Allison Shoemaker

None of the curious friction of its story, nor in its cast, results in any sort of frisson of excitement, dread, or even shock. The best Yuba can inspire is indignation. You get all these folks together, Tate Taylor, and the end result is this?

Uncle Frank anchors itself to the war within Frank, but it’s the conflict within the film itself that’s most potent. That’s a fight no one wins, least of all the audience.

To watch it is both painful and vital, like taking a great deep breath with a set of broken ribs. It will hurt. The pain is worth the reward.

In attempting to tell the story of this young woman’s death — not her life, no time for that either — I Still Believe cheapens it.

First Cow, adapted by Reichardt with frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond from the latter’s novel "The Half Life," is many things. A simultaneously gentle and unsparing dissection of the formative flaws of capitalism, and thus of the “American dream”; a frontier story which captures the harsh realities and simple pleasures of a life built painstakingly from rock, wood, and soil; a heist movie; an argument for the power of baked goods.

While not particularly subtle or probing, The Invisible Man manages to do what many of our greatest horror movies have done before it: address a real-life, everyday nightmare in a heightened, bracing, and even cathartic way.

It is neither disaster nor dream, landing firmly somewhere in the disappointing middle.

It’s not subtle, and it’s not pleasant. It’s angry, and it’s honest. Hugo would approve.

The film has spent so much time telegraphing its own depth that it forgets to create any, and thus when that wig arrives, we have no reason to view it as anything other than ridiculous.

The strengths of the series are the strengths of the film. It looks great. It sounds great. If it could, it certainly would smell great (like rain, Earl Grey, green grass, and freshly baked bread.) And above all, it’s beautifully acted by a cast able to land both the punchlines and the punches.

Director Alex Holmes and editor Katie Bryer cannily draw out the story beneath the story, allowing it to bob along in the wake of Edwards’ tale.

It’s winning enough that you can spot its flaws and still don’t really care. Much of that is due to Kaling’s script, and particularly her writing for Thompson, who gets a role worthy of her dramatic talents, and her oft-underused expert timing.

It’s a thrilling, surprising, often funny film, centered on a terrific performance.

Together, Weaver and Keaton sometimes manage to tease out the movie inside the movie, the one drawn to the connections between death and joy, youthfulness and mortality.

While the story may be flimsy in places, the performances are anything but.

It’s all well-trod territory. And yet — and here’s another cliché — The Mustang breathes new life into most of those conventions, thanks in no small part to Schoenaerts and his remarkable work.

Inflate its profundity, and you’re part of the joke; Dismiss its pleasures and layers, and you’ll miss a strange and sometimes rewarding experience.

There are touches of the freshness that percolated through Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok, two films that brought new points of view, loads of promise, and no small amount of political and social resonance to the MCU, but only a little of the sense of newness and boldness that Ryan Coogler and Taika Waititi’s films had in abundance.

Those who follow it down its strange little alley will be rewarded with beautiful music, Isabelle Huppert, and a table-flip for the ages. See it with your mom. It’ll be weird. That’s what Greta would want.

Serenity is often stylish. It is never, ever dull. It is also deeply stupid.

That said, Marshall is particularly well-served by Blunt and Miranda, who seem to be having such a good time together — both as characters, and as two movie starts making a sequel to a freaking classic in really cool getups — that even when floating through the sky on the tail of a balloon looks kind of dull, their charms are nearly impossible to resist.

If you walk into Mary Queen of Scots looking to be dazzled by some great performances and rich art direction, you’ll walk out satisfied, no question. If you want something more than that, it’s likely the reaction will be more mixed.

Like the women who populate its halls, it might be easy to see The Favourite as only one thing, to reduce it to one quality, but it contains multitudes. And like its three central characters, you underestimate it at your peril.

Good actors can’t make up for narrative inconsistency. Beasts can’t erase the frustration of seeing characters you love behave in ways that make no sense. One can forgive retconning backstory where it doesn’t belong if it feels true to the fictional world you love. That doesn’t happen here.

Because it’s Claire Foy’s turn, The Girl in the Spider’s Web cannot honestly be called a colossal waste of time. It’s merely a moderate waste.

Its moments of creativity and daring, while effective and elevating, never even approach the audacity of the subject on which they center, and it’s easy to wish that Heller had pressed down a bit more firmly on the gas. But the overall effect is so simply pleasing, the performances so honest and engaging, and the story, frankly, so worthy of an earnest what the fuck? that it’s hard to work up the steam for any kind of complaint. It all works, and works well.

The master stroke of The Price Of Everything is that it asks the viewer, in Cappellazzo’s words, to see the intricacies of the art world and the way those two seemingly oppositional forces — the financial side and the creative side — are inextricably intertwined.

This is a film that’s tense from its earliest moments and tragic shortly thereafter, but never does it feel gratuitously punishing.