It would be churlish to deny that The French Dispatch is a box of delights; Wright, in particular, is a joy as the sauntering hedonist. Equally, though, it would be negligent not to ask of Anderson, now more than ever: What would incite him to think outside the box?

The voice work, by Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, and America Ferrera, among others, is also lively and fun. This sequel also adds a major new character, Valka (voiced exquisitely by Cate Blanchett), a protective den mother who runs a dragon sanctuary. She gives the film a surprising emotional resonance.

One’s eye is at first dazzled, then sated, and eventually tired by this pitiless inflation of scale.

The most disturbing and dissonant aspect of The Last Duel involves the filming of the sexual crime at its center.

For all the earnest diagnosis of race relations in a country that doesn’t recognize race, Zadi crafts an extraordinary comedic work of lilt and sparkle.

No Time to Die has a heavy heart, and right now, more than ever, we could use a light one.

Lamb preens and strains to be admired even as it reduces its characters to pieces on a game board and its actors to puppets.

Despite its physical horrors, the movie is also a celebration of the body, of the bond between pleasure and pain, agony and ecstasy—and that fusion proves to hold for family bonds as well. But the psychology and the practicalities of the story are ultimately thinly sketched, the abrupt transitions calculated to elide reflection in repose. The movie is too specific and detailed to be starkly and abstractly symbolic, yet too vague and general to convey the complexity and density of a relationship.

Over six seasons The Sopranos at least compensated for its reductive aesthetic with complex patterns of narrative information. The Many Saints of Newark, by contrast, reduces characters of potentially mythic power to a handful of defining traits and pins them to a diorama-like backdrop of historical readymades.

Jones is as formidable as ever, and Vincent D’Onofrio gives a sombre and riveting portrayal of Jerry Falwell, the Baptist Savonarola, who doesn’t hesitate to scythe down the Bakkers for their sins. But this is Chastain’s movie, through and through.

With a limited, intimate focus, Little Girl becomes a grandly diagnostic analysis of French society, distilling the country’s fault lines into a few indelible images.

Never, though, has the evolution of an automaton been depicted with the extensive grace and wit that Dan Stevens, speaking good German with a slight British accent, brings to I’m Your Man.

Cry Macho doesn’t resound with the hectic astonishment of The 15:17 to Paris or the tragic imagination of Sully, but it delivers whispers of both. Its breezy, easygoing fable of late-life adventure and connection is also a story of an over-the-hill athlete who may meet his match on any street corner.

What’s discomforting about The Card Counter is that Schrader builds this strong moral backdrop for his characters and then allows them to drift about in front of it.

As you’d imagine, the entire shebang is so naggingly self-referential, and so noisy with in-jokes, that it should, by rights, disappear up its own trombone. But there’s a saving grace: this is a funny movie.

As a performer, Morales is laughably smart, sympathetic, and engaging, and what’s so clever about Language Lessons is the deployment of that allure.

Azor is Fontana’s first feature, and what’s impressive is how coolly he avoids the temptation to put on a big show, preferring more delicate tactics.

The films range widely in form—documentary, fiction, hybrid, and unclassifiable—as well as in tone, subject, style, and, for that matter, in originality and inspiration. Even the most ordinary of them is worth seeing, and the best of them, brevity notwithstanding, are among the most powerful films of the year.

For all its symbolic heft and keen-eyed flair, there’s a scattershot quality to Candyman that has to do with the seemingly inescapable demands of its genre source. The horror-film combination of constrained tautness and calculated gore keeps some of the themes from fully developing and leaves narrative loose ends dangling.

The filmmakers of Respect aim at a wide audience with an altogether more obvious and calculating contrivance. They don’t grant the person, the personality, the character of Aretha the same originality, complexity, or substance that the real-life Franklin had; they leave all the specifics on Hudson’s shoulders, and her energetic, detailed, and focussed performance nearly papers over the missing heart of the movie.

Searching for Mr. Rugoff is an entertaining and instructive jaunt, and it bristles with small shocks.

Levy, holding his nerve, does cut through the chaos, delivering a fable that, if not exactly coherent, is nonetheless tinged with the very last virtue that you’d expect in a movie of this ilk. It has charm.

Annette is a folie de grandeur, alas, without the grandeur.

Jia’s restrained yet fierce X-ray of the ills of modern China also evokes a calm, intimate compassion for its struggling survivors.

The Green Knight wields a peculiar magic, the reason being that Lowery—as he showed in A Ghost Story (2017), which ranged with ease over centuries—is consumed by cinema’s capacity to measure and manipulate time.

Sisto picks up the spell that is cast by Lowery’s tale, verdant with danger, and continues to weave.

It is not a great film—its form is less personal than its substance, its revelations and insights come only intermittently.

With Old, facing the constraints of filming during the pandemic—on a project that he’d nonetheless planned before it—Shyamalan has created a splendid throwback of a science-fiction thriller that develops a simple idea with stark vigor and conveys the straight-faced glee of realizing the straightforward logic of its enticing absurdity.