie remains a lightly comic meditation on aging, relationships, and time—say, a junior Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—it’s fantastic and frequently moving. But large chunks veer into television-drama territory, where the movie operates in a more generic register.

A curious comedy that neither looks back at Rear Window nor ahead to Vertigo, but rather exists in some goofy space all its own. It’s as if Hitchcock went on vacation, but kept working.

Gun Crazy is a burst of movie id all its own, a confluence of sex, sexism and violence.

Nostalghia is further evidence that Andrei Tarkovsky might not be a filmmaker, but a sorcerer.

There’s a tactile quality to the film—the way softly glowing lamps float alongside characters in dark hallways or fabrics drape around them and flicker violently in the wind—that makes everything feel simultaneously graspable and out of this world.

As Armageddon Time proceeded, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the way Johnny’s story only served to stoke Paul’s (and the movie’s) moral consciousness—to be ground zero for the film’s white guilt. Yes, in some ways Johnny is a supporting character much like any other, serving a particular purpose in the narrative. But the racial realities add a significant wrinkle.

The stunning set pieces take full advantage of animation’s unique mastery over time and space, so that we don’t just watch the characters’ daredevil exploits – we’re spinning and whirling right along with them. It’s as if we’ve mastered space and time ourselves.

It’s at once deeply formulaic and—in terms of the faces and places we usually see on movie screens in the West—refreshingly unfamiliar.

There can sometimes be a significant gap between a great high concept for a movie and that concept’s execution. Such is the case with Dream Scenario.

Overall, this is genuinely moving and instructive, though I do wish it was a wee bit funnier, considering the onscreen talent and the fact that director Josh Greenbaum guided the sublimely silly Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.

A mashup of Macbeth and the biblical chronicles of King David, all set in contemporary New York City, Highest 2 Lowest sees Spike Lee playing with classical narratives in order to explore a modern man’s artistic reawakening.

Sean Baker’s movies see people for their humanity first and their circumstances second, an approach that has never been more clear than in Starlet.

Garfield is fine, if a bit one-note in his show-must-go-on energy. The real issue is that the film is maniacally focused on Larson as the uber-struggling artist in a way that eventually feels monstrous, devouring any other character or concern that happens to cross its path.

As Starfish becomes a more obvious personal metaphor involving betrayal and forgiveness, it also becomes a bit less interesting—even as it still marks White as an ambitious talent to watch.

It’s only when She Said opens up to consider Twohey and Kantor’s home lives, as well as the ruined lives of the Weinstein victims they interview, that the film exhibits some vigor.

A predictable narrative is given rich contours in Little Woods.

Splendor in the Grass may seem quaint, even silly. But anyone who’s thrown – or endured – a teenager’s temper tantrum will recognize the anger and confusion on the screen as genuine. In that sense, Splendor will never be out of touch.

The style is arresting and the leads are strong, but the story runs out of steam.

Huntt is a talent to watch. Her psychic wounds now bared, it will be fascinating to see how she explores them, as well as things outside herself, in different cinematic formats.

Here and there, Coppola seems interested in poking that Murray persona. On the Rocks would have been much better if Murray had done some poking too.

Washington has never been better, capturing the greatly varied phases of Malcolm’s personality while always giving us a full sense of a single man: sharp, smart, with a quick smile but also a simmering, righteous anger.

The movie’s most distinctive feature, especially as a family biopic, is the tragic nature of this story. The Iron Claw is a downer that ickily sticks with you.

Wise and witty, Inside Out 2 continues the Pixar tradition in the ways that matter most.

The Fall Guy isn’t perfect, but as a crowd-pleasing, romantic action comedy, driven by the magnetism of its stars, it feels like an increasingly rare treat.

Majors is easily the best thing in this third Rocky offshoot.

A powder keg of movie-musical performances, Wicked balloons the Broadway sensation in unnecessary ways—this is only Part I, despite the fact that it runs nearly three hours—but I hardly minded thanks to the dynamic force of its two leads.

You can feel the ungainly attempts to force that material into tidy little narratives.

This is a crazed and lurid character portrait that spends most of its time psychoanalyzing itself.

In Parabellum, the shootouts—and there are two disastrous ones, that finale and a mid-film sequence featuring new costar Halle Berry—are less about Wick (his motivations, his anger, his technique) and more about the grandiosity of the violence.

Train to Busan is a cleverly concentrated shot of zombie terror.

The Killer is a gorgeously sterile, de-romanticized riff on the likes of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (which notably features a near-silent assassin) and countless other hit-man movies, peppered with sideswipes at capitalism.

The race itself is another of the movie’s astonishing set pieces; Mann and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt give it a fresh sense of vroom, even if you think you’ve seen all the movie car races you’ll ever need.

Even taking a step back from current events, News of the World registers as a fine film at best. Hanks is sturdy, though this is also one of those performances where there isn’t much surprise in those kindly eyes.

Good Boy is a harrowing experience for dog lovers—or possibly anyone who’s noticed an animal staring at something you can’t quite perceive—yet the movie never quite unearths the subterranean chills of the most potent horror.

One of Them Days is propulsively directed by music-video veteran Lawrence Lamont, who knows how to frame a punchline, from a sharp script by Syreeta Singleton, who wrote many episodes of HBO’s Insecure. The same mixture of hilarity and humanity is on display here.

It might be corny, but the basketball nerd in me can’t resist their rivalrously romantic games of one on one, which is a sweet motif throughout the film.

Ultimately, Charlotte’s Web is too potent a tale of life and death, as first learned by observing life on a farm, to keep even this so-so effort from ringing true.

When it’s clicking—and it mostly clicks—Athena balances aesthetics with import, even interweaving the two into something that has the grave intimacy of Son of Saul and the political potency of The Battle of Algiers.

