The Killer (David Fincher, 2023). Following the prestige passion project Mank, David Fincher returns to the sort of glossy pulp that seems to most stir his cinematic heart. The Killer focuses on a hitman (Michael Fassbender) whose previously perfect professional record is blemished by a failed job in Paris. The repercussions prove to be more problematic than a reduced rating. Metaphorical dominoes topple, which sends the hitman out on a course of bloody retribution. The material is thin as watered-down broth, which Fincher can only disguise so much with his customary images of pinpoint precision. The screenplay, credited to Fincher’s Seven collaborator Andrew Kevin Walker (and adapted from a French graphic novel series), is swamped by self-