What I found uniquely depressing about Dark Fate, though, is how resigned it is to the reality of its title. How it organizes itself as a paean to tireless scramble and triage, to the fight not for something better but for less of something worse. It’s a bitterly pessimistic film. It may be a realistic one, too.

Aaron Paul scintillates, once more, as his Breaking Bad character.

Lucy in the Sky is an odd curio, a drama that’s forlornly funny, a comedy of social manners with a howling desperation fueling its engine. I admire the balance that Hawley tries to strike, between the mundane and the sublime.

I found myself reluctantly taken by the movie, and the way Scorsese uses it to maybe, just a little bit, atone for some of his own past blitheness about violence. In The Irishman, a merry darkness slowly becomes an elegy, ringed with guilt. And what could be more Irish than that?

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.

It succeeds by sticking closely to the important specifics ... It’s a small-scale human story, precious few of which make it to film these days. It’s also, if you’re in the market for that kind of thing, an extremely effective tearjerker.

It doesn’t have the polish or prestige of your typical Oscar movie ... But there’s a tension at work in Harriet that’s missing from other, “better” movies. ... It’s also a vaster and in many ways wilder film than it will get credit for, a movie that leans into the excitement of Tubman’s mission so energetically it almost morphs into a heist picture, dredging up odd romantic and religious energies along the way.

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.

Winning and funny, while also a bit surface-level and predictable, it is an excellent case for the twin powers of Feldstein and Caitlin Moran, the author who adapted her own autobiographical novel to the screen. But it also fails to make the best use of either woman; Feldstein is significantly hampered by a working class British accent, while Moran’s unforgettable comic voice doesn’t come through nearly enough.

It’s the sort of movie that gives nearly every character a thoughtful closeup before, somewhat fantastically, bringing most of them back together at the end for a tender sendoff.

Jojo Rabbit has little to say about any of the things it dredges up, beyond the obvious.

There is something undeniably exciting about seeing a polished piece of studio-ish entertainment like this be cognizant of the world it exists in.

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.

It feels at times like a Tracy Jordan spoof of a movie, and not always for the better. But that doesn’t stop Dolemite from being funny, or from giving Murphy room to do the things he likes to do.

I wish all of Tartt’s tender and moving allegory—the way she pours the density of growth and regret into a solid thing that can pass hands—had space to bloom in the film. It doesn’t, and I left the film appreciative of its style and strong performances, but not emotionally altered in any lingering way.

It’s a rousing and moving enough film that one is compelled to excuse the limits of its artistry.

[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.

Without the Shakespearean language, this is just an ahistorical story about a king and a battle. ... But it’s nothing fancy, really, nothing newfangled or inventive. This is a pretty straight-down-the-middle period war-king film, a true Boy Movie of respectable pedigree but no real distinction.

There isn’t truly standout work from anyone in the cast, even if the cast is what makes the movie work when it does work. Thank God for Hader’s unassuming sense of humor, Ransone’s jitteriness, Chastain’s steely, intuitive resolve.

Uncut Gems is a movie that lives in the gut, where shit makes a name for itself, where anxiety, folly, and instinct are borne out without morality or restriction.

The movie goes all over the place, attempting to map the world of this thing but really just chasing its idea into abstraction. Which is the opposite direction of where it should be going.

I admire Zellwegger’s performance most of all for risking outright broadness, even badness, to chip away at the truths of the star’s persona. Frankly, it’s a performance that threatens to fly free of the movie enclosing it, which is well-made but not nearly as compulsively odd as its star.

The movie is, for a good stretch, a troubling and arresting character study, one done with nervy conviction. Eventually, though, Phillips has to more tightly attach this downward spiral to the larger Gotham mythology, which is where the provocative ambivalence of the film gives way to veneration.

One Child Nation does not flinch from critiquing mass complicity and the broader cultural logic—specifically the indoctrination into party politics—undergirding it.

The realities documented here would seem to merit judgment from filmmakers so clearly invested in the subject. But the film itself feels noble, gentle.

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

For all its strife and sorrow, Marriage Story is a generous film. It sensitively acknowledges the ways people fail each other, and the ways they don’t. It’s well worth your time. Maybe don’t watch it with your spouse, though.

It’s a mess of a movie, choppy and incoherent, a mishmash of tone that veers wildly from comedy to bloody drama, a gangster epic with no grounding in any people, place, or thing.