The Bubble (which Apatow co-wrote with Pam Brady) is a sort of good bad movie, in which the aesthetic falls flat but the personal motive, the emotional core, is authentic, pugnacious, derisive.

Apollo 10 1/2 unites the inner and outer life in a form of cultural autobiography, and it does so with a unique sense of cinematic style and form.

With its bland and faux-universal life lessons that cheaply ethicalize expensive sensationalism, the film comes off as a sickly cynical feature-length directorial pitch reel for a Marvel movie.

For all the specific accusations and denunciations that Y—and Lapid—level at Israeli politics and culture, “Ahed’s Knee” is, above all, a work of cinematopoeia: it looks and sounds and feels like what it means.

Toward the end, Deep Water grows less ambiguous and more conventional, but the rest of it is actually well suited to Lyne’s fetishistic style, with its succulent closeups, and the bitter memory of Glenn Close’s character—depicted as a vengeful virago—in Fatal Attraction is somewhat eased by de Armas’s willful and cheerful Melinda.

What Moore’s film strives toward, and touches only erratically, is an emotional claustrophobia to match its physical squeeze.

Master is a tensely effective, terrifyingly affecting drama that’s also a virtual vision of the power and the purpose of the modern right-wing war on truth.

What is this “fun” of which Selina speaks? It’s certainly not a concept that The Batman, dropsical with self-importance, and setting a bold new standard in joylessness, has much use for.

You may start to wish you’d gone to see the new “Jackass” movie instead.

The silences that overwhelm the movie’s confrontational rages and the suppression of backstory details, underplaying motives and emphasizing action, thrust “Fire” out of the realm of psychological drama and into shocking emotional immediacy.

The exemplary figure of Ropert’s film is Solange’s retreat into a sharply expressive silence, captured in poised and precisely composed images, that resounds as clearly as a cry of agony.

In Desplechin’s implicit view of his artistic heroes and milieu, he turns Roth’s personal story into his own.

Its core of information is largely a footnote to Aaron Sorkin’s drama “Being the Ricardos,” but, with access to previously unreleased audio tapes recorded by Ball and Arnaz, Poehler vividly and poignantly evokes their offscreen personalities.

Through Glassman’s diligent and empathetic investigations, it becomes a film of documents, in which the aura of the letters—the worlds that they contain in their text and evoke in their sheer physical presence—generates overwhelming emotional power.

Cyrano is a thuddingly dull film that sinks under the ponderous undigested mass of its own bombast, squandering the talents of a fine cast and a fine concept.

It goes without saying that, like most of Abu-Assad’s films, especially Paradise Now(2005) and Omar(2014), Huda’s Salon is rubbed raw by the politics of the occupied territories; but somehow it doesn’t feel like an issue movie. When Huda is onscreen, played with sublime command by Awad, the story becomes unremittingly about her.

The sense of calculation makes the journey feel like a lockstep march; the movie’s sense of a story that’s dictated rather than observed makes its good feelings feel bad.

The principal story that The Automat tells is that of a commercial vision meshing with an aesthetic one, the transformation of cheap dining into a sort of theatrical experience, complete with a stage setting of authentic craft and luxury, in which the banal purchase of food becomes a tour de force of industrial ingenuity.

The no-holds-barred, extravagantly playful methods by which Audley and Birney conjure the audacious yet coherent tale of supernatural menaces and splendors are the movie’s prime achievement.

If “Marry Me” plays with the obvious and brings it to obvious conclusions, its actors nonetheless invest its gestures and its dialogue, its broad lines of action and its closeup incarnations, with the spark of surprise.

The Sky Is Everywhere is a movie of inner vision, of fantasy and symbol, that coexists with the drama even when it doesn’t quite coalesce with it.

Amid its tightly plotted action, it seethes with a rage that seems pressurized by the sealed-off grimness of the pandemic years.

The best parts of “Moonfall” feel like a sharp and cogent reproach to the corporate stolidity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other superhero-franchise movies. The ridiculous proves occasionally sublime.

The Worst Person in the World strikes me as believable, beautiful, roving, annoying, and frequently good for a laugh. Like most of Trier’s work, it also takes you aback with its sadness, which hangs around, after the story is over, like the smoke from a snuffed candle.

As a whole, the film lacks the courage of its own despair. The longer it goes on, the more Franco feels obliged to pack it with plot and context.

The movie sinks, fast and deep, under the weight of dramatic shortcuts, overemphatic details, undercooked possibilities, unconsidered implications.

Its clarity and simplicity—and the outrageous, nearly humorous audacity with which its brisk mysteries conjure wide-ranging, complex, and turbulent stories—makes it among Hong’s most compulsively rewatchable films.

I have seen “Sansho” only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal.