There are some moments early on when there are still shots of nature, or slow Ghibli-esque pans across landscapes. But these isolated shots don’t connect to a larger overall mood, characterization, or thematic idea. They feel like pale imitations from a director who knows what Ghibli films do, but not why.

The film’s use of neon candy pinks, its star’s striking choice of nail polish, the soundtrack, the casting, the drama imbued in every shot, no matter whether it’s an extreme close-up of just-smacked bubblegum or a wide shot of a bleak overpass, or our electrifying heroine (played by Carey Mulligan) — it all works in unison to deliver a mesmerizing film wrapped around Fennell’s savage idea.

The film has the feel of theater, focusing on conversation and subtle power dynamics rather than a lot of movement and action. But some nimble staging and stunning performances from all four of its lead actors make One Night in Miami pulse with energy.

The best plays are often more situation than plot. They capture, unravel, and singe the edges of the power struggles between people who are standing on shifting sand, letting the upper hand change from moment to moment. In retaining the feel of a play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom hangs onto that inherently theatrical quality.

By the end, Another Round is a truly wonderful movie about trying to come to grips with life, anchored by terrific performances, infectious music, and a real understanding of the humming discontentment that all adults must learn to navigate in their own ways. It’s the sort of comedy fused with tragedy that may just best represent what life really is: a melancholy, glorious, slightly off-kilter dance.

Soul wasn’t made for a world that’s just gone through the nightmares of 2020, but coming out at the end of this harrowing year, it couldn’t feel more poignant. It’s funny, and it’s imaginative, but it’s also just very, very real.

The only thing that can conquer fear is love, and Wolfwalkers loves its characters, their world, and the stunning beauty of human life. But most of all, it loves the truth that is buried within the myth.

Large adult sad boys who want to take over the world and launch it into an apocalypse is something we’ve seen before (see: Loki in Avengers, Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Luther and Doomsday in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Steppenwolf in Justice League). This formulaic story is something fit for the other guys. The more time spent on it, the less time WW1984 spends being wondrous.

It’s a very good movie, tight and layered and complex. And though it could feel chilly — and I understand that reaction — I found it quite moving.

Education becomes a portrait of a community disappointed by the country they came to with eagerness — and determined to make something of themselves, and their culture, in spite of it.

Alex Wheatle plays like a conventional coming-of-age story, of sorts, but the film is a fitting addition to Small Axe, rounding out a picture of young manhood and serving up powerful images of isolation and courage.

It’s a cute movie with a lot of heart. It’s just that this heart was retrofitted from other movies’ tropes and is, as such, an awkward fit. For the next lesbian Christmas movie (please let there be a next one), it would be great to build a story about queer holiday celebrations from the ground up.

What might be best about I Am Greta is a related theme woven throughout the film. She speaks to the camera frequently, frankly, and without embarrassment about her experience of having Asperger syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder she refreshingly sees as a positive rather than a negative.

The Nest isn’t a haunted house movie, per se, but it draws on some of the visual tropes of the genre. It frequently feels as if something sinister is lurking around every corner.

There are many obvious reasons why Red, White and Blue feels timely, but perhaps the greatest one is that it depicts the tricky dynamics Leroy experiences among his superiors.

Watching Lovers Rock is like being at the party at which the film takes place.

The film boasts a stellar cast led by Letitia Wright (Black Panther), who plays Altheia Jones-LeCointe, the leader of the British Black Panther movement.

Whatever your opinion of the book, the movie is a different animal, and a startlingly terrible one.

Dick Johnson Is Dead suggests that learning to confront reminders of death, to even conjure them for yourself and examine them closely, takes some of the sting out of death and replaces it with love. To love someone is to accept that one day, death will part the two of you. The pain of knowing that is built into the act of loving. But we go on loving anyway.

Whereas Crowley left no one off the hook in his scathing play, creating a purposely painful experience, this remake seems to lack the same purpose of frightening accountability. The flourishes that made the original work so risky and raw feel more like polished, glimmering performance in the adaptation.

There’s a chilliness to Tenet that I haven’t felt in his previous work. The stakes, presumably, couldn’t be higher — both onscreen and offscreen — but after watching the movie, I don’t understand why I was meant to care. As an intellectual exercise, Tenet is very interesting, if not entirely successful. As a movie, I’m not so sure.

For all its screenplay’s threadbare talk about the importance of cultivating deep understanding, Mulan stays superficial and perfunctory. It gets down to business — and little else.

