Justin Chang

In Steve McQueen’s harrowing film, starring Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan, London faces threats from above—and from within.

Sean Baker’s thrilling film, starring Mikey Madison as a New York sex worker, pushes comic misadventure to the brink of chaos.

In films starring Sebastian Stan and Demi Moore, the directors Aaron Schimberg and Coralie Fargeat satirize the self-annihilating pursuit of beauty.

The director Tim Burton and the actor Michael Keaton resurrect a classic collaboration with supernatural-screwball verve.

In his first feature in more than two decades, the Spanish director Víctor Erice tells a story haunted by the ghosts of cinema past.

Now, at seventy-seven, Hui has directed some thirty-odd features across a dizzying range of genres: she’s made historical epics, martial-arts epics, and humanist melodramas, as well as a yakuza thriller (“Zodiac Killers”), a supernatural horror-comedy (“The Spooky Bunch”), and an artist bio-pic (“The Golden Era”). Despite or perhaps because of her narrative versatility, her films have never had the formal flash, vivid stylistic signature, or widespread Western recognition achieved by some of her…

Four years after the release of his Oscar-winning drama, “Minari,” the director enters the eye of the summer-movie storm with “Twisters.”

One performer, John (Divine G) Whitfield, played by Colman Domingo, seems to capture the fleeting nature of the experience with some of Lysander’s most famous lines: “And ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold!’ / The jaws of darkness do devour it up; / So quick bright things come to confusion.” So quick is right. All too soon, the men have changed back into their green uniforms and returned to the daily tedium and terror of incarceration. The vastness of the stage, with its lofty view of a noisily…

Have we stumbled upon a modern-day nativity scene? In a sense, yes, although Schanelec has excavated her tale from the ruins of an older, pre-Christian storytelling tradition; the goat, with its satyr-like associations, is as much a sign as it is a supporting character. Watch “Music” closely—and there’s truly no point in watching it any other way—and you will discover the sturdy bones of the tragedy of Oedipus, bent and twisted, almost beyond recognition, into a modern-day retelling. (Rest assur…

So begins “Green Border,” a searingly powerful new movie from the seventy-five-year-old Polish-born filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, who has spent much of her career casting her cinematic lot with those brutalized by war. (She directed this film in collaboration with Kamila Tarabura and Katarzyna Warzecha, and co-wrote the script with Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Łazarkiewicz-Sieczko.) The title refers to a dense maze of forests where Belarus and Poland meet, though we see the trees in full verdant col…