Watching Pearl, the first movie I thought of was The Wizard of Oz. This is as if Dorothy got sucked up by a tornado and dropped down in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—holding the chainsaw.

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.

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).

Formally straightforward and heavily reliant on the perspective of the oldest sister, Jaclyn, Bad Axe (whose title comes from the name of the town) nevertheless serves as a reminder of how ugly things got during that crucial year—and how the American dream is an unjustly contingent one.

Broker marks another minor miracle from writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, featuring another one of his makeshift families.

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.

Whenever someone wants to downplay historical atrocities, Descendant suggests, it’s because they’re also trying to cover up injustice in the present day.

Women Talking reduces women to their words, as the title implies, a choice that is bold but limiting.

Overall, Corsage doesn’t reinvent the royal-as-trapped-canary subgenre (it also glorifies Elisabeth’s ultimate fate in a slightly uncomfortable way), but the film style and attitude, much like Krieps’ empress, make a scene.

It would be too dismissive to call Babylon—Damien Chazelle’s incessantly bravura period piece set during Hollywood’s transition to the sound era—a “giant swing at mediocrity” (to borrow a phrase the silent star played by Brad Pitt uses to describe one of his films). Babylon is better than that. But the swing still registers more strongly than the results.

It’s a miracle it all works—and it works wonderfully, thanks mostly to Mendes’ script and his casting of Olivia Colman.

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.

Far from a courtroom procedural, however, Saint Omer expands beyond those wood-paneled walls to consider how culture, colonialism, biology, and race determine what women experience—and how society views them because of those determinations.

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.

Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is not a love letter to the magic of the movies. It’s a nice note to more tactile matters of craft—how to thread a reel of film into a projector, for instance. And yet, in the process of paying attention to such details, The Fabelmans manages something even more specific than love: a deeply personal ardency for both how and why movies are made.

Strange and vaporous, The Eternal Daughter confirms Hogg as a filmmaker who knows how to transmute her most intimate ruminations in cinematically provocative ways.

As with Knives Out, Johnson takes care to add a bit of political bite to the proceedings. This is a movie interested in unmasking killers, yes, but also emperors who wear no clothes.

As in the nature documentaries of Werner Herzog, there is grandeur and servility to be found here. Like the Kraffts, Fire of Love demonstrates a brazen humility.

The doc works best when Mitchell, who narrates, gets past the facts and lets his acutely observant critical voice merge with his memories, as when he recalls seeing Spook on the big screen with friends as a teenager in Detroit. His education then, is ours now.

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.

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.

The movie wants us to see how the butter is made, nothing more and nothing less.

To borrow a phrase from the movie itself, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a “terrible joy.”

Pinocchio manages enough charm, inventiveness, and—yes—technical innovation to be worth the effort.

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.

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.

As more of the pieces of the puzzle are revealed, the movie never exploits them. Instead, they fall into place the way memories do. Indeed, the way the best movies do: as revelations that are nevertheless mysterious.

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