The story can’t keep still, shifting from year to year and place to place, and, whereas "Mr. Jones" appalls you into wanting to know more, Wasp Network is so temperate in its political approach that you start to forget what’s at stake.

Is it conceivable that Holland’s bleak, murky, and instructive film could prompt a change of heart in the current Russian establishment, or even a confession of crimes past? Not a chance.

By the end, in truth, I found myself swamped by Scott, and wondered if he might have made more impact as a secondary character — maybe as a foil to his widowed mother, Margie, who is played to perfection by Marisa Tomei.

In short, Lee’s new movie — like the great “BlacKkKlansman” (2018) — is a history lesson wrapped in an adventure, the caveat being that history is never done with us, and that we struggle to shrug it off our backs.

Hong’s deft artistry is an attempt to get past the habits of issue-oriented, advocacy-besotted political cinema to work out just what a political cinema would be. And his answer is: first of all, it’s cinema. In this regard, he connects with Mankiewicz, Resnais, and other great filmmakers for whom politics is an important, interwoven part of life—and of art.

The Vast of Night is the most absorbing piece of small-scale science fiction — the best since “Monsters” (2010), for sure — into which it’s been my privilege to be sucked. As Everett says, “If there’s something in the sky, I wanna know.” Same here.

Shirley, by contrast, coats her in gothic excess as if glazing a ham, and of her humor scarcely a shred remains. As a sworn devotee of “Airplane!,” I found myself praying that once — just once — she would utter the words “And don’t call me Shirley,” thus rending the veil of gloom from top to bottom. Sadly, it was not to be.

To see Coogan and Brydon being waited upon by unmasked servers, who carry the plates with bare hands, is to yearn for the touchstones of a mythical past. As one kindly waitress inquires, in a lull between courses, “Do you want to continue?” Yes, if we can. Forever.

If The Painter and the Thief is occasionally annoying, it’s because Ree gives away so little. He tracks to and fro in time, springing items of evidence upon us without warning, and withholding others.

Dumont turns the tale into a dialectical spectacle: he stages military musters like Busby Berkeley productions, seethes at the torturers’ rationalizations, delights in hearing his actors declaim the scholars’ sophistries, and thrills in the pugnacious simplicity of Joan’s defiant responses, which reduce her captors’ pride to ridicule.

Even though the movie retreats into its narrow story line, you come out with a sense of epic horror and the perception that this white master race is retarded.

The diverging paths and seething conflicts of two lifelong friends, now young Brooklyn professionals, are explored deeply and poignantly in this deceptively calm melodrama, written and directed by Dan Sallitt.

This lushly romantic creation, directed by Marcel Carne and written by Jacques Prevert, is a one-of-a-kind film, a sumptuous epic about the relations between theatre and life.

Do not be misled by the comic charm of this film. It’s a ghost story, brooded over by the rustling wraiths of bookstores dead and gone.

Despite these shortfalls, there’s much to relish here. To play a guy like Hank, who must resign himself to being second or fourth fiddle, is a tricky task, but Hawke pulls it off in the quiet style that he has made his own.

Reichardt films the workingmen’s friendship and their frustrated strivings sympathetically, and observes with dismay the official’s domineering ways and pretentious airs, but she reduces the protagonists to stick figures in a deterministic landscape.

The many characters’ distinct perspectives on the action are multiplied by chilling views from surveillance cameras, prompting deceptive displays—including romantic ones—in which tipped-off targets fool those who are watching.

Everything’s in place, and there’s not a weak link in the cast, with Debicki — lofty, playful, and unreadable — in especially beguiling form. The idea that art, like love, is something that you can make or fake, and that surprisingly few people can tell the difference, will always be ripe for exploration. And yet the movie stumbles.

For all the authentic thrills that the film eventually delivers, it leaves the feeling of a terrific idea that’s been left on the drawing board.

De Wilde’s film is a more clueful affair, and Flynn (soon to star in a bio-pic of David Bowie) makes an arresting Knightley — more bruiser than smoothie, with a hinterland of unhappiness.

The result is remarkable, yet it’s still a hairbreadth away from credible.

Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and performances are embedded in the lugubrious pace and tone of Pedro Costa’s modernist fusion of classic melodrama and documentary.

The emotional repression and intellectual stiffness that suffuse Angela Schanelec’s melancholy new drama are as much a matter of style as of substance.

Whenever the movie strays from its hero, you feel oddly impatient to get back to him, to watch his cravings do battle with his conscience, and to wonder anew what’s burning in his blue-green gaze.

