As adapted from the beloved Jane Austen novel by screenwriter Eleanor Catton and director Autumn de Wilde, Emma. is a cheerful confection—brightly colored, briskly consumed—and as such a worthy representation of one of the great literary characters.

Even for a Wong Kar-wai film, Fallen Angels is lavishly stylized.

The true revelation is Dyer. A fresh presence amidst the boys’ club of Stranger Things, she’s incredible here in a performance that ranges from understated drama to physical comedy.

It’s the moral imperative of the found-footage formalism that sets REC apart, transforming Angela’s camera from a visceral instrument of voyeurism into a tragic, last-gasp tool of truth and justice.

Blitz gets a little preachy at times (perhaps another Dickens influence), but there is also a stark honesty about the dread and difficulty of living as a civilian under siege—as a person of color or not. And of course McQueen manages instances of jaw-dropping imagery.

Gazer owes an enormous debt to a few obvious influences, but the movie has just enough vision and atmosphere of its own for the makings of an unnerving, lo-fi, neo-noir.

Now, Voyager may not have the fine balance of some of Davis’ best films—Jezebel is probably the place to go for that—but it’s still, in its stronger moments, a fine showcase for an iconic actress.

Much of what makes a great Pedro Almodovar film can be found in The Room Next Door: a layered narrative, a thoughtful color scheme, a focus on women, and an intense interest in sex and/or death. But a certain vitality is strangely missing, and not because of the subject matter.

There are plenty of big laughs to be found in Theater Camp—Ayo Edibiri pops up to steal a few scenes—but it’s this ability to weave self-deprecation with theatrical passion that distinguishes the movie.

As someone with only a basic knowledge of Bob Dylan, I can’t say I came away from A Complete Unknown with much more of an understanding of the man, his music, or his cultural significance.

What’s missing, in comparison to Nichols’ other movies, is an internalized angst.

If Starman works at all, it’s because of the way Allen gazes at Bridges, as if his mystery is her answer. We believe she’d seriously fall for this doppelganger because we understand how badly she’s hurting.

It’s as if Moss is directing the movie through her performance.

Thankfully a sharp cast and goofy wit mostly keep the movie light on its feet.

Hoss (so riveting in Christian Petzold’s Phoenix) gives the strongest performance, arriving at the party with a goddess-like superiority that Hedda tragically chips away at as the night proceeds. Though not without a riveting fight.

Thrumming with energy—thanks to vivacious filmmaking from director Lola Quivoron and a ferocious lead performance by newcomer Julie Ledru—Rodeo takes place within the world of underground motocross in the suburbs of Paris.

Directed by Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, The Sisters Brothers), whose heart might be in the right place—the movie at least honors Emilia’s dysmorphia, rather than using it as a plot gimmick—but whose execution resembles something like community-theater Sicario, pulsed in an erratic blender.

Kudos to Patel for not making a dull vanity project for his feature directorial debut, but Monkey Man is still a rough watch of its own kind.

Ballooning. Biking. Swimming. Parachuting. The Great Muppet Caper represented a giant leap for Muppetkind, in only their second big-screen outing.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is still beholden to an overwritten superhero/sci-fi storyline that involves lots of quantum talk and way too many players.

Hang in there with Together Together. What may seem at first like a slender character study eventually grows into a more expansive exploration of loneliness, before ending on a perfect, powerhouse final shot.

Wong captures this in his usual, expressive style, employing black and white at times and staggering the frame rate to accentuate heightened moments (including an aching slide into slow motion as the two men share a cigarette).

Like each of del Toro’s nastier pictures, Nightmare Alley closes in on you with a hellish elegance.

The real problem, however, is that neither Molly, nor Newbury, nor anyone on her staff is very funny.

Eventually a fatalistic torpor settles over the film, even during the increasingly gun-heavy action scenes. For all its early intoxication, The Old Guard has an aftertaste that’s deadening.

The Ugly Stepsister has macabre fun with what some women will do to make a shoe fit. It’s The Substance by way of the Brothers Grimm.

What’s missing from Johnson can be found in abundance in two brief, supporting turns. Zoe Winters, as one of Lucy’s clients, and Louisa Jacobson, as a skittish bride, knock out their slim scenes by bringing a unique verve and vitality to every second. Their characters pop as interesting, complicated, compelling humans, whose stories we want to hear. If Song had cast one of them in the lead, Materialists might have really been something.

Certainly The Phoenician Scheme still fits within what I’ve come to call “Wes Anderson’s restoration cinema.” It just does so more plainly, less poetically.

Watson is reliably sturdy in the lead role—you can see her panicked conscience in her eyes—but it’s Franciosi who grabs the film by its shoulders and turns it into a searing, singular experience.

In their hands, and with Pusić’s guidance, Tuesday registers as a magical metaphor for how we process death—and particularly how that might play out in this mother-daughter relationship.

Absolutely no one—Oscar voters included—should find Mortensen’s performance anything other than excruciating. From the hand gestures to the accent, it’s as if he jumped out of a vintage photo at The Olive Garden shouting, “Unlimited breadsticks for everahbody!”

