Our culture has changed in monumental ways when it comes to dating, romantic connection, sex, and how marriage is viewed by younger generations. The genre itself needs to evolve in tandem with this. Despite their momentary delight, films like Office Romance tell us that Hollywood is stuck creating outdated movies for a version of our romantically yearning culture that doesn’t exist anymore.

By pushing the nihilism off the charts, however, Sarnoski finds an idea that emerges fully in the movie’s closing act. The Death of Robin Hood is all about storytelling, which is appropriate because its narrative is a retrospective one.

It’s a strange, strange movie, but a thoroughly compelling one, thanks in large part to Early’s performance as Maddie.

So, it’s a ghost story, and a time travel story, and a folk tale, and something of a kitchen sink drama, but it’s also none of these things, really, and that’s where Jenkin’s formal gambits come in. His filmmaking has a lovely, homespun directness.

Toy Story 5, which was directed by studio stalwart Andrew Stanton (who co-wrote the script with Kenna Harris), is both the best thing Pixar has done since Turning Red and disappointing in a way that only something you once found utterly captivating could manage to be.

All this setup, and the sparse and sometimes clumsy writing, is just scaffolding to support the mind-boggling set pieces and fight sequences, which come frequently and involve a rewarding variety of settings, from your classic split-level nightclub to a freezer room full of bodies frozen into slabs of ice.

The film is a refreshing retreat to a bygone world of mid-20th-century spirituality; it’s also a sometimes painfully honest primer on the stories behind and in between the band’s biggest songs.

Disclosure Day can be messy, but much of its beauty lies in that messiness. It’s an astoundingly personal film, and we can sense Spielberg trying to feel his way through the conflicting aspects of his vision.

Masters of the Universe isn’t a real movie. It’s a bunch of half-realized, semi-contradictory ideas accrued over years. It takes the rough shape of a comedy without ever really landing a joke.

Most of its gags require not surprise but surrender. Because while some dumb jokes are (as noted) funny the first time and never again, on the opposite end of spectrum lie those bits that are funny only after the fifth or sixth or 11th time, at which point the comedy comes not from any inherent wit but from the doggedness of the teller. We laugh because we’re defeated.

Backrooms suggests that while we’re teetering on the verge of something new, filmmakers are going to have to do more work to wrestle these nonnarrative, non-centralized ideas into something that can sustain a story.

For the most part, the film is a model of narrative economy and clear character development, all grounded and enhanced by Scott’s delicate performance.

Riley’s film only works in fits. Its stunning visual bravura can’t distract from what’s lacking within its filmmaker’s arsenal of storytelling tools.

The Black Ball is itself mighty compelling, though it’s also the kind of film that feels weightier during the watching than it does when looked back on the next day, when in retrospect its achievements start to seem like they might have been outstripped by its considerable ambitions.

Jimmy is a compulsively magnetic figure who keeps everyone at arm’s length, including the audience, and for a film that embodies a voluptuous sense of tragedy, that leaves it undeniably aloof.

I would say that what Almodóvar pulls off in the end makes the rest of the film worthwhile, but only barely and only if you’re invested enough in his ongoing arc as an artist to find intriguing the idea of a self-lacerating late-career self-portrait about the nature of inspiration.

Few recent movies better embody the vibe that in a spiritual vacuum all that matters is momentary sensation, a dry quickening of the pulse to counteract the emptiness of what we might still choose to call “existence.”

Mungiu has a lot more on his mind than tepidly insisting both sides can be bad. For all the political pole reversal that happens in Fjord, the movie stealthily argues what’s really going on here is that old standards about assimilation and cultural uniformity have just been given a socially acceptable gloss.

Drab and stone-faced to a fault, The Mandalorian and Grogu struggles to capture the inventive vitality of the better Star Wars movies with action scenes that feel frustratingly pro forma and lifeless performances that seem determined to lull us to sleep.

Driver ably brings the heartbreak in Paper Tiger, though Johansson’s no slouch in a less ornate but no less harrowing role.

The fact that his fumbling journey toward fatherhood is not just tolerable but genuinely touching is a testament to the disarming earnestness with which Firstman approaches the clichéd set-up.

None of the female characters in the film acts in ways that suggest Farhadi has actually given much thought to what it’s like to move through the world as a woman.

There’s probably a smart, chilling film to be made about the terrors of smothering and relentless adoration — one imagines what Rod Serling would have done with something like this — but this isn’t really that film.

In his latest, In the Grey, Ritchie takes this compulsive, hyperanalytical love of preparation to comical levels. Intentionally, but maybe not productively: As the screen fills up with lists and the narrative overloads on data, we may find our attention drifting.

There’s a vulnerability to being touched by something, to finding something sexy or scary, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is filled with a wry but immense compassion for its heroine and her habit of holding up concepts to ward off her own reactions.

A fascinating movie for kids, but it’s an improbably effective and tear-jerking one for adults as well.

Built around silences and the steady accumulation of human and natural detail, the story feels at times as if it’s being told by the tree itself: omniscient, unflinching, yet shot through with an almost alien tenderness. Its perspective is not so much Olympian as it is pointillist.

While Urban hurls himself into the role of Johnny with the commitment of someone for whom the phrase “sequel to a reboot of a fighting-game adaptation” signals only the latest opportunity to shine, the film, which was written by Jeremy Slater and directed by a returning Simon McQuoid, offers so little to work off of that even he gives off the faintest whiff of exasperation.