Richard Brody

Spielberg’s vision in “Disclosure Day” suggests audacity, even recklessness, two qualities that have often been wanting in his movies. There’s a sense of freedom, of a work pulled from deep within, that in some ways seems even more personal than the memoir-like “The Fabelmans.”

As a genre, “The Little Sister” is a psychological thriller, even a film noir: a tale of a double life, which Herzi constructs with a watchmaker’s precision and an analytical clarity that distinguishes Melliti’s starring performance all the more.

Power Ballad is a sentimental tale of family and friends both fostering and thwarting a dream. It finds an unusually strong current of authentic (if narrow) emotion while leaving wilder ideas and feelings trapped beneath its surface.

An exuberantly inventive but overstretched comedy about the redistribution of luxury goods and the chic that goes with them.

The movie fails politically to make clear what democracy is up against, and it fails artistically to imagine the unimaginable and give voice to the unspeakable.

Desplechin and his co-writers have created an enticing set of characters who arouse a viewer’s curiosity not only about their connections to one another but about their relation to the world in which they live. But in “Two Pianos” there is no such world.

Setting aside the woeful omission, though, and considering the film outside the realm of preëxisting facts, as if it were a work of fiction about a fictitious character, “Michael” still counts as only a modestly noteworthy achievement, enjoyable yet flawed—because it contains other, artistic blind spots that keep the drama thin and narrow.

The script’s blank spots and evasions leave the drama feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfying.

Its boldly distinctive method is inseparable from its emotional vitality, and its audacious sense of form is as immediate and personal as the story it tells. It’s a memory-film that captures inner life with physical style: patience, speed, precision, and breathtaking leaps.

The Drama plays like an extended internet trolling that exists solely to stimulate discourse.