The Weight understands that stolen gold is valuable precisely because it is difficult to move, turning every river, bridge and suspicious companion into another cost desperate men must calculate.
The Uprising is alive whenever Paul Greengrass throws the audience into the chaos, yet thin characterization and an overly explanatory script keep its spectacle from carrying real weight.
Bunker is strongest when it forgets about billionaires, class allegory and survivalist spectacle and simply watches Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem test the load-bearing walls of a long marriage.
Practical Magic 2 finds genuine feeling in three generations of Owens women, yet its strongest relationships keep fighting for room inside a long, busy sequel that mistakes more magic for more enchantment.
Possible Love takes nearly three hours to ask who gets to observe suffering, who gets to profit from it and whether genuine intimacy can survive when every relationship begins with unequal power.
Elsinore occasionally brushes against the clichés of awards-season illness drama, but Andrew Scott refuses every easy note. His Ian Charleson is not a dying man learning to live; he is an actor furious that death has arrived before he is finished.
By Any Means is uneven by design and sometimes simply uneven, but Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Wahlberg make its collision of civil-rights drama and revenge movie hard to dismiss.
Cocoon: One Summer of Girlhood is delicate without being timid, using friendship, painterly animation and an imperfect floral metaphor to mourn lives interrupted before they have fully begun.
Wild Horse Nine has all the barbed dialogue and bruised male friendship expected from Martin McDonagh, but John Malkovich gives the film a melancholy center that keeps its political cynicism from curdling into empty provocation.
Jack O'Connell and Guy Pearce are excellent in Danny Boyle's kinetic account of The Sun's transformation, even when the film's appetite for sensation begins to resemble the media culture it wants to indict.
Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin and Margaret Qualley give The Dog Stars a humane center, even as the film’s increasingly busy second half loses some of the emotional clarity of its quieter opening.
La La Land still dazzles on the big screen, where Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling and Damien Chazelle’s carefully constructed dream of Los Angeles feels both more artificial and more emotionally honest.
The Rivals of Amziah King tries to be a folk tale, crime thriller, musical and family drama at once. It does not always hold together, but its best stretches feel completely alive.
Dafoe gives one of those performances that removes acting rather than displays it, in a melancholy comedy that stays smaller than its own best questions.
Not a biopic about discovering food but a coming-of-age story about discovering work, with Sessa and Banderas making the kitchen the whole world.
A promising grief drama built around an artificial child becomes one of Kore-eda's most emotionally remote films.
A dense but absorbing samurai mystery that replaces swordplay with suspicion and makes a castle feel as dangerous as any battlefield.
Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton wander through a gorgeous neon nightmare that too often feels like Nicolas Winding Refn remixing his own greatest hits.
Nolan's largest film is also one of his most human, a monumental journey home that never lets Odysseus forget what it cost to survive.
The 4K theatrical return restores the scale of Welles’ visual invention and confirms why Citizen Kane became a landmark, while also exposing the emotional distance built into its legend.
A strong ensemble and an urgent true story survive a respectful adaptation that turns complicated lives into overly tidy lessons about literature and resistance.
A strikingly photographed erotic thriller turns caregiving and telephone scams into a study of control, then mistakes provocation for development.
A sincere and occasionally rousing portrait of George Washington’s formative military failures, elevated by strong battle sequences and a seasoned supporting cast.
Four exceptional actors turn a provocative invitation into one of the year's funniest and most emotionally precise relationship films.
Emily Blunt gives one of her finest performances in Spielberg's moving, uneven collision of government conspiracy and extraterrestrial awe.
La Bola Negra can be overstuffed, sentimental and occasionally too aware of its own significance, but its ambition is inseparable from its power. Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo turn erased history into a lush, wounded piece of popular cinema.
The cast still knows exactly how to wear these characters, even when the movie surrounding them feels like a familiar outfit in cheaper fabric.
