Eggers’s action sequences are swift and brutal, filled with the crunch of life extinguished and tossed into the bone pile of time. Skarsgård, hulking and seething, is a fine vessel for the film’s opulent menace. He’s a fearsome, yet elegant, creature of destruction as he hacks and slashes away.

It isn’t remotely surprising that a political film can be gut-splitting entertainment; if the legacy of the American Western proves anything, it’s this. But Bacurau doesn’t merely reflect that legacy. It outdoes it.

While it certainly stimulated and overwhelmed my senses, Blade Runner 2049 rarely got my mind whirring the way one always hopes this kind of artful, serious-minded sci-fi will.

It sounds strange to say of a film about such impossible sorrow, but Mass is thoroughly entertaining. Or maybe engrossing is a better word. Its incisive dialogue and nuanced performances demand our attention, inviting us into a roiling weather system of guilt and sadness. The experience proves oddly nourishing, clarifying.

It’s not a subtle movie, but it’s an uncommonly affecting one—a film that, like Pixar’s best, manages to be whimsical and bone-deep, all at once.

One of the funniest pictures of the year: a farce with Frank Morgan, Lee Tracy, Ted Healy and particularly Jean Harlow, concerning the life and times of a Hollywood star, complete with a Marquis and three dogs.

Fargeat gets her thrills from all the bad things that make her genre great: Cinematography that’s rancid with heat and color, sound design that delights in every exaggerated crunch and squish.

Rather than trying to undo or edit the history of how her story has been told, Tina makes fans and observers another offering: Experience the full range—musical, emotional, and spiritual—of a rock-and-roll legend. You won’t regret it.

American Fiction, a sharp and clever film, could be all the more so if it felt better connected to the present tense. As is, the reflection is a bit warped; contemporary subtleties are missing.

If In Fabric is initially hindered by the literalism of Strickland's vision, it still manages to prove irritatingly suspenseful, at times even pleasurably shocking.

It pains me to say this. I spent a good deal of Us straining to like it, to get on its slightly preening wavelength, to be nourished by its heady stew of tropes. I couldn’t get there, though. As loaded up on stuff as Us is, there’s not enough to grab onto; it’s an alienating idea piece that lumbers away just as it’s about to reveal its true nature.

It doesn’t take a dystopian future or a sci-fi bent to present a teenage girl who faces enormous stakes and near-constant potential for violence, and The Hate U Give represents Hollywood’s first real ability to recognize that.

His intricate craftsmanship is a pleasure to watch in motion, though a bad symptom of sequel-itis stalks the film: Johnson, facing all that daunting follow-up pressure, has decided to go bigger.

That McQuarrie and Cruise are eventually able to get this hurtling, heavy plane level and pull off a rewarding climax is a testament to the fierceness of their commitment to these projects.

The thrill arises from the way Seimetz constructs and juggles everything, the balance between what she provides (feelings, memories, sensations) and denies (hard answers, explicit philosophy).

The language of the film is found not in the thoughtfully restrained dialogue Ishiguro has written—which accurately reflects the collective repression of polite British society—but in the images Hermanus, cinematographer Jamie Ramsay, and editor Chris Wyatt have constructed, in collaboration with production designer Helen Scott and costume designer Sandy Powell.

The Nest is a complex movie, despite its economical size.

The purpose of the fine-grained emotional details keeps getting scrubbed out of Waves as its runtime wears on and reconciliation feels increasingly imminent. The observations are sharp, but the attitudes and arcs that they paint feel overly simple.

Lears’s lens captures not just the candidates, but the volunteers—scrappy, seasoned canvassers and callers, smoking cigarettes in Nevada or crowding on porches in West Virginia. This is the process.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On both gets on little ones’ level and lifts them up to give them a better view out the window, presenting a world of thought and feeling to go along with the giggles and “aw”s of the film’s endearing landscape. Maybe quirky earnestness is back—so long as it’s done with as much care and insight as this rather marvelous curio.

It’s a piercing and often very funny character piece, a study of narcissism masked, at least in part, by bourgeois, Millennial understandings of progressive coupling. But Sachs, who is in his 50s, has not made some condemnatory thinkpiece about what’s wrong with a generation. The people of Passages could, in some senses, be from any time; mercurial partners have existed forever.

From a certain angle, Incredibles 2 looks a little too slavish to creaky conventions.

While visually and aurally stunning, James Gray’s latest film doesn’t explore anything new.

Holofcener weaves these people and their problems together in delicate fashion, guiding us toward her thematic conclusions in a way that never feels starchy, didactic, too lesson-oriented. She’s got a light touch, a humane one too.

The film never obscures what it’s about. This is, after all, the story of a martyr. But because it’s recounted by a director whose cosmic visions are deliberately meted out through the most minute details, things most other films overlook—the ephemera of everyday experience, the gestures, glances, and sudden flights of feeling that define us without our even recognizing them in the moment—it all feels that much more particular.

The gap between fact and fiction is where Bergman Island finds its murmuring potency. Its maybe unanswerable questions of self and creation give Hansen-Løve’s finespun film a sneaking weight. Perhaps one point of art is the guessing.

There is plenty in Barbie to be delighted by, even moved by. I have no doubt that the film will be a massive hit, cheered for turning a cynical I.P. project into a loopy treatise on being. But the movie could maybe have been stickier, more probing and indelible, if it had reined in some of its erratic energy and really figured out what it wanted to say.

With weary humor, Blank details how hard it is to sustain an actual, decades-long career in the arts, when the twin forces of public appetite (and money) and personal obstacle conspire to derail or deaden what was once so exuberant, so teeming with possibility.