Mank taps into a vein of feeling that reaches farther than mere family tribute. The film also serves as a political cri de coeur, one that inspires as much as it dismays. In making a film that’s sort of about the making of another film, Fincher has many metatextual layers to work with, which he does with trademark precision and unexpected gentility.

Garland is a breathtakingly talented filmmaker, one whose few second-film stumblings—the unwieldy scope of his ambitions, his scrambling for an ending—are forgivable. Annihilation murmurs and roars with ideas, a dense and sad and scary inquest into life and self. It’s a true cinematic experience.

What is decidedly clear, consistent, and declarative in the film is the force of seeing Kidman venture down yet another new avenue, tossing self-consciousness out the window (or, maybe, just laying it aside for a while) to help realize Reijn’s curious vision.

Bad Education (which honestly isn’t a great title for this movie) is an arresting, nuanced depiction of insatiable want, of the bitter fact that reaching for things is often more instinctual, more human, than holding on to what we’ve already got.

Feels Good Man shows the collective lizard brain of the internet at work, explaining how systems driven by engagement naturally propagate outrage and instigation.

Heavy with spectacle and theme as it is, Part Two is often surprisingly nimble.

There’s a deep, and never pandering, empathy at work here, an allowance of confusion and moral error that keeps Monster from the smarmy and didactic lows of so many social-issues films.

In The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the West isn’t a source of nostalgic pride or a place we ought to willingly, lovingly reinhabit, like some auteurist-friendly Westworld. Rather, it’s where our great American myths go to die. Buster Scruggs isn’t an act of mourning; it’s laying all that to rest.

How to Have Sex is a vivid and heartbreaking depiction of what is caused by the willful, dehumanizing disregard of women. May its lesson be taken to heart by those who need to hear it most.

Once the politics of food and gas and guns have finally been sorted, Furiosa revs its engines and goes chasing after the grandeur of its predecessor. It doesn’t quite catch up. But it comes close enough that we can at least glimpse Fury Road’s tail lights in the distance.

[Green has] made a powerful movie about the ways power enforces silence, even between assistants and other underlings—people convinced they have everything to lose. It’s a movie about the tragedy of being brought into the fold and conditioned into that silence. And it’s a movie about how a person feels when they believe they have nowhere to go.

Yes, it is the cool stripper-robber movie with the awesome cast. But it’s also a true movie for our era, teeming with the confusion and yearning and risk of life right now. It’s a deeply humane film, one that finds celebration, and illumination, in the dark spaces where so many grind.

the sub-90 minute thriller offers a searing yet slyly humorous portrayal of the modern technological landscape—as well as the abuses (and negligence) of both state and corporation towards woman victims of sexual assault.

Twinless is a disarmingly assured film. Sweeney’s stylistic flourishes and complex writing flow with an easy cadence.

Conclave whips itself up into high melodrama and then cuts through all the sturm und drang with sudden darts of humor. It’s a carefully calibrated thing, touching fingers with prestige greatness while keeping its feet firmly planted in the realm of rollicking entertainment.

Priscilla is not an emotional epic, nor is it a furious correction of the record. It is, instead, a convincing and humane sketch of a young woman caught up in something vast and eternally defining. She may as well be wandering Versailles.

Had Tom Cruise not been in the cockpit, I suspect very little of that emotional component would be so effective. Maverick—loud and dumb and occasionally thrilling—is an act of arrogance, sure, a veteran movie star happily strutting onto the stage so lovingly set for him. (And which he helped design.) But that proves to be a clever reflection of the character he’s playing.

Small as Good Luck to You, Leo Grande may be in its cinematic dimensions, Thompson’s performance is a big one, loquacious and multifaceted and unsparing in its let-it-all-hang-out-there frankness. She’s a marvel. There

Karam makes an auspicious directorial debut, one that captures all the tense, rattling mood of his stage horror while giving it a new, decidedly cinematic shape.

You’ll leave the film unable to stop thinking about its dimensions.

A too-close-to-the-case ardor for the material does the film a disservice, as can sometimes happen when a cherished object is adapted.

There’s a host of great performances too, from Evans’s sad and weary nonagenarianism to Johansson’s watery mettle to Brolin’s lumbering and alluring villainy.

The film is rich with male feelings and even manages to have a sense of humor about its own sadness. Phoenix is fine here—his usual loose cannon—as is Gyllenhaal, whose educated snob routine doesn’t overplay its hand an inch. Though I’m tempted to launch a federal investigation into his mutt of an accent. But it’s Reilly who really carries the movie.

At first, I thought I didn’t like the movie. But then, of course, I quickly realized that the film had simply done its job; the whole point is for the audience to desperately want out, just as Linda does.

Sorry to Bother You is a surreal ride.

1917 is a rattling wonder of form, an audacious undertaking that nonetheless bobbles or cheats on a few occasions.

There are too many endings here, as if Fargeat had several great ideas for final images but couldn’t decide on one. So they’re all thrown in, one after the other, as the film wears out its well-earned welcome. Moore and Qualley keep selling it, though.

The movie seems to be a study of the artificial limits we put on our desires—and the ways those desires naturally betray us. This being Denis, she of course goes above and beyond merely exposing those limits; she must also, of course, expose the audience’s limits in the process.