David Ehrlich

Long on dream imagery and moldy skin makeup but short on scares, jokes, or anything that might add a sense of life to a film steeped in the go-nowhere airlessness of being stuck in your house with a newborn, Nightborn turns its genre tropes into a study of maternal ambivalence.

Johnson recognizes how this, at heart, is a coming-of-age story about a rising star who’s learning to be unburdened by a future that’s better than he could ever imagine — a kid who’s learning that no one can become the person they pretend to be without being the person they actually are along the way. “Tony” struggles for an ending, but it doesn’t really need one; the real fun here lies in paving the way to parts unknown.

Despite the prescriptive nature of its framing, however, A Sad and Beautiful World ultimately wrestles with a question that neither of its characters will ever have the luxury of answering for themselves: Is it easier to love without hope, or to hope without love? Nino and Yasmina have always been bound together by that uncertainty, and the open-ended final moments of this movie leave us desperate to believe that they always will be.

Spider-Man can’t do it all by himself. At this rate, someone will need to come along and save him. too.

For all of the affection it maintains for the dorkiness of pickleball, it’s ironically hard not to wonder just how much richer this movie might have been if it were just a little more at peace with playing on its own terms.

The Kidnapping of Arabella arrives at a satisfying destination because it finds a certain peace in the knotted fabric of space and time.

While the future may be predetermined, this world is still the sum of what we choose to make of it. To surrender our role in that is to forfeit our humanity, and the opposite will always be true as well. The gods speak obtusely, even in Nolan’s script, but this magnificent epic leaves us with the ability to heed their meaning.

As moody and weightless as the noir-accented score that blows through the movie like a curlicue gust of wind in an old cartoon (credit to musicians Sam Clapp and Steven Jackson), Night Nurse lacks the pulse required for its stray feelings to come alive. Still, the film ambiently taps into the latent eroticism of teasing out the distance between how you see yourself and who you really are.

Eerie in a way that feels more seductive than scary, the film isn’t bewitched by its demons so much as the process of transubstantiation by which a (self)tortured young woman can transform them into grace.

Little in the film stings as much as the fact that Knoxville and co. have clearly lost a step. It’s a bummer that Knoxville himself is too banged up to get involved to the same degree that he once did, and though some of the new bits reflect the visionary idiocy of the crew’s finest work (Larry the robot is a brilliant addition to the cast), many of them fail to leave a mark.