The Devil Wears Prada 2 is selling a truckload of preposterous goods, but it sells them awfully well, with unfeigned assurance, conviction, and the appropriate ratio of cynicism to hope.

The new film is both Akin’s strongest and, with its stately, picturesque classicism, his least characteristic work in some time.

Setting aside the woeful omission, though, and considering the film outside the realm of preëxisting facts, as if it were a work of fiction about a fictitious character, “Michael” still counts as only a modestly noteworthy achievement, enjoyable yet flawed—because it contains other, artistic blind spots that keep the drama thin and narrow.

For me, the possible false note lay not in Aramayo’s performance but in the script. At times, it seems that Jones’s film, far from being strictly diagnostic, might in fact be egging John on, for the sake of our entertainment, toward perverse new heights of verbal invention.

Kawamura and Hirase seem to have perceived the immersive limitations of the movie medium—and, rather than fighting those limitations, adapted their story accordingly. What they’ve emerged with is the rare picture that feels at once true to and ultimately subversive of its source.

The invasion in this movie is neither an assault nor a threat; it’s an invitation to open doors and let fresh inspiration in.

The script’s blank spots and evasions leave the drama feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfying.

Its boldly distinctive method is inseparable from its emotional vitality, and its audacious sense of form is as immediate and personal as the story it tells. It’s a memory-film that captures inner life with physical style: patience, speed, precision, and breathtaking leaps.

The Drama plays like an extended internet trolling that exists solely to stimulate discourse.

The movie’s rage is righteous, its symbols profound. It is hard to imagine a fiction film that could rise to the severe aesthetic demands of its enormous subjects, but “Yes” is the rare film that challenges the cinema at large to try.

Coppola observes the connection of big ideas to fine details, the power of intensive collaborations, and the ultimate creative helplessness once the show starts.

The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the screenwriter, Drew Goddard, clearly want us to shed a few of our own. They also want to make us laugh, and their instincts are often at lumpy cross-purposes.

Hoppers is a hoot but also a more soulful film than some will give it credit for. It knows that, for humans and animals alike, seeing and understanding are one and the same.

Unfortunately, The Bride! falls victim to this hollowing out of character, and the result feels simultaneously like a reduction and an expansion—or call it an inflation, an accretion of curious traits that crop up conveniently but remain undiscussed and undeveloped.

Herzog, for his part, remains firmly interested in both nature and man. His camera is enthralled by the animals that occasionally steal into the frame: a venomous spider, covered by its equally dangerous young, gets a frightening cameo. But what absorbs him most is the intense kinship that the San feel with the elephants.

In Pompei: Below the Clouds, Rosi is as quietly watchful as ever, though he is either remarkably skilled or remarkably fortunate in finding individuals whose voices of conscience, matched by action, can stand in for his own.

Hong renders these universal conflicts locally specific and intimately personal.

There’s a tension, too, between the observant realism of Layton’s style and the derivativeness of the plotting, though the three leads, all superb, smooth it over with considerable skill.

Hadi tells an engaging story, brings complex and surprising characters to life, lends a locale an aesthetic iconography, and renders personal identity inextricable from the forces of history that shaped or deformed it.

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is certainly something to behold. I’m less convinced, for all its frenzied emoting and rain-soaked rutting, that it’s something to feel.

The unusual power of “My Father’s Shadow,” for all its subjectivity, comes from its elements of impersonality—from the seemingly scriptural authority with which memory is sublimated into myths and relationships into destinies.

The movie develops these ideas, with thrillingly demented showmanship, into a doozy of a third act, built on two cleverly intertwined cases of mistaken identity.

An exemplary work of cinematic modernism, a reflexive film that turns its genesis into its subject and its moral essence.

The documentary puts personalities to ideas; it teems with notable characters, spanning a range from righteous to indifferent to ignoble, who excel at speaking their minds and expressing their emotions when a camera is pointed at them.

Bezinović presents the story of D’Annunzio’s autocratic rise, reign, and fall in a way that’s as unusual as it is revelatory.

Foster gives a taut performance despite the unstrung absurdities of the plot. The story is anchored in Paris’s Jewish community, but the context remains anecdotal and unexplored.

The workplace dramas intended to animate Hind’s story wind up distracting from it.

Dabis embraces the conventions of melodrama with sombre grace. As a director, she orchestrates scenes of separation, discord, and shattering loss with an emotional restraint that’s equally evident in the way she plays the role of Hanan.