Director Sian Heder had an obvious aesthetic card to play with CODA, and she saves it for just the right moment.

When experimenting with his own techniques—Shackleton gets ingenious mileage out of slow zooms and pans in those location shots—Zodiac Killer Project works as a provocative, meta consideration of the genre’s form. When dumping on other films and the genre in general, the movie comes across as a bit hypocritical and smug.

At its best, the movie captures the thrill of those moments, whether romantic or friendly, when you realize something special is happening.

Cooley High has the same youth-movie energy that defines some of the genre’s greats: American Graffiti, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. All of these films run on the mischievous, unfounded optimism that characterizes our teenage years. They make you nostalgic for naivete.

Nanny stands as a promising feature debut for writer-director Nikyatu Jusu; I’d rather see an abundance of ambition in an emerging filmmaker, which is what we get here, than timidity.

I’m not exactly sure what tone Friendship means to set, but the movie itself feels confident in its own skin. And that counts for a lot.

There’s no doubt that Fennell has made something that shows impressive filmmaking promise and pulses with real pain.

Bob Fosse’s half-confession about what a jerk he was to the women in his life may pull a lot of punches, but there’s just too much art on the screen to completely disregard the effort.

A lot of fun, even if it could have been better if it had taken itself just a smidge more seriously.

Mickey 17 may not be my preferred mode of Bong Joon-Ho, but it’s the mode we need right now.

Blow the Man Down snagged me right away with its bold, stylized opening.

Wunmi Mosaku (Ruby on HBO’s Lovecraft Country) has a fierce sense of determination, even if her character has to defer in this traditional marriage, and Sope Dirisu keeps revealing more and more layers to the husband, a man struggling to survive under what ultimately feels like the curse of assimilation.

Nine Days is slow going at first—it sometimes feels as if the title is a reference to its running time—but eventually this pensive, existential thought experiment blossoms into something more cinematic.

Like Shinkai’s metaphysical body-switching fantasia Your Name, Weathering with You works on multiple levels: as eco-fable, social commentary, and teen romance.

The best numbers in The Color Purple capture the anger and/or exultation of personal experience.

Bugonia has its creative “pleasures.” . . But mostly it feels like we’ve been here before, with the same faces.

Possessor cranks up the aesthetic volume on two familiar subgenres—the hired killer psychodrama and the sci-fi body-snatcher—until they meld into a destabilizing case of extreme cinema.

Even for a 1933 movie musical, Flying Down to Rio is a vaudeville show shamelessly trying to pass for a feature film. Thank goodness, then, that it can get by on sheer showmanship.

What’s really spooky about Candyman is that the movie is confused in almost exactly the way that the first film was. Maybe the material itself is haunted.

A light delight, even if you have no experience with the role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves takes its fantasy world seriously, but not itself.

The result is a sci-fi fantasy that’s part Fantastic Planet and part Miyazaki.

Like Hereditary, Midsommar functions as an outlandish imagining of the effects of personal trauma, especially for someone who already struggles with an unsteady mind. Yet the psychology and the horror aren’t quite as holistically handled this time around.

Lee gives this familiar figure of vengeance a soft, singular touch.

Even though she’s playing a woman who is suffering, Lawrence brings a playfulness to the screen that leavens the depths of misery in which Ramsay’s movies tend to wallow.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be a connoisseur of kill-shot comedy, but director James Gunn at least makes it somewhat palatable.

Before it strangely peters out, lost in its own conspiracies, The Shrouds registers as a mournful, if macabre, meditation on losing a loved one—as only writer-director David Cronenberg could manage.

Moss shifts into another gear for the truly disturbing finale, when those eyes flicker with thoughts of revenge and events unfold in a way that remind us that Whannell’s big break was as the screenwriter of Saw. The Invisible Man ends on a nasty note, but then again the 1933 film was nasty too. Given the omnipotent power of invisibility, humans apparently do their worst.

Pattinson and Kravitz bring real heat to their scenes together—there’s a great moment where he holds her against his chest as they’re hiding from a pursuer and their breathing slowly, erotically falls into rhythm. Even at three hours, the movie could use more of her.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings isn’t perfect. There’s a bit too much exposition involving myths, history, and character backstory; that climax inevitably abandons the intimacy of the fight scenes for gargantuan CGI. Yet by that point the movie has earned too much goodwill to be affected much by such complaints. I’m sure there are plenty of punchplosions to come in the MCU, probably even delivered by Shang-Chi himself, but at least Ten Rings offers a momentary respite from the reverberations.

One of Pixar’s smaller, sweeter efforts.

As Naru, a smart, skilled young woman who would rather be hunting than gathering, Midthunder is mesmerizing—capable in the crunchy fight scenes (especially a single-take standoff between her and a handful of Frenchmen), but also in the ways her eyes are always watching, consuming every detail about the way the Predator works and the weapons it uses.

Even as the movie itself unnecessarily spirals further into madness and attendant plot holes—perhaps inspired by the wackadoo escalations of recent horror such as Malignant, Barbarian, and Longlegs—Grant makes for a genially deranged host.

The result is a laboriously convoluted narrative (Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange plays a significant role) that only grows exponentially as the story unfolds, to diminishing returns.

In its erratic narrative, random assortment of characters, and omnipresent soundtrack, Car Wash captures something perfectly: the rhythms of a working-class work day.

There are two curious elements to The Land of Steady Habits: writer-director Nicole Holofcener centering a film around a male protagonist; and Ben Mendelsohn giving a regular-guy, mildly comic performance. I wish both experiments had paid off a bit more.

For all its silliness, the musical also taps into something existential, thanks to its ticking-clock structure. As the hours slip away and impending separation looms over every note, On the Town becomes a bittersweet reminder that all our days are numbered.