Alison Willmore

Toy Story 5, which was directed by studio stalwart Andrew Stanton (who co-wrote the script with Kenna Harris), is both the best thing Pixar has done since Turning Red and disappointing in a way that only something you once found utterly captivating could manage to be.

All this setup, and the sparse and sometimes clumsy writing, is just scaffolding to support the mind-boggling set pieces and fight sequences, which come frequently and involve a rewarding variety of settings, from your classic split-level nightclub to a freezer room full of bodies frozen into slabs of ice.

Masters of the Universe isn’t a real movie. It’s a bunch of half-realized, semi-contradictory ideas accrued over years. It takes the rough shape of a comedy without ever really landing a joke.

Backrooms suggests that while we’re teetering on the verge of something new, filmmakers are going to have to do more work to wrestle these nonnarrative, non-centralized ideas into something that can sustain a story.

The Black Ball is itself mighty compelling, though it’s also the kind of film that feels weightier during the watching than it does when looked back on the next day, when in retrospect its achievements start to seem like they might have been outstripped by its considerable ambitions.

Jimmy is a compulsively magnetic figure who keeps everyone at arm’s length, including the audience, and for a film that embodies a voluptuous sense of tragedy, that leaves it undeniably aloof.

Mungiu has a lot more on his mind than tepidly insisting both sides can be bad. For all the political pole reversal that happens in Fjord, the movie stealthily argues what’s really going on here is that old standards about assimilation and cultural uniformity have just been given a socially acceptable gloss.

I would say that what Almodóvar pulls off in the end makes the rest of the film worthwhile, but only barely and only if you’re invested enough in his ongoing arc as an artist to find intriguing the idea of a self-lacerating late-career self-portrait about the nature of inspiration.

Driver ably brings the heartbreak in Paper Tiger, though Johansson’s no slouch in a less ornate but no less harrowing role.

The fact that his fumbling journey toward fatherhood is not just tolerable but genuinely touching is a testament to the disarming earnestness with which Firstman approaches the clichéd set-up.