Emily Yoshida

Lane observes with both wryness and palpable admiration as groups across the country embrace the gothic pageantry of the Temple as a means of exercising their political freedom.

Violet wants to sing. Does Violet want to be a pop star? This is posed as the the driving question of the film, but nothing about Fanning’s performance suggests a desire for much of anything.

As many times as I tried to get onboard with its proposed brand of breezy fun, it kept kicking me off, if only because I found myself running up against the very foundation of its premise.

The first time I saw Peterloo, it sent me out of the screening room onto Park Avenue with my blood boiling. Despite the oratory and the funny hats, Leigh’s ability to incite felt utterly contemporary and urgent.

Its own pointlessness may keep The Dirt from feeling like an actual affront to humanity, but that doesn't make it very good, either.

So here, in the year of our lord 2019, comes Five Feet Apart, and if it ends up being a late entry in the trend, it wouldn’t be a bad one to go out on.

What makes Booksmart land so delightfully is Wilde’s handle on exactly how seriously to take her neurotic heroines. ... Booksmart manages to be inclusive and progressive, without being precious about anything or sacrificing an ounce of humor. It feels at once like a huge moment for the teen movie genre, and also effortless, effortless enough to make one wonder what took so long.

The film ... is more emotional than definitive; stopping just short of bestowing sainthood on the artist, but still aiming for something a little more cosmic than reportorial. This is not a “what really happened” exposé of his death, nor is it an academic postmortem on Peep’s musical or cultural legacy. It’s most effective as a character study.

It’s a messier film than Get Out, in that it never quite gets around to saying the things it’s trying to say. This is not entirely a bad thing; its messiness allows the film to spend more time working up inventive scares than conveying an all-caps complete-sentence message.

Sword of Trust feints at being an Ideas movie, but really only wants to hang — which is certainly not a crime, but given the subject matter, and These Times, it’s a little disappointing.

The film remains too mannered for its own good; it’s unquestionably nice and well-intentioned, but lacking momentum.

Merchant is more brutally honest than most sports movies — or any kind of rising-star movie, for that matter — about failure, and it makes Fighting With My Family better than it needs to be. The entire cast is a pleasure, particularly the dynamo Pugh.

What Men Want is a wildly uneven stretch of a movie that’s more of a flail than a romp.

The childlike, free-associative playfulness is now underscored by a palpable hunger to be the cleverest and coolest kids’ movie on the block, a hunger that weighs down Lord and Miller’s plenty-smart silliness.

What makes Late Night — otherwise a largely predictable story in a familiar mold — really pop is Kaling’s script, which is at the blunter and frankly more exciting spectrum of what Kaling has proven herself to be capable of in her writing career thus far.

As an origin story for a young actor’s warped worldview, Honey Boy is compelling.

As a psychological down-is-up horror movie, The Lodge has a few solid tricks up its sleeve. But when the smoke and mirrors clear, it’s ultimately a story about trauma, and a rather bleak one at that.

The little dramas and themes that emerge during the reunion of the film’s far-flung brood become, like a family, more than the sum of its individual parts, and an incredibly satisfying meal of a film.

If the narrative film only exists to give us the unsettling sliminess of Efron as Bundy, it won’t be a total waste. But it’s not much of a movie, either.

The only reason any of this works at all is Salazar and, I hate to say it, those goddamned big eyes. They’re the windows to the soul, after all, and this ungainly, lurching cyborg of a would-be blockbuster has more of that than meets the eye.

It’s clear between this and Nightcrawler that Gilroy and Gyllenhaal have some kind of gonzo chemistry. Even if Velvet Buzzsaw starts to sputter slightly after it’s made its point, it’s plenty exciting to witness the incredibly specific madness they whip up together.

The film builds to an anarchic set piece, in which a school full of rambunctious children defend the world from evil while the adults literally disappear off the face of the earth. It’s the closest thing Cornish comes to a real-life prescription for what ails us, and it goes down pretty well.

If only the issue with Polar, Åkerlund’s fifth feature film, was merely shallowness. Polar is an execrable motion picture, a sad, lint-filled key bump scraped together from the bottom of the post-Tarantino ’90s exploitation baggie.

Replicas is chock-full of histrionic what-ifs that seem to hyperventilate so hard in their delivery that they don’t have enough oxygen to actually blow anyone’s mind. It would be the stuff of future cult screenings if it wasn’t so boring and muddled.

That more or less is The Upside in a nutshell. It’s a film that contains complicated, sad, interesting ideas rarely expressed on screen — even Kidman’s scold character unfolds into a more intriguing person, full of contradictions — but whose package is fundamentally unsuited to showcase those ideas, like a sweater with the holes in all the wrong places.

American Hangman, a bar thought experiment turned into a film every bit as simple and bad-taste-leaving as that would imply, only has use for humans as sock puppets.

Tight, fun little thriller.