Simon films the lives of others with an empathetic passion that transforms observation into deep and resonant subjectivity.

The irony is that what makes the movie challenging is not the scientific theory—which is delivered with a diplomatically light touch—but a glut of political paranoia.

Barbie is fun, no question, yet the fun is fragmented. You come away with a head full of bits: interruptions that are sprinkled over the plot like glitter.

Let’s be fair. Despite its longueurs and shortcomings, this movie is still a bag of extravagant treats.

[Leaf] reinvigorates one of the basic elements of movies, the closeup, and restores its centrality as the beating heart of the cinema.

Biosphere, though sometimes larky in tone, is also a frowningly intense venture that never stops being about itself.

You should, nonetheless, make a date to watch Mangold’s film, and, if you have to duck out after an hour because you’ve left something in the oven, no matter.

Even if you regard the latest movie as a box of tricks, you have to admire the nerve with which Johansson, as Midge, delves into that box and plucks out scraps of coolly agonized wit.

So heavily does the movie strain for offbeat detail—a killer who watches cartoons at full blast; Jay equipped with a neck brace and a leaf blower—that it refreshes one’s respect for Wes Anderson, whose eye for oddities remains clear and bright.

The ultimate deflation of the movie into a pointed drama of norms and ethics doesn’t, however, dispel its glorious hour of theatrical spectacle and artistic mystery.

Corbijn has an obsessive eye, and it suits the detail-crazy methods of Powell and Thorgerson.

Rich in settling and unsettling, Past Lives, for all its coolness, provokes us with difficult questions.

In its hectic, scattershot way, Padre Pio feels very much of the desperate present day.

If the original “Little Mermaid,” in its effervescent way, talked down to its audience, the new one, bluntly but amiably, talks ever so slightly up to its young viewers. It adds hints of a complicated world beyond the narrow realms of fantasy; it delivers earnest cheer.

It’s almost as if the movie were following the blueprint of a moral scheme, like the layout of a herbaceous border, and plausibility be damned.

The movie seems lived-in; its virtually tactile details and its trenchantly analytical dialogue feel like intimate aspects of the filmmaker's audiovisual, emotional, and intellectual experience.

Given this mockable array, Holofcener goes surprisingly easy on her troupe of fools. Could it be that, over the years, her approach to the hypersensitive has lost a pinch of sourness and grown more sympathetic?

Everything ends badly, or sadly, and one can imagine the film being screened for M.B.A. students as a cautionary tale—frequently very funny, but often disheartening, too.

The movie is grandiose but not impressive, elaborate but not eye-catching; its most poignant simulation is the effort to make it feel like a movie for adults, with grownup concerns, which remain dramatically undeveloped but are delivered with a thudding earnestness.

It’s a hell of a performance from Küppenheim as the heroine, precisely because she demonstrates how hard it is to be heroic.

The filmmakers’ self-imposition of a pristinely clean aesthetic results in the kind of emptied, tranquillized, minutely calibrated experience that’s no less a matter of fan service than the latest installment of comic-book I.P., and offers no more meaningful a view of life.

The story of young George’s childhood and rise to fame has a tense and turbulent charm, but the story of the professional heavyweight’s dash to the championship and everything that follows (up through the nineteen-nineties) has a whiff of a ghostwritten corporate autobiography.

All in all, Beau Is Afraid gave me the unsettling feeling that, owing to some administrative error, I had stumbled upon an extended therapy session instead of a movie—looking on, or scarcely able to look, as the director digs deep into who knows what private funks.

In truth, every performance in Everything Went Fine is nicely judged—too much so, I suspect, for many filmgoers, who will be praying for someone to explode. Yet the movie is anything but bland.

It’s bouncy, clever, amiable, and idiosyncratic, but its virtues seem inseparable from its over-all inertness and triviality.

As for Nargle, he seems like a refugee from a Christopher Guest film, and I can imagine him, say, as an artist-in-residence among the folksingers of “A Mighty Wind” (2003). Whether he merits a movie to himself is another matter.

The movie’s substance remains largely implicit; its pleasures are partial, detached, and superficial. It offers little context, background, personality, or anything that risks distracting from the show.

It’s a quiet, candid, sharply conceived and imaginatively realized masterwork, her first film of such bold and decisive originality; it’s Reichardt’s first great movie.