It's a bold and borderline eccentric performance by Mulligan.

Garland’s alien biodome is a trippy mixture of tactile old school hardware and computer-generated images. It combines to give his brightly ominous new world a sinister sheen, especially when showing how it has consumed/subsumed the old seaside community it has displaced.

Sometimes these anecdotes show courageous and admirable striving, and a genuine love of science. Sometimes they show something less inspiring – the way systems can be gamed by competitors whose specialized knowledge of rules combine with tactics and strategies that give them an advantage, so what's being measured and honored is not always aptitude and innate genius.

Night Comes On isn’t a docudrama, but it’s informed enough to give us a sense of the obstacles facing young women like Angel.

Buster Scruggs, it seems, is about not just the Old West, but The West in a larger sense.

The War Room is far more interesting, however, as an unintentional commentary on the evolving (or de-evolving) nature of documentary itself, and on Pennebaker's famous style - the shaky hand-held shots, the grainy film stock, the abrupt zooms and changes in focus. The style is known as cinema verite, the very name suggesting that what you see is spontaneous and "true." [12 Jan 1994, p.36]

The title character in Gloria Bell is a fiftysomething divorcée, and the movie is uncommonly generous to her by the sometimes standards of contemporary Hollywood.

Despite its stars, the film is probably best known for the surreal dream sets provided by artist Salvador Dali. [26 Feb 1998, p.35]

I wasn’t sure, after the tedium of Infinity War, that Marvel could wrap this up in a satisfying way. Turns out, it was a snap.

The elegiac air that surfaces here and there in Bathtubs blends nicely with Young’s own final days on Late Show, reading his separation papers and wondering how to look for a job in his 50s.

Phoenix has a way of drawing most of the camera's energy toward him, but Reilly, in his own mysterious and quiet way, can hold his own with anyone, be it Ricky Bobby or King Kong.

Mira Nair is a director who, for a change, is not obsessed by the way bigotry pulls people of different cultures apart. Instead, she is amazed by the way love keeps bringing them together. [12 Feb 1992, p.41]

The movie is wildly uneven but lively and timely – in its own surreal way (nods to Idiocracy and The Island of Dr. Moreau), it stands as one of the few Hollywood movies to show an awareness of chronic low-wage pressures in our full-employment economy.

The movie has things on its mind, like the expendability of labor in the modern workplace.

High Life has the trippy profundity of 2001, the human treachery of Aliens, and it also includes an Orgasmatron.

One part beautiful fable, one part cheesy "Rocky" clone, "Fly Away Home" is nonetheless a notch above most flimsy Hollywood movies made primarily for children. [13 Sep 1996, p.44]

The movie is a pitch-black comedy, told with a wink and a smirk by unreliable narrators, who include Harding, her mother, and her husband — all presenting self-serving versions of the truth, often standing in arch contrast to the images we are shown.

Dunst is playing it straight here, but there is enough arch in Kidman’s eyebrow to signal that Coppola is having fun around the edges of this Southern gothic, with its formal compositions and deliberate pacing (as usual, a little too deliberate for my taste).

The small miracles that do occur in The Mustang feel real, and well–earned.

When we finally leave the hotel, the movie’s energy is spent.

It's Close who nearly rescues The Wife, grabbing control of it in the crucial final moments, managing to transcend the script to suggest a more complex portrait of Joan, whose life choices form their own narrative, with their own reward.

The Disaster Artist really hangs on James Franco’s performance. He’s an uncanny mimic of Wiseau’s legendary accent and mannerisms, but what he really nails is Wiseau’s complete lack of self-awareness.

Lady Macbeth is a mash-up of a different sort — it’s not strictly Shakespeare, but based on a Nikolai Leskov novel that transplanted elements of the play to 1865 Russia. Like "Shanghai Knights," this film adaptation is a period drama, but the actions of the woman are faintly anachronistic — modern attitudes transplanted into 19th-century characters.

Kahn surveys artists, dealers, auctioneers, and gallery operators to provide a synopsis of the New York art world, and is at its most interesting when profiling artists who represent differing attitudes toward the way money affects their work.

Maslany is first-rate in this role.

If nothing else, Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, mother!, will get you talking. Part psychological thriller, part anarchic horror flick, it is one of the strangest movies to come from a major studio in recent years — and Aronofsky seems to revel in that confusion.

The movie's best window into Foley comes via his music, played expressively by Dickey, whose performance finds humor in Foley's rather sad life.

The acting is fine throughout, and director Labaki (she plays Zain's lawyer) has a genius for handling untutored performers like Al Rafeea.