Apocalyptic stories (as well as post-apocalyptic ones) have been with us forever; as a species, humans are uniquely fascinated with our own annihilation

As they leap through the years, West and Cohen give us a compelling account of Ginsburg’s key cases, starting from her days as a lawyer with the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project.

For the young cowboys at the heart of Zhao’s film, mounting a horse and galloping across a field represents more than just freedom — it becomes a communion with the past and the future, allowing these riders to imagine and inhabit their best selves

(Joaquin) Phoenix plays a hammer-wielding veteran who is paid to save kidnapped children and who brings all his rage and regret and self-loathing and desire for oblivion to the job

The problem with I Feel Pretty isn’t that it’s offensive but that it’s often plodding and unfunny, almost as if its creators are afraid to have too much fun with such a loaded premise

… You Were Never Really Here follows the disjointed, tormented inner journey of Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), a former soldier and law enforcement official who now works as a kind of hammer-wielding vigilante-for-hire, finding missing people (usually, it seems, kids)

… the film is dedicated to “all who have been persecuted for their faith,” which means that in today’s world, it’s pretty much dedicated to everybody

The movie follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), an orphaned teenager living in Columbus, Ohio, in 2045, who spends pretty much all his time, along with everyone else in this world, inside a virtual universe called The Oasis …

A splendid jewel box of a movie about rather grisly matters, the filmmaker’s latest represents another example of the clash between his playfully self-aware aesthetic and his growing obsession with our inhumanity

“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

It has impenetrable technobabble jutting up against awkward football metaphors and a reverie on peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches sandwiched between a monologue on climate change and the triumphant revelation of a character’s hidden home arsenal.

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

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

… 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 …

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

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

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