Making her fictional feature debut as a writer-director, Kapadia unveils a storytelling style that whispers rather than shouts and whose empathy for the unseen women among us is a balm to the soul.

Oppenheimer has made a chamber play of and for the damned, and while it never fully escapes the laboratory of ideas, it shows a daring and lethally sharp creative mind at work. More, please.

There’s a message here, and the great good grace of “Flow” is that it trusts us enough not to spell it out. Even adults will figure out what’s going on; the kids will be way ahead of them, as they usually are.

A book that got under the young Guadagnino’s skin, about the ache to merge with a forbidden lover’s body and soul, has become a film that uses the play of light on a screen to hint at the light we carry inside ourselves and that only the queer know we share.

[Kurzel] delivers another warning in the form of a timely American crime story — one that, arriving in theaters a month after the U.S. election, many will deem too late.

It’s too bad that the premise hints at more of a horror twist than the movie actually delivers. Heller frequently interrupts a thin story with ambiguous dashes of magical realism that only serve to confuse.

The songs aren’t the problem. Rather, it’s the muddled story, which takes way too long to give Moana — now a skilled wayfinder scouting new lands and new peoples to reconnect her long-isolated island tribe with the world — her mission.

Maria is still worth your attention for the spectacle of a statuesque actress playing a woman who willed herself into statuary.

At nearly 2½ hours, the movie is fun to watch until it’s not, and then it becomes a chore.

The production numbers in “Wicked” are garish and cluttered, but they have snap and a pleasing sense of unified mass movement; their effect on the eyeballs is somewhere between an assault and a massage.

There are pieces of a great movie here, but they never quite come together in a way that allows a gifted filmmaker to take flight.

Culkin walks a line between obnoxiousness and delight; it’s a performance both liberating and touched by a deeper, more inarticulate sadness.

Red One is a sour sugarplum of a Christmas treat, a cheerfully cynical action comedy for kids — especially the ones who asked Santa Claus for ninja stars and a Nerf gun.

The Piano Lesson offers a spirited if uneven testimony to the playwright’s great gifts.

Written and directed by “A Quiet Place” scribes Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, “Heretic” builds suspense through ideas and argument, allowing both sides to score points when it comes to organized religion.

Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” is a triumph of production design; unfortunately, what it triumphs over is story.

Ironically, it’s Zemeckis’s reluctance to embrace theatrical artifice over attempted photorealism that prevents “Here” from hitting as powerfully as it might.

Memoir of a Snail, by the Oscar-winning Australian animator Adam Elliot, is a grubby delight, a stop-motion charmer that feels like falling into a dumpster and discovering an orchid.

Eastwood was never much of a cinematic stylist to begin with, and this film in particular has the dull, proficient sheen of a TV movie.

Emilia Pérez is a big, bulging bag of eye candy, in other words, and like a lot of candy, it can give you a sugar high without much genuine sustenance and perhaps an attendant headache.

The movie is superficially a comedy — and ultimately a love story, just not the one we think — but there’s a great deal of striving and sadness beneath its layers of glitter and soot and, beyond that, the exhaustion that comes from slowly admitting to yourself that the doors of the kingdom will almost certainly never open for you.

Cousins succeeds at his main task. He brings back a genius in all his contradictions, and his movies in all their deadly delights.

It’s hard to be a saint in the city, but “Road Diary” reminds us why it’s worth it.

It’s the kind of movie that some will deem important enough to merit end-of-year awards and others will find portentous enough to give them the giggles — again, not unpleasurably.

How do you make a movie about this story? Do you spin it as a thriller, a true-crime drama, a horror film, a sick pop-culture joke? Actress Anna Kendrick, making her debut as a director, does something fascinating. She juggles all four and then adds a fifth layer undergirding the others: the unceasing dread that comes from being a woman who knows men like Rodney Alcala are out there.

Rumours is too slap-happy to function as the fine-tuned political satire one might want it to be, and too often the gags hit a nonsensical dead end.

In any event, Pugh uses her expressive eyes and ardent, intelligent sensibilities to paint a touching if underdeveloped portrait of an artist desperate to leave her mark before being rushed too soon from the show.

This lethargic romantic drama forces chemistry where there is none and, worse, sells out its aspirationally cool, intelligent female protagonist with an endgame that she — and the luminous Dern — hardly deserves.