The movie is a hate-watch thriller that scoffs at its characters as much as you do.

It’s the performances that ultimately carry the film.

The silliness is as sharp and improvisational as ever, as are the impressions.

One of Nolan’s greatest attributes as a filmmaker is his trust in the intellect of mainstream audiences—audiences who have rewarded that trust by making challenging, original works like Inception huge hits. This time, though, it might have been smart to dumb things down a bit.

Rowlands takes the movie by the throat in the dramatic, onstage sequences, just as Brando would have done, yet she’s equally compelling in the film’s smaller moments.

In a Selick film, every object has a rich inner life; perhaps Wendell & Wild just has too many objects

Like its predecessor, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home is content to be a high-school movie first and a superhero saga second.

Despite all the mania and exaggerated characterizations, Raising Arizona is ultimately one of the Coens’ kinder (if not gentler) efforts, a raucous cartoon that consistently offers the beleaguered, desert-stricken H.I. little oases of grace.

Unlike Daze and those other predecessors, Selah and the Spades never convincingly establishes its own stylized universe, resting somewhat uncomfortably between the real world and a fully realized, believably hermetic place.

A mixture of hard-boiled intrigue and mental instability, this dark passage takes us from the film noirs of its time to the psychological thrillers that Alfred Hitchcock would make in the 1950s. Altogether, it’s a wild, harrowing journey.

A smart, sweet gem of a comedy.

If you can get on its moodily monstrous wavelength, the movie will have you asking why we let some animals sleep on our beds and put others in pens.

In so many monster movies, the pieces show. This creature is seamless.

The dispiriting truth is that Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’s staged pranks can’t compete with our awful reality. The movie is trying to expose people who have already been walking around the past four years with their pants down.

If Some Came Running survives its dated gender politics, that’s all due to MacLaine. Her Ginnie—overly made up and yet disheveled, with hamburger bun crumbs on her sparkly cocktail dress—is the only one to lend the movie an authentic sense of dignity.

Just enough insider detail to tantalize a hardcore basketball fan, but too much inspirational sports hooey to hook one.

F1: The Movie is a corporate conglomerate on cinematic wheels.

With or without special effects, Twister delivers the same sort of suspense that’s been a staple of good drama since storytelling began.

Sophie delivers three “confessions” over the course of the film, each delivered by Streep with what can only be called a commanding fragility.

There’s a vulnerability to A Quiet Place: Day One that’s rare in big, would-be blockbusters.

If the overall project of the Craig pictures was to domesticate 007, No Time to Die accomplishes its mission. But it was a bit of a slog to get there.

Robert Redford hovers like a ghost over A River Runs Through It—not so much as director (this is a sturdy if uninspired adaptation of Norman Maclean’s novella), but rather via his sacramental voiceover and the casting of a young Brad Pitt.

During the many fight sequences, the action has a brightness and clarity—in terms of line work and movement—that should be studied by anyone working on the effects side of American superhero movies. There is admittedly too much plotting; in fact, you could argue that a final-act twist isn’t even necessary.

Given Kikuchi’s purposefully distanced performance, Zellner’s tendency to give scenes four lungs full of breathing space, and the often jarring musical choices, it’s almost as if the movie is daring you not to like it.

Just Mercy is a testament to what talented actors can do with material that might otherwise be stifling.

Lust for Life features exhilarating scenes of Van Gogh at work, often set in the locations of some of his most famous paintings and punctuated with close-ups of the original artwork. Like the 2017 animated experiment Loving Vincent, the movie functions not only as a biopic, but as an exercise in aesthetic reinterpretation.

The Shining is terrifying for what it doesn’t do.

By the movie’s merciful end, you wonder what a nice guy like Superman is doing in a mean place like this.

We’re largely left with an arresting return to the sort of wild work Cronenberg delivered in the 1980s and 1990s, if one where the shock is ironically missing.

The movie’s best moments are those of cinebro-bonding between Pascal and Cage’s characters.

Black Widow certainly suffers from MCU bloat—dutiful references to other installments in the franchise, an overly convoluted plot leading to a two-hour-plus runtime, an endlessly explosive action finale that takes place mostly in front of green screens—yet a strong cast and emphasis on character ultimately overcome much of those grievances.

Rustin is a dutiful history-lesson movie of the type that usually fails to stir me, yet in recent years I’ve come to put more value on such efforts. If any acknowledgment of the difficult, “inconvenient” periods of America’s past are going to be banned from libraries and schools, then let art do what it can to fill in the gaps.

A work of blockbuster auteurism, Avatar: The Way of Water wildly, weirdly expends massive resources on a vision at once generic and bizarrely idiosyncratic, for better and for worse.

Vox Lux has such snarky contempt for pop music—or at least the star-making machinery that governs it—that you wonder why writer-director Brady Corbet bothered to make an entire movie about the subject.

