It is a great disappointment that we had to wait a decade for the Danish director to return to filmmaking, only to wind up with something that much more resembles the drivel of Copenhagen Cowboy than the fresh panache of Drive.

There are many promising pieces here and some great performances, though little in the way of actual meaningful insights.

Despite the mid-runtime ebb and an overlong runtime that works against the film’s firm grasp on the slippery tautness of good action, Hope still proves one hell of a time.

Even a lesser Kore-eda is still at least interesting, even frequently insightful, about the ways that we move through a world of pain and loss. It’s just a shame that, for a film that’s ultimately about the power of imagination and our ability to tell stories as a way of enduring, this one was unable to dream bigger.

Visuals and lighting aside, the production fails to impress in any meaningful way, and for a story rooted in art, con jobs, and detective work, Forge doesn’t seem to have much fun exploring any of them, allowing a person room to wonder who this movie is for and why.

Thankfully, Drucker has enough charisma to hold your attention in even the most mundane moments.

Paper Tiger may be built from recognizable Gray pieces, but he keeps finding new variations inside the same mournful blues. The result is familiar in outline, but authentic, poignant, and quietly devastating.

[Kreutzer] might have served Gentle Monster better by narrowing her focus to a pure character study. But one hardly has to squint to find those elements in the film. They’re present every time Kreutzer trains the camera on Seydoux and lets her demonstrate why she’s among cinema’s finest working actresses.

Although Firstman’s brand of modern humor highlights the absurdity and hypocrisy of social interactions, it is in no way cynical. On the contrary, his comedy playfully exposes those primal emotions and impulses that we think we’re hiding better than we actually are. This comedy of honesty carries well into drama, essentially blurring the boundary between the two.

Even as emotions may overcome the viewer, Hamaguchi never pushes All of a Sudden into saccharine terrain for empty positivity or cheap inspirational aims. It all feels earned.

The Iranian filmmaker guides his lukewarm homage to the seminal work of the renowned Polish director with an A-list French cast, crafting an examination of the traps of creativity that lacks the driving force of the spark it sets out to dissect.

Ultimately, you get an acceptable thriller with some sharp lines, two leads you like, and far too much scaffolding for what arrives in return. Not a disaster, but no sign of peak Ritchie either. It is, in a way, fitting that it ends up in the grey.

With Magic Hour, Aselton and Duplass have again given us something uniquely special.

This contemporary Japanese drama centers on the relationships between two vaguely thirtysomething women and two middle school-age boys. Two pairings that find a common connection in the most unexpected of circumstances. It’s the context of their attractions and the contradictions Fukada delicately presents that eventually beguile the viewer, even if his restrained aesthetic may test your patience getting there.

Reuniting with a majority of his “Ida” and “Cold War” collaborators, a 1:37 aspect ratio, and cinematographer Lukasz Zal’s masterful black and white compositions, Pawlikowski, whether intentional or not, has crafted a trilogy of films that chronicle the painful reverberations of the Second World War. With “Fatherland,” he’s also holding up a mirror. A reflection on today and, more likely, the near future. How will you treat those complicit in war crimes and humanitarian horrors? How will you grieve a world that is gone? Or will you grieve at all?

It is a film that feels movingly personal while speaking to the ubiquitous tussle between duty and desire, and that does so through the gnarling of fresh and guts and bones to find what is buried deep within one’s being: a throbbing vein of wanting, undeniably alive, and that, once freed, will not stop until its thirst is quenched.

Through the increasingly ghastly parade of grotesqueries, Barker sharply comments on poisonous relationships.

"Billie Eilish: Soft & Hard” is thrilling as a concert film, but its force comes from how carefully it maps the machinery behind the magic—the lighting choices, stage movements, emotional calibration, hidden pathways, and private moments of anticipation. It is vivid, immersive, and unusually personal, a portrait of a performer who understands the scale of her platform and still wants every person in the room to feel seen. For a film this massive, its most impressive trick is how close it comes to witnessing everyone.

By the end of Blue Film, it’s hard not to feel like it didn’t quite live up to its potential. As a novel, it would be engrossing. As a movie, it’s got good bones but a cowardly lack of boners.

There’s plenty to like, and this starter kit for detective fiction ought to serve as more of a net positive for kids than another soulless reboot of existing IP. But it’s a shame to settle for merely good when something great was very clearly a plausible outcome.

We’re not sure there will ever be another “Devil Wears Prada” installment, but be glad this one came along. At worst, to reinforce that shining memory of the original, at best to simply delight you for two hours. Hey, it might even be an improvement on that first flick.

The action scenes and kills are bloody, and the performances and muscles are big. After Amazon’s “Reacher,” consider “Motor City” another showcase for the above-the-title billed Alan Ritchson as a credible, cinematic leading man.

Theron can survive almost anything onscreen. Apex proves, once again, that she can carry weak material farther than most actors. It also proves that even she cannot quite drag a dull survival programmer up the mountain.

If you want to relieve some of the MJ magic, Jafar, Fuqua, and those timeless bangers will quench a nostalgic thirst that will make you want to forget all that “negative stuff.” For a few moments anyway.

McKenzie may frame the journey with some bemused curiosity, but the movie lands somewhere much angrier than that. Fair enough. A system this shady doesn’t deserve awe. It barely deserves the dignity of confusion.

The scattershot Mother Mary can never effectively find the connective tissue between different modes of storytelling. To put it in musical terms, this is less a mixtape and more of a playlist on a chaotic shuffle.

For all its rage about moral decline and the psychic poison of content culture, Faces Of Death never rises above the same cheap sensationalism it pretends to condemn. Instead of confronting the sickness, it feeds on it and spits out something just as rancid as the faux snuff films it claims to abhor.

Outcome—and it’s bad scenes shot behind obvious blue screen and fake, manufactured sunsets—is terrible. But what makes it memorable is the queasy way the movie keeps collapsing into the very pathology it thinks it is exposing. It wants to mock the famous for living inside a bubble of privilege, paranoia, and vanity, yet it ends up sounding like it was made from inside that bubble.