In using all those technical aspects of filmmaking to tell this story, director Andrew Patterson manages to marry form and content beautifully. The tale is engrossing, reminding us that even the simplest technologies we take for granted now have an element of magic to them.

Taken together, the movies are a meditation on middle age and mortality, on how our irrevocable life choices, even when they’re the right ones, will haunt us for the rest of our lives.

Rae and Nanjiani are terrific comedians whose wisecracks and antics are thoroughly entertaining, so even if you know what the ending of The Lovebirds will be, it’s great fun watching them get there.

By the time the breathtaking final moment arrives, we have learned, a little better, how to really look at the world, as a lover of both beauty and the strange bits of ourselves that make us really human.

Driveways is surprising at every turn. It’s a modest and gentle story about a boy who feels out of place, and the weak ties he forms that gradually become strong ones.

It’s not a puff piece, but it also doesn’t contain any big revelations.

South Mountain suggests that the moments that break us can also give us the space and excuse to grow and re-mold ourselves in new ways. There’s joy in those broken spaces.

It’s one of the best, most gripping, and smartest films of 2020.

There are some really terrific moments there — particularly where the movie leaves its central relationships — but they all hinge on a series of actions that the characters seem to undertake simply because the movie is almost over. It’s too bad. There’s a great movie inside of The Half of It, and Wu is a tremendous talent who shouldn’t have to wait 15 years to make another feature film.

Where the film really sings — aside from its often darkly funny writing and surprisingly thrilling take on what could have been a dull bureaucratic scandal — is in tracing the effects of the pressures placed on administrators and faculty.

Kurzel favors stylized images and the occasional anachronistic metal track to provoke a mood more than faithfully recreate history. And his approach works well in this film, bolstered by a strong cast, which features MacKay, Russell Crowe, Nicholas Hoult, Charlie Hunnam, Thomasin McKenzie, and Essie Davis.

Slay the Dragon isn’t a glorified PowerPoint presentation about the history of voting. It’s an unabashed activist documentary aimed at convincing viewers they can fight gerrymandering in their home states.

Chilly, precisely designed scenes make for a sharp juxtaposition with images of blood, violence, and birth. And the feeling that something very wrong is going on here is inscribed into every exacting, unnerving shot.

Though it verges on the overstuffed at times, Vivarium is dirty, sinister, hair-raising, and thoroughly entertaining — and completely worth a watch if you’re feeling a little, well, trapped.

Somehow it works — probably because The Platform commits to its conceptual framework so thoroughly, and with such precision, that it coaxes the audience to do the same. Its vivid images are designed to imprint on your brain.

Movies like this one are just looking for an audience with whom they’ll resonate. And the seriousness of The Way Back — its unwillingness to take the easy road, and Affleck’s total commitment to letting his personal rawness inform performed pain — should ensure those audiences find what they’re looking for.

It’s better than most of the entertainment aimed at children that studios churn out these days.

On a number of occasions, the film veers close to succeeding. At times it’s evocative and touching. But it’s also heaped high with ideas about the magic of stories and the importance of recapturing your sense of wonder, which don’t really add up to much in the end.

This new Emma doesn’t play too fast and loose with the story or its most familiar beats, but it digs out the absurdities of being wealthy (or adjacent to wealth) around the turn of the 19th century — the affectations, the frills that cover up the crudeness of real life, and above all, the vast, unmitigated boredom.

What makes the French masterpiece Portrait of a Lady on Fire — one of my favorite movies ever made, and the perfect Valentine’s Day date movie — so good is that it’s both a great romance and a great love story. The two bleed into each other so skillfully that you’ll almost miss where the romance begins and the love story ends.

As she was in To All the Boys, Condor is the beating heart of this movie, and her performance as Lara Jean is deceptively complex. Lara Jean has to be simultaneously a nerdy introvert and badass cool chick, but Condor makes both sides feel equally present and equally real.

It’s frustrating, though, to see a movie so tight and entertaining in its action and so gangly in exposition. The result is a rambunctious female-driven revenge thriller, filled with tentpole moments of crackling verve that is knit together by flimsy exposition and voiceovers.

Zinging between humor and poignance with a lot of charm, it achieves in its most insightful moments what comedy does best: Let us laugh at the world a little, by way of learning something about ourselves.

It’s both interesting and sometimes a little dull, which seems to be by design.

Crip Camp is buoyant and inspiring, a tale of people working together through difficulty and opposition to change the world.

The film is a beautifully empathetic work of art.

