Justin Chang

The film’s twisty wrap-up feels creaky and far-fetched in ways that the rest of the movie, over the top though it is, does not, and you can sense Araki struggling to bring his two leads, and their oppositional schools of sexual thought, to a place of convergence.

As a story of time and tide waiting for no man, “Rose of Nevada” is haunting, bittersweet, and a little scary. As a filmed object, it’s even more fascinating: a movie that, through the sheer idiosyncrasy of its construction and the implausibility of its existence, seems to both mourn and defy the medium’s decline. If cinema is a sinking vessel, as so many are eager to suggest, its rusty hull may yet contain treasures worth scraping off and scrutinizing anew.

Simón plots out the tensions and affinities within this sprawling family with an on-the-fly deftness that never feels diagrammatic; it takes a while to glean exactly how everyone’s related, but the details matter less than the emotional texture.

The closing moments are sweet and poignant; they also suggest a failure of nerve. I’m not saying The Invite needed an orgiastic climax—only that it might have benefitted, like any relationship, from less fidelity to a preëxisting script, and perhaps a drop more of its characters’ own courage.

In the end, Koepp’s script exaggerates the best and the worst of how humans might respond to such a revelation, and Spielberg struggles to split the difference between paranoid-thriller cynicism and his usual mode of emotional uplift.

As much as Enyedi enjoys positioning her camera among the branches, Silent Friend is ultimately too invested in the power of human faces and bodies to adopt a purely plant-centric perspective; what it achieves is more of a hybrid gaze, which encourages us to marvel at creation in all its forms.

Our Land is the work of a great filmmaker exploring the boundaries of a relatively unfamiliar form.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is selling a truckload of preposterous goods, but it sells them awfully well, with unfeigned assurance, conviction, and the appropriate ratio of cynicism to hope.

The new film is both Akin’s strongest and, with its stately, picturesque classicism, his least characteristic work in some time.

The invasion in this movie is neither an assault nor a threat; it’s an invitation to open doors and let fresh inspiration in.