Alison Willmore

Its most impressive trick is its underlying warmth, its understanding of the vulnerability and fallibility of its supposedly fearless artists and preening industry experts as well as of the downtrodden writer standing just on the outskirts, trying his best not to let anyone see how much discomfort he’s in.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a boundlessly generous and frequently surprising two-hander.

While the movie feels empty and pointless overall, it’s not without its scattered interesting elements.

Seydoux may exude voluptuous sensuality, and Stewart may be performing a whispery, dystopian take on a sultry librarian, but the film itself has an aloof, clinical quality. What interests it is not the potential of our physical forms for pleasure and revulsion, but their inevitable failure.

Fire Island is, in other words, a reluctant romantic comedy that’s willing to acknowledge the genre’s shopworn pleasures while only begrudgingly indulging them itself. All of its best parts — and there are plenty — exist outside of that framing, which raises the question of why it’s there at all except as a means of wrestling with its author’s ambivalence about the conventional wisdom that a happy ending is the result of a pairing off.

What it is, really, is a showbiz satire about media ownership and our nostalgia fixation, though it muddles its message before the tone gets too scathing. It is, after all, still a Disney movie, even if it takes a perverse pleasure in playing around with Disney’s vast catalogue of characters.

Thyberg clearly set out to create a hysteria-free look at the industry, taking on the challenge of critiquing structural issues without casting judgments on the idea of having sex on camera. Pleasure succeeds at this, though not without a cost. It’s a clear-eyed treatment of porn wedded to a character study that never comes to life.

All of the miseries that are revealed as the two men go about their day may be bleak, but the humor comes from the small indignities inflicted on them even as they try to go out with a bang.

The mechanics of Sciamma’s film are simple, but they’re realized so delicately, and with the help of such unaffected child performances, that they feel miraculous.

The Northman doesn’t invite its viewers into its world, but instead dares them to try to catch up.

If the series was conceived as a way to hold on to the fans of the original books and movies who are now grown, what’s clear in practice is it’s a children’s story staggering to support a few ambitious and deeply underdeveloped themes.

More than anything, Aline feels like a kamikaze act of wish fulfillment, wildly indulgent but so deeply committed to what it’s doing that it can’t help but be compelling.

The film’s litany of details about growing up in the Houston area in the ’60s isn’t enveloping — instead, in its drone of vintage sitcom titles and reminiscences about fecklessly riding in the back of a pickup on the freeway to the beach, it feels, for the first time from Linklater, like a lecture about how things were better back then.

Everything Everywhere All at Once may be a kaleidoscopic fantasy battle across space, time, genres, and emotions, but it’s an incredibly moving family drama first.

Like most of West’s films, X is not particularly ambitious in its psychology or storytelling. It’s his technique that makes his work feel like it has one foot in the arthouse, with its elegant compositions and the way the camera moves as though daring us to see something the characters have yet to spot.

Deep Water, which was written by Zach Helm (of Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium) and Euphoria Svengali Sam Levinson, never creates any sense of internal coherence in its toxic main pair.

Effervescent and ridiculous and grounded in a pastel-shaded Toronto and the nearby throwback details of 2002, it has texture and specificity to spare, and the only person it cares to speak on behalf of is its 13-year-old heroine, Meilin Lee (Rosalie Chiang).

Like a lot of movies these days, Fresh feels like it was conceived through its themes first and then written to bolster those ideas, rather than from the perspective of character or story.

After Yang has the structure of a subdued mystery, though at its core it has no answers to these, or any, questions. Instead, it provides a slowly dawning and utterly devastating understanding of the hidden richness of its title character’s existence.

Dog feels like it should have been bigger and braver, but by the end, it also feels as if it could have been improved by being much smaller, closing in until it was just a guy and a dog and some of the country’s most beautiful scenery. What else do you really need?

Kimi threads its increasingly tense interactions with a modern melancholy.

For all that it has been positioned as the comeback of the rom-com queen, Marry Me isn’t really a return to form for the genre. Instead, it aims to have things both ways, to have the glamour and the buoyant fantasy and to also be more textured in its treatment of its characters and their relationship.

It’s so unapologetically absurd and so very fun.

It has the air of a television-show fragment, and not just because its initial entanglement feels like the stuff of a pilot, something that has to be gotten out of the way to reach the actual premise. It’s also because it introduces characters who feel like they have storylines in the wings.

As is often the case with Hosoda, it’s the extracurricular details that make his work so moving, the textures of the everyday lives of his characters that become something larger and more profound when placed in contrast to the genre elements at the center of his story.

The 355 was directed by X-Men: Dark Phoenix’s Simon Kinberg, who wrote the script with Smash creator Theresa Rebeck, and he’s genuinely terrible with fight sequences, which is a real issue in a movie that has a lot of them.

It’s hard to think about who, exactly, is going to be moved to make changes to how they live their lives by Don’t Look Up, a climate-change allegory that acquired accidental COVID-19 relevance, but that doesn’t really end up being about much at all, beyond that humanity sucks.

The real sin of The King’s Man is its near-total lack of fun.