Birds of Prey, alas, is an unholy and sadistic mess.

In its modest, forthright warmth, “Cane River” is a work of visionary artistry and progressive imagination.

The hermetic logic of the plot is as impeccable as it is ridiculous. It’s a drama crafted with robotic insularity for the consumption of viewers being rendered robotic at each moment of the soullessly uniform spectacle.

If you want family values, Marco Bellocchio is your man, though they may not be what you expect.

The characters don’t seem to exist outside the stilted drama of their individual scenes; the ambiguities of Balagov’s detached approach yield a sentimental tale of pride and reverence.

Green’s direction and dramatic sensibility are blunt, but the film’s laboratory-like microcosm of scenarios pointedly similar to recent widely publicized events in the movie business is shocking and effective.

You emerge from the film with a divided heart: thrilled to hear of a woman who, ignoring the dictates of the age, filled her days to overflowing, yet ashamed to measure your own days and to find them, by comparison, hollow and bare. Is it too late to follow Gertrude Bell’s example? First, hire your camel

What distinguishes the latest Cage freak-out is the care with which it’s paced; not until halfway through does he start to lose his hinge, and, even when his face is sprayed with blood, he keeps his glasses on, as if hoping to settle down with a book. Oh, and, if you’ve always wanted to watch him milk an alpaca, your time has come.

The Gentlemen is a mongrel of a movie. There are not enough twists and tangles for a proper mystery, not enough thrills for an action flick, and not enough laughs for a comedy.

Wondrous yet rueful views of the city, with its blend of grandeur and squalor, are anchored by the wanderings of an actress, Zhao Tao, whose mysterious role is clarified by one of the most anguished of testimonies.

What is involved here, in other words, is a tradition of truthtelling, with a long and honorable reach. The new film, like the old painting, is a stubborn, unvain, yet beautiful description of a man whose illusions are failing along with his mortal health, but who is somehow revived and saved by the act of describing. The glory flows from the pain.

These basic failures of taste and sensibility are a subset of Hooper’s over-all failure of literal vision: he doesn’t really see what he’s doing, and the virtual invisibility of his own movie to himself is reflected in an odd set of metaphors that result from his casting.

The so-called long take serves as a mask—a gross bit of earnest showmanship that both conceals and reflects the trickery and the cheap machinations of the script, the shallowness of the direction of the actors, and the brazenly superficial and emotion-dictating music score.

This is Hogg’s most disconcerting work to date. Like her previous movies, such as “Unrelated” (2007), it proceeds in lengthy takes, and the camera, more often than not, prefers to keep its distance, the better to observe her characters — the human animals — at play.

The immensely empathetic view of Franz is overwhelmed by vague spirituality and vaguer politics; the impressionistic methods dispel the story’s powerful and noble specificity.

While displaying the erratic workings of the law and the crucial importance of journalism, the movie’s legal focus narrows its imaginative scope; the drama, though infuriating and moving, sticks to its characters’ surfaces.

The movie’s energies drop perceptibly in the middle section; lines of dialogue are recited at a sluggish rate, with lengthy pauses, as if the pressure of the presiding theme had numbed the characters’ tongues.

Victor Hugo would watch this film and weep.

The movie’s outward gaze is radical, no question, yet it refuses to scorn the comforts — of ingrained habits, and of home — that are honored by the conservative imagination. Such equipoise is almost as rare in cinema as it is, God knows, in politics, and right now, though we can’t foretell whether time will be cruel or kind to Gerwig’s Little Women, it may just be the best film yet made by an American woman.

Uncut Gems jitters and skitters and lurches and hurtles with Howard’s desperate energy. Sandler’s frantic and fidgety performance provides the movie with its emotional backbone, and he’s not alone.

Invisible Life is a heady blend of the casual, the sorrowful, the near-mythical, and the carnally explicit — never more so, be warned, than on Eurídice’s wedding night.

As often occurs with topical tales, which are hellbent on catching a widespread mood (in this instance, anger and disgust), there’s something hasty and undigested about Bombshell....the action is relentlessly sliced and diced. Why, we could almost be watching TV!

To judge by the fashions, In Fabric is set in the nineteen-seventies. And, to judge by its visual and aural manners, it might as well have been made then, so reverent is Strickland’s thirst for the period, with its soft-core-porno tropes and its throbbing horror flicks. If anything, this antiquated air makes the film a little too arch and over-concocted for its own good.