Light bigotry aside, everything here is blandly, smoothly cozy. And if you are sad and tired from the holidays since apparently they now start at Halloween, and you need to turn off your brain and watch some straight garbage every day for 18 days, then A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding is here for you.

It’s literally incredible. I hope I never see it again.

The Rise of Skywalker falls somewhere between an overstuffed fan-service finale and a yawnfest. If The Force Awakens kicked off a new cycle in the franchise and The Last Jedi set it up to push beyond its familiar patterns, The Rise of Skywalker for the most part runs screaming in the other direction.

If we learn anything from the story in Richard Jewell, it’s that truth is truth, whether or not it fits your pet narrative. So either the movie fails at understanding its own message, or it flat-out lies. What a disappointing way to undermine your own valid point, in a movie that’s otherwise well-acted and competently filmed.

It’s a subversive and powerful way to retell the Bonnie and Clyde myth for a new era — but also to reexamine what that myth has meant (something that Thelma and Louise’s feminist retelling did as well).

Frozen 2 is still a plenty enjoyable film, even if it lacks its predecessor’s subversive spark. But for me, watching generative and derivative nostalgia spar within it prompted a different sense of the familiar: bleakness about the future of mouse-eared entertainment.

The Laundromat is unwieldy at times, and its final scene is truly befuddling. But it’s worth watching not just for its bitterly entertaining explanation of a densely confusing matter but also the way it illustrates a larger problem.

Ultimately, the film is not just a wild and nearly unbelievable story; it’s a rumination on the lasting effects of sexual abuse, the complicated question of “good” lies, and the moral quandary that comes along with withholding painful information.

Noelle is Kendrick’s movie, and it’s a fitting reminder of why she’s such a potent star in projects that require some degree of cheerful borderline sociopathy. She smiles and sings and makes you believe in some truly unfortunate and fake-looking CGI reindeer in a story that keeps mutating and gobbling up other genres.

In the hands of Deadpool director Tim Miller, Dark Fate by and large pulls off recapturing the goofy fun of the original, though with a twist. It evokes the earliest Terminator films, but Dark Fate doesn’t want to just rewrite Terminator’s future — it wants to reevaluate its past, too.

The single most useful insight of Get Me Roger Stone is that men like Stone are driven not so much by ideology as by an overweening thirst for power and celebrity, propelled by absolute antipathy for their enemies.

As with most comedies, your mileage may vary wildly. It’s more of a celebration of its own existence than anything terribly fresh, but the jokes are solid and I laughed a lot, which I can’t say for most studio comedies of late.

The fun comes from seeing your favorite characters again, not finally resolving missing pieces that have tortured your sleep for six years. And on that front, El Camino delivers.

It’s an interesting (if not in-depth) exploration of how culturally dependent a thing comedy really is. It’s a vivid depiction of the challenges that black entertainers have faced, particularly in Hollywood. And it is, to everyone’s delight, a great Eddie Murphy performance.

Lucy in the Sky, distracted by its own flashy filmmaking, can’t center its gaze on one goal long enough to convey any of its interests well.

Mostly, The King is about the corrupting influences of power, and the idea that war, perhaps especially Renaissance war, is an inhuman, brutal experience. And it is damned if it’s going to let you get off your couch with any ideas to the contrary. No, The King will thump its themes into your head, whatever it goddamned takes.

Gemini Man is a demo reel for some fancy new movie technology, an EPCOT attraction dressed up as an action flick.

The movie has the maturity of an older man’s perspective, an eye cast backward on a full life. It is lively and wry and very funny, but at times it also feels like a confession, a plea for grace, not just from its protagonist but from the filmmaker himself.

Ad Astra is beautiful, contemplative, and loaded with meaning — not an action movie, but one that leaves you with plenty to ponder.

Parasite is an unpredictable, thought-provoking masterpiece about inequality.

Marriage Story sees the end of a marriage as cause for both mourning and bittersweet comedy. The relationship is changing, but not ending. And the evolution is something to behold. To get a story like this right requires a sense of the comical and the absurd along with the devastating — and Marriage Story delivers.

This film invites us into Rogers’ philosophy that adults would be better people if they tried to remember what it was like to be children. It gently coaxes the audience to filter some very adult emotions through the familiar characters and songs and stories of Rogers’ world. The result is unexpected and unlike any film of its kind, and a testimony to Rogers’ enduring influence, too.

Joker is a well-made movie, with a killer performance from Joaquin Phoenix, who seems born to play the role. But there’s nothing “bonkers” about it. It has nothing to say about the Joker himself or what he represents, or even about the world in which his brand of evil exists. Go ahead and crack open the movie. It’s hollow to the core.