The film clumsily stumbles into feminist significance in its final moments, without having laid much groundwork for it beforehand.

Cummings is a unique talent; Snow Hollow is just an awkward fit, beyond the ways he intends.

It’s like watching the problems of a pillow. Adam Sandler, as Jay’s manager, delivers the most interestingly human performance in the film, but he’s not given nearly enough to do. If the movie had been equally weighted between them, Jay Kelly might have been somebody.

Whatever else he ends up doing in his career, Adam Driver will always have Annette. Surely this will go down as his most notorious performance (and yes, I’m including his snit-fitty—and thoroughly magnetic—turn as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars movies).

Right out of the gate—and even working within the modern Hong Kong gangster genre—Wong Kar-wai burst onto the screen as a strikingly unique talent. This is clearly a filmmaker less interested in plot and dialogue than he is in movement, music, and color—no matter the time, place, or story.

There’s a playfulness and a romanticism to the technique—a way of placing the characters both within and without history—that elevates Tesla from being a snarky art installation to something, presumably like Tesla himself, with a soul.

While the baby Ochi is something of a Grogu-Gizmo hybrid, the use of puppetry and animatronics gives it an idiosyncratic scruffiness. It feels as if you’re encountering a new species, not watching a digitized fantasy film.

If joy and liberation bursts from the best Astaire-Rogers films, The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle is defined by restriction.

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning fumbles its own legacy, largely by believing it had one in the first place. With apologies to Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, this has never been a franchise powered by our emotional connections to its characters, much less any sort of overarching, thematically resonant narrative. The Final Reckoning belatedly attempts to conjure up such qualities, while skimping on what has always mattered most in the series: scintillating stunt work.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever suffers from a giant, Chadwick Boseman-shaped hole that it can’t fill, no matter how many characters, storylines, and muddled, chaotic action sequences it tries to throw on the screen.

If Sunlight worked even a quarter as well as it does, the movie would still have been something of a miracle.

This is noir as costume party.

Nelson is jarring, scary and brilliantly bitter.

In a sense, the film only works because, in the real world, the system is rigged against someone like Axel Foley. Yet when Murphy seizes the screen, all bets are off, resulting in a work of racial subversion that’s both hilarious and cathartic.

Adonis’ motivations are less compelling here than they were in Creed—especially in the way they sideline his relationship with the pregnant Bianca. In the end, he does what he does so that there can be a Creed II, nothing more, nothing less.

The cultural context is at once vague and oppressive—there’s constant talk of “chi” and “ancestors”—to the point that it’s nearly rendered meaningless. With Yifei Lu in the title role, posing elegantly but not given much of a chance to project any sort of inner life.

There is pleasure in Astaire and Rogers floating, a foot apart, to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” as well as the elaborate, heavily furred gowns that the fashion setting allows.

Nearly every frame of Shaft is intent on doing one thing: establishing its hero – private detective John Shaft – as a powerful, independent, innately good yet still devilish man in complete control of his own destiny.

Watching Game Night is like witnessing someone on a hot streak while playing charades. As they keep nailing points for their team in rapid succession, you wonder how long they can sustain it. In Game Night, it’s the laughs that just keep coming.

[Zellweger’s] unrecognizable, in appearance and level of conviction. Even with the gaps I have in her filmography, I feel safe saying this is a career-best performance.

Wonka may be more Paul King than Roald Dahl—it bears the clever kindness of Paddington and Paddington 2 far more than the clever cynicism of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author—but a worse fate could have befallen the iconic title character.

When Pieces of a Woman is at its best, it’s focusing on this traumatized couple and how neither knows how to make room for the other’s grieving process, partly because their respective processes conflict. Unfortunately the movie wants to be so much more.

White Noise is ultimately an absurdist comedy, with Gerwig and Driver as the victims/clowns at its center (he wears a suit of amusing denialism, while she floats about in a tragicomic state of daze).

The long, seemingly monotonous shots in Skinamarink will be trying for some, yet there are rewards if you have the patience: occasional, eerie beauty (that night-light evokes a twinkling star dangling in space) and clever filmmaking.

With a more streamlined narrative, it would have been stunning. As is, the movie certainly marks Diallo as promising.

As a political satire, Let the Bullets Fly is pointed and precise.

Erivo anchors even the hokiest scenes with exactly the qualities a faith-forward telling like this needs: conviction and fervency.

If you’re going to take on an iconic role like Mary Poppins, it doesn’t pay to be timid. You might as well go for it. Emily Blunt does just that in Mary Poppins Returns, taking the Julie Andrews template, honoring it to a T, and adding her own lively spark.

The movie has a self-aware streak that isn’t too self-impressed, as well as an amusing flair for the absurd.

This is a film of clashing ideas and clanging style.

It’s all wild, but too intentionally amped up to be any fun.

Gazzara is riveting as man who exudes cool and calm—style—while also stinking of panic.

A romantic, flashback-rich narrative distinguishes this feature-length animated effort, which Warner Bros. was confident enough in to give a theatrical release.