If the story of Jean Seberg is one of the more wretched footnotes in the chronicle of fame, that’s all the more reason to treasure those occasions, onscreen, when she was not a victim — when she bore herself, and whatever pains she harbored, with mastery and grace.

For an instant, I heard the rumble of the coming Revolution, and wondered how Sciamma would conclude her engrossing movie. In violent devastation, perhaps? Well, yes, but the violence is that of a storm-tossed heart, and the final shot is of a woman — I won’t reveal who — shaken by ungovernable sobs, with smiles breaking through like shafts of sunlight. Reckon you can weather all that without falling apart? Good luck.

Here’s the paradox: the closer The Aeronauts gets to peak silliness, the more beautiful it becomes.

Sumptuous and diverting.

The director Todd Haynes’s artistry is hardly detectable in this environmental thriller, yet the film, based on a true story, nonetheless offers a stirring and infuriating story of brazen corporate indifference to employees, neighbors, and the world at large—and the obstacles faced by those who challenge it.

The Report has purpose and grip, as does any film that carries the stamp of Adam Driver.

Still, however obvious the emotional setup, Heller, Hanks, and Rhys manage, Lord knows how, to skirt the pitfalls of mush, and to forge something unexpectedly strong.

Coppola can’t avoid a dash of mythology when filming brutal killings, but he also looks grimly at the Mob’s role in popular artistry—and in enforcing racial barriers.

Diop films the characters and the city with a tactile intimacy and a teeming energy that are heightened by the soundtrack’s polyphony of voices and music; she dramatizes the personal experience of public matters—religious tradition, women’s autonomy, migration, corruption—with documentary-based fervor, rhapsodic yearning, and bold affirmation.

Luckily, Ferguson is fabulous in the role. She and Curran take possession of the tale and save it with sprightliness; their smiles arise without warning. I only wish that Rose had been around when Jack Torrance was on the rampage. What a lovely couple they’d have made.

Bale is a cussed and calculating actor, yet he’s never been more likable than he is here — an irony to relish, since the character he plays makes so little effort to be liked.

The intensity and the lyrical fervor of Kasi Lemmons’s direction lend this historical drama, about Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery and her work with the Underground Railroad, the exalted energy of secular scripture.

That blend of tones, with near-farce and emotional brutality blitzed together, is pure Baumbach, and he dishes it up for two hours straight.

Despite the déjà vu, there is plenty to savor in Miller’s film, and the final third, in particular, is quite the light show.

American Dharma succeeds neither as journalism nor as portraiture, neither as political critique nor as cultural survey nor as psychological study.

If I had to define The Irishman, I would say that it’s basically “Wild Strawberries” with handguns. Like Bergman’s film, from 1957, this one is structured around a road trip.

Lapid’s sense of form is more modest than his impulses; his direction falls short of Mercier’s clenched intensity and unhinged energy.

It’s no surprise that the film should so often stumble and trip, yet I would sooner watch it again and sort through my mixed feelings about it than revisit, say, the nullity of “Joker.” There is genuine zest in the unease of Jojo Rabbit, and it’s weirdly convincing as a portrait of childhood under surreal strain.

Dafoe and Pattinson have the stage pretty much to themselves, and the result is a beguiling crunch of styles.

Gemini Man is largely a sad affair. Fans of double characters should stick with Austin Powers, who, in “The Spy Who Shagged Me” (1999), enjoys the rare privilege of meeting the person he was ten minutes ago. “You,” he says, “are adorable.”

Bong, in short, is a merchant of stealth. There is no more frenzy in the editing of Parasite than there are shudders in the motion of the camera, and, as with Hitchcock, such feline prowling toys with us and claws us into complicity with deeds that we might otherwise fear or scorn.

The unholy clash of pageantry and squalor is finely framed; warriors in silvery helmets, shot from high above, and gleaming in the murk, resemble a nest of wood lice.

Such is the strenuous effort of Phoenix’s performance that it becomes exhausting to behold.

The film, directed by Perry Henzell, is feverish and haphazard, but the music redeems much of it, and the rhythmic swing of the Jamaican speech is hypnotic.

Zellweger’s singing here passes through to the other side. Suddenly, Zellweger herself seems to pass over to the other side of the character, to come out from behind the curtain and reveal that the cabaret performer and singer in question isn’t Judy Garland but Renée Zellweger, and has been all along. She leaves the movie behind, where it belongs, and heads off on her own, by herself.

