Mark Asch

As an awards-bait biopic, Christy is basically solid; as another chapter in the star text of a soon-to-be-28-year-old woman basically no one on the internet can ever be normal about, it’s interesting – and also, given the entrepreneurial Sweeney’s social-media savvy, quite a canny bit of positioning.

After so many punishing stories, most recently 2022​’s Tori and Lokita, it’s hard to begrudge them the raw sentiment and mostly happy, hopeful endings of their newest one. But it comes too easy, in a film so artfully and opportunistically structured, which jumps from dramatic peak to dramatic peak as if skipping tracks on an album.

Like Imitation of Life, The Last Showgirl treats high-gloss femininity as a form of false consciousness, an ideal imposed upon women that ends up alienating them from each other, particularly mothers from their daughters.

Timely, anguished, and ultimately cathartic, the movie meets its moment.

The film is fan fiction about real-life celebrities.

The challenge, such as it is, of watching a Mike Leigh movie is simply the challenge of being a person in the world – the challenge of paying sustained attention to others – and Pansy is among his most demanding and rewarding tests.

This is simply a generic and brutally efficient tearjerker – like its title, it aspires to archetypal grandeur and lands somewhere blander.

By halfway, Trump gets more flagrantly cruel, delusional, thin- skinned and aggressive. It’s the kind of charismatic antihero’s journey that might fly in a Scorsese film – arguably the ultimate Trump film is The Wolf of Wall Street – but Abassi and Sherman’s take on the material is largely dutiful.

It’s a bit difficult to find your footing in the first half-hour of “Concrete Valley,” and it’s arguable that in addition to starting too shapeless, the film ends too shaped. But niggles about calibration aside, the on-the-nose ending is a gut punch.

In Next Goal Wins, Taika Waititi depicts Samoans the same way he depicted Hitler in Jojo Rabbit: as absolutely adorable.