Bilge Ebiri

Your cousin could have written this movie. But maybe only Wenders could have directed it. He has the sensitivity to shoot the seesawing depths of Yakusho’s face. He has the eye to capture the elegant and diverse architecture of Tokyo’s public bathrooms.

Kitano has conjured a universe of such incredible and casual nastiness that we yearn for some nobility and loyalty, or even some modicum of decency.

Erice’s fourth feature is a stirring tale about memory, identity, and friendship, and it feels deeply, almost alarmingly personal.

By cutting things up and showing us the perils of fractured perspectives, the director, one of cinema’s great humanists, demonstrates that compassion is more than just a natural state of being; it’s a process that requires constant expansion of one’s field of vision.

The audacity and beauty of Asteroid City lie in the way it connects the mysteries of the human heart to the secrets of science and the universe.

In its own sly and subtly devastating way, The Zone of Interest pulls us into its circle of evil.

The film is both humane and scathing. Which is why Haynes’s stylistic treatment of the subject, veering between noirish gusto and flights of snark, winds up being so touching.

For all its extravagant running time (three hours and 26 minutes!), its big-swing history lessons, and its tale of an Old West giving way to the regimentation of a modern police force, Killers of the Flower Moon turns out to be that simplest and slipperiest of things: the story of a marriage. And a twisted, tragic one at that.

Its real-world mysteries eventually become existential ones, but the film never stops sending chills up your spine.

The damn thing is fun. Mangold may not have the young Spielberg’s musical flair for extravagant action choreography (who does?), but he is a tougher, leaner director, using a tighter frame and keeping his camera close.

It’s the comic energy generated by the triumvirate of Howerton, Baruchel, and Johnson that really drives BlackBerry, but Johnson and his co-writer Matthew Miller also find lively ways to dramatize the technological concepts at play.

Sisu veers between the elemental and the ethereal. Once it’s over, it feels like you must have dreamed it.

Because Rocket is not just an object, and because the film’s flashback structure invests the quest with emotional power, the plot of Guardians 3 never feels like paint-by-numbers gamification; it feels like something we might actually want to care about.

The problem with Peter Pan & Wendy is all too often one of subtraction, not reinvention. You can almost read the tsk-tsking studio notes as you watch the movie.

For much of its running time, director Ritchie’s war movie manages to be topical, suspenseful, and moving. But partly because the story is fiction, Ritchie takes a few genre liberties that threaten to undermine the sincerity of his tale.

The flaws are part of the overall effect — spontaneous and human. The reason Broken Lizard seems to keep making cult movies is because when you watch them, you feel like you were there when they made it. Broken Lizard is all of us.

It allows Crowe to have fun with the part of Father Amorth, but the film forgets to have fun along with him.

Air might seem at first like a ridiculous idea for a movie, but it is in fact an ingenious one.

It’s a time-filler, not a time-waster. It’s a film of simple pleasures — but they are pleasures.

The film’s set pieces are built around comedy, with bits of (cleverly choreographed and directed) action and suspense to add some urgency, not the other way around.

The fact that The Lost King never quite reconciles this tension between striving for noble recognition and the fallacy of divine majesty feels like an implicit damnation of both.

Tori and Lokita is a film born of rage and frustration, and as such, it’s a moving one. But it’s fair to expect more than just rage from artists — especially our greatest and most empathetic ones.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods isn’t unwatchable. It’s competent, uninspired swill, undone largely by the fact that it’s following up a superior first movie.

Scream 6 does distinguish itself in the horror set pieces. Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (who also made the previous entry) clearly grasp that these movies are, at their best, mean.

Come to think of it, these are all great roles — for Statham, Plaza, and Hartnett. Everybody in Operation Fortune — yes, even Ritchie — seems to be having fun. Sometimes, that’s all you need.

It has an ambling, gory insouciance that might have been more off-putting in a movie not called Cocaine Bear.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is an atrocious movie, but it’s atrocious in a way that Marvel movies rarely are.

The result is the most exhilarating and wounding film M. Night Shyamalan has made in many, many years.