Downton Abbey concludes with both Lady Edith and Daisy uttering the sacred words “I’m happy.” Upstairs and downstairs, in perfect concord: believe that, and you’ll believe anything.

How can a parable that set out to take the side of little people, versus gargantuan greed, end up using them as disposable comic fodder?

Ad Astra is Gray’s most formidable paradox to date, liable to leave you awed, confused, and sad. It is a work of calculated grandeur, and, if you get the chance to catch it in IMAX, and thus to revel in the breadth of its beauty, do so. But there’s something small at the movie’s core.

As written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, the movie offers enough moments of sharp emotion and keen perception to keep anticipation high throughout. Yet the movie stays on the surface, to yield, for the most part, a simplistic, unexplored celebration of characters who are molded to fit the story’s amiable tone.

What Landes has done is to revise, and to render yet starker, the premise of “Lord of the Flies.”

At once breakneck and tolerant, Give Me Liberty manages to be both rousingly Russian and touchingly all-American. The Cold War is officially over.

This mixture of poverty and fantasy will not be for everyone. Compare the angry reaction to Buñuel’s “Los Olvidados,” when it came out, in 1950; not content with revealing the plight of destitute children, in Mexico City, Buñuel had the temerity to swerve into nightmare.

It’s built on such a void of insight and experience, such a void of character and relationships, that even the first level of the house of narrative cards can’t stand.

The filmmakers’ probing analysis reveals the basic principles of freedom and dignity within the political essence of labor issues.

Good Boys is worth catching for those rare and wrenching points at which emotional honesty breaks through.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette has to be seen, and demands to be believed, because of Cate Blanchett. Like “Blue Jasmine” (2013), which earned her a second Oscar, this new film lies at her command.

The new comedic drama Blinded by the Light feels designed to be heartwarming, and does a depressingly good job of defining by example that innocuous quality

Its big idea, though vague, is at least a fascinating curiosity. But with its jumble of clichés, its blatant word-bubble declarations, and its hectically rushed impracticalities, the movie—which is based on a comic-book series—invites an air of antic exaggeration and revved-up stylization. It hints frustratingly, throughout, at a comedic impulse that the direction of its actors suppresses.

For novices, the film will serve as a lively, if annoying, introduction to the Hammarskjöld mystery, yet there’s a sadness here. The more we are encouraged to puzzle over the darkness of his death, the less heed will be paid to his illuminating life.

The longer that After the Wedding goes on, the more it concentrates on the woes of white folk, to the exclusion of all else, and you gradually realize that the Third World, far from being a source of cultural tension, isn’t even a backdrop to minor domestic events on the East Coast.

This boldly confrontational and journalistically probing documentary, by the director Nanfu Wang, goes beyond the slogan of China’s longtime “one-child policy” to reveal the system of violence, corruption, propaganda, and silence on which it depended.

Cars and songs. To be exact: the sight of a car bowling along, at speed, while a song cries out on the soundtrack. That, in the end, is what Quentin Tarantino loves more than anything; more than crappy old TV shows, more than boxes of cereal, more than violence so rabid that it practically foams, and more, if you can believe it,than the joys of logorrhea. His latest work, Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, is a declaration of that love.

The movie simmers with a longing for revenge, frequently boiling over, and the foe is not just Hawkins but the colonialist order for which he stands: barbarism, thinly disguised as civilization. Many scenes feel punishingly hard to watch.

Honeyland swarms with difficult, ancient truths about parents, children, greed, respect, and the need for husbandry.

I happen to find the live-action Disney reboots easy to admire but hard to warm to — supremely unlovable, indeed, and stripped of the consoling charm that we look for in their animated sources.

[Losier] revels in Cassandro’s offstage charisma and in his acrobatic artistry while also revealing the authentic violence of the sport’s blatant artifice.

Even viewers who take their comedy black, without sugar, may wince at the violence that is doled out; Stearns raises laughs and then chokes them off.

The movie is compact, coolly heartwarming, and gratifyingly uncute. Be warned, though, it also leaves you starving.

From the opening shot of Ophelia adrift in a river, in mimicry of Millais’s famous painting, the film seems to splash around in search of a suitable style. The drama is no longer a tragedy but a fairy tale — almost, at times, a farce.

The movie is fun, largely because it proposes that fun is the principal legacy of the Beatles.

As Rose-Lynn, stomping along in white cowboy boots, she is ballsy and fiery, at once wised up and dangerously immature.