Agathe is concave in both posture and spirit, but she feels right for this muted world of amorous contemplation, of long, uncertain glances met by equally long, equally uncertain glances. By the end, romance in the abstract becomes something much more real — and we can’t help but fall for all these characters ourselves.

Reinsve, with that phenomenally open, oval face, does an unreal job of transmitting emotions that Nora is barely aware that she’s feeling. Skarsgård is at turns infuriating, charming, and pitiable as an aging artist filled with regret, but also too stubborn to yield.

Highest 2 Lowest is an old man’s movie, and I don’t mean that as a criticism.

Alpha is more evidence of Ducournau’s genius for evocative imagery and striking compositions, but it also suggests she’d benefit from boundaries to push against.

What was once a lazy, crazy, charming afternoon daydream of a movie is now a frantic, insistent, often unfunny sci-fi comedy. It might distract young children with its hyper, family-forward story line, but most of the magic has vanished.

A film that is, chain collars and ass-eating aside, surprisingly mild at its core — or, at least, it ends up positioning dominance and submission in counterpoint to emotional intimacy in a way that echoes E.L. James more than you might expect.

Karan Kandhari’s colorful and deeply odd Sister Midnight, about the frustrations of a young woman in a working-class corner of Mumbai, is one of those movies that starts over here and ends waaay over there. But the film comes by its tonal shifts and narrative changes honestly — its twists are organic and rooted in character — which is quite an accomplishment for a feature directing debut

It delights in its characters’ rule-breaking and playfulness and experimentation.

It’s a movie that makes you long to be able to freeze frames in order to appreciate the loveliness and wit of its details, while at the same time giving you little reason to want to revisit the thing as a whole.

The film is one-half Sound of Metal and one-half Misery: Unfortunately, those movies already exist.

No genre really makes more sense for this moment than horror — except, maybe, for black comedy, and Aster’s bracingly nasty but centerless new film offers plenty of both.

If we judge these films primarily by the creativity and elaborate absurdity of their death scenes, this latest entry ably expands the palette without messing with the formula.

It’s an astonishing work, twining together the lives of four generations of families with an intricacy and intimacy that feels like an act of psychic transmission.

The good news is that Final Reckoning does eventually recover from the calamity of its first hour to give us an entertaining, if still messy, Mission: Impossible movie.

Jia’s recycling is not haphazard or mistaken. He’s an artist squeezing all the juice from his lemon: How many different ways can he show us that China’s development is leaving people behind? We also feel his confidence that Zhao, in every film, brings enough of herself to carry multiple characters. His reediting and reuse of her performances is a marvel.

It’s the little comedic cul-de-sacs that make the movie work as well as it does, sustaining it as much as the growing tension between Craig and Austin.

Preminger, an old noir hand, perhaps understood something fundamental about Sagan’s story: It is not one well served by subtlety or realism. Chew-Bose’s effort is nevertheless a noble one. She wants to make this world immersive, convincing, and compelling. She’s good enough to get part of the way there, but I don’t know if the destination was ever in sight.

The picture is dedicated to Hutchins, and its brooding elegance, its rich shadows and evocative close-ups, demonstrates her achievement: Visually, Rust is often astonishing — which of course reminds us all over again of the dark specter hanging over the film.

Thunderbolts* recaptures some of the magic of the early Marvel productions, when they felt like some alchemical phenomenon of corporate entertainment, and not just slop. The secret, which should have been obvious, is taking pleasure in the people these movies put on screen, rather than just treating them as marketing materials for future installments.

Evans has assembled a worthy cast and has crammed his film full of what should be fun elements, and yet the final result is weirdly without joy — akin to filling your plate with all your favorite foods at a buffet, only to sit down and realize you have no appetite to eat it.

The way the film swims through the contradictions, considerations, and cultural reverie of the rural South is genuinely enlivening. Sinners, festooned with intriguing ideas and even more beguiling characters, grabs the hem of greatness even if it never takes hold, hobbled as it is by a desire to hold more than it can properly contain in its over-two-hour run time, leading to a story that feels misshapen after the setup.

One to One: John & Yoko becomes not just an enormously moving historical portrait but a freshly relevant and cathartic one.

Malek keeps trying to find the emotional center and dignity of a character who’s pure pulp, and while it’s an admirable effort, it’s also jarringly unsuited to the movie.

If Gazer doesn’t pick up the momentum needed to match Frankie’s increasingly dire situation, it’s nevertheless a pleasure to watch — a project that feels, like its heroine, unstuck in time, reminiscent of a whole other, more vibrant era of American independent cinema when the films themselves were the point and not just calling cards for a bigger commercial opportunity.

It feels like a small miracle that the resulting film is so funny, lively, and light on its feet.

Magazine Dreams certainly isn’t inept, and Bynum, who wrote as well as directed it, summons a devastatingly spare atmosphere that’s broken up with some arrestingly dreamlike compositions when Killian arrives at a show or competition. But it consists of the same idea, underlined over and over.

Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia is an existential drama masquerading as a comedy masquerading as a thriller.

The problem with Holland is that Cave has no aptitude for tone.