“The robots were the good guys, because humans drove them. So maybe they weren’t technically robots. Well, some of them were.”

It’s fun stuff, but in a deeply corrosive way — daring to suggest that people engaged in a soul-sickening endeavor will find, well, their souls sickened

The director seems to be in pursuit of a broader tapestry: The Russia he presents is a wasteland of survival, where a woman’s only hope is pairing off with a moneyed man

In Between is a movie not so much about suffering as it is about the grinding reality of just being

It’s a twisty-turny crime drama complete with stolen money, vengeful mob bosses and all sorts of strange coincidences and random dialogue digressions

… While the film does insist on its own irreverence a bit too much at the outset — it opens with a group of birds inspirationally singing, “You’re only as small as your dreams,” before they get abruptly knocked out of the sky — it offers plenty of lively fun once it settles down …

In Paddington 2, the emigre bear (again voiced by Ben Whishaw) appears to be the glue holding the Browns’ diverse, colorful neighborhood together

Bradlee and Graham learn over the course of The Post to abandon the clubby congeniality that allowed politicians to lie to the press for so long without ever getting called on it

Phantom Thread unfolds so quietly that the questions it’s asking about the nature of desire and attraction, and its delicately confrontational back and forth between Alma and Reynolds, may not register immediately

Although it goes beyond a mere stylistic device, the supernatural here often feels like a function of Thelma’s loneliness and inner turmoil

… The film has three sections, and each part seems to assume a different set of genre conventions, a different set of emotional cues

Knowing the real-life inspiration for On the Beach at Night Alone may help one appreciate the film’s moral trajectory a bit better

Over the course of the film, we go from seeing the elder Getty as a figure of great power to one of no power at all, and that is perhaps the most fascinating part of the movie …

Writer-director Rian Johnson has certainly made the busiest Star Wars film of them all, but he keeps it from becoming a slog by infusing it with humor, verve and visual charm

… Just as the story should start to speed up and get more predictably exciting, it becomes weirder, drawn to odd tangents

Franco portrays Wiseau as a haughty but charismatic weirdo, someone who isn’t well-liked but who definitely gets noticed

And one of the great delights of this film is the way it charts the shifting waves of allegiances that can occur in a family that loves and argues with equal ferocity

It starts off as the portrait of a troubled child, but expands to become a film about community

Action scenes start and stop and then start again, then go in different directions, and it was a few moments into The Big Climactic Face-Off before I realized we’d arrived at The Big Climactic Face-Off

Maggie Betts’s Novitiate bears all the signs of an exceptional talent. It follows the experiences of Cathleen (Margaret Qualley), a teenager who enters a convent in the early 1960s just as the Catholic Church was starting to undergo the reforms of Vatican II. The title refers to the girls’ yearlong…

Despite the many troubling trends in our media culture, the movies’ response to the Iraq War has been (gasp) surprisingly admirable. Since the mid-2000s, a steady stream of films have artfully addressed war’s aftermath and the homefront — from Stop-Loss and In the Valley of Elah, to Grace is Gone…

Ruben Ostlund’s The Square, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this past May, probably says more about the times we’re living in than any other film you’re likely to see this year. And yet the beauty of the movie is that everybody will have their own ideas about what,…