I think I’d rather re-read The Goldfinch than watch it again. Straughan’s screenplay strips out most of the novel’s heart in favor of plot fidelity, albeit with the pieces told out of order. No longer does it feel like we’re on a journey with Theo. Instead, we’re just observing what happened to him during his life, and there’s no reason to care about any of it.

It’s the most finely tuned version of a murder mystery you could hope for, with joyous performances and style in spades.

Hustlers isn’t a fatuous tale of empowerment; it’s also not ignorant of the sisterhood its characters find in the midst of their sordid deeds.

The film is a little too sprightly to land any heavy punches — it’s more of a comedy with satirical elements than a true satirical tale. ... But hate can be both worthy of ridicule and deadly serious, and for the most part Jojo Rabbit manages to thread that needle.

It’s an intensely personal project for writer and star Shia LaBeouf, one that walks a thin tightrope, but pays off beautifully.

The film is smartly designed to deliver its message into as many hearts as possible.

The ultimate problem with this remake. King’s novel argues that evil is cyclical and that we never really outgrow our childhood fears because our childhood fears never really end. But It: Chapter Two muddles this message. It tries to convince us, not very effectively, that the evil in Derry can be fully defeated. But it also wants us to know that the real evil in Derry is Derry itself and that Derry is every small American town.

Waves earns its grace-filled ending by asking us to live alongside a trial by fire. It sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it: You walk out with a weary, cleansed soul.

American Factory tackles the challenges of globalization with much more depth and nuance than most reporting on the topic, precisely because it steps back to watch a story unfold over time and resists easy generalizations. It’s both soberly instructive and fascinating.

Jawline is both disturbing and empathetic, and an important peek into the glory and angst of being a teenager on the internet today.

Ready or Not takes its name from a game, an amusement for children, but it has something to say about some very grown-up concerns. And it’s both fun and deadly serious.

Bernadette is a soggy misfire, with sparks of possibility peppering a weirdly plodding tale.

One of Good Boys’ smartest insights into that period of life is that everyone is developing into their teenaged selves, but at very different speeds.

The movie's arguments and implications for policy are a matter of life and death, and yet it’s the images that stayed with me after 13th.

With Hobbs & Shaw, the quirky “James Bond as a fun Disney movie” formula that brought this franchise its legions of fans finally begins to feel tired.

The Great Hack isn’t revealing much that hasn’t been reported elsewhere, but it’s powerful in the ways it does so.

So The Lion King now has its very own pristine cover album, rendered in intricate, realistic detail, a high-fidelity B-side for its many devoted fans. But it might, in the end, leave you wishing for the slightly scuffed-up vinyl original.

Grief and love coexist in The Farewell, as do truth and fiction, past and present, sorrow and joy. It’s an outstanding, quietly devastating, deeply personal story, and one that’s destined to put Wang firmly on the map.

Throw in the earnest sweetness of Peter and MJ’s growing friendship, and Far From Home leaves us on as strong of a high as the low that its first act takes us to. That warm and fuzzy feeling makes it impossible not to think of how great a movie Far From Home could’ve been had it not tripped over its own feet in setting the stage, or unspooled itself from that tangled-up beginning.

While the film often feels like a slow-motion real-world horror story, it’s not without hope. For Brazil, liberty once existed. Can it exist again? And what does that mean for the rest of the world?

There’s no cutting away from the disturbing in Midsommar (in fact, the camera prefers to push into the worst of it); you will look at this, and you will see the violence that is life and death, the movie says.

Murder Mystery does feel like a very specific sort of direct-to-Netflix offering, designed to ape other movies you’ve already seen and enjoyed without straying too far from the formula or doing anything particularly innovative. But it does so cleverly enough to make watching it a pleasure.

Gorgeous, absolutely charming.

Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth’s chemistry and rookie/vet dynamic is almost enough to make you forget about the missed opportunity and just relish in all the alien tomfoolery.

Most of all, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a love letter — not a romantic one, but the kind you write when you can no longer hold on to a relationship that nonetheless shaped you profoundly. Richly textured and vividly rendered, it’s clearly the fruit of a lifelong love.

It’s the worst of the bunch, a continuation of the franchise’s swan dive into joyless mediocrity, while managing to destroy any affection one might have for Marvel’s merry mutants.

Late Night feels underwritten in some spots, but it’s surprising in others — an unfussy, entertaining comedy with some serious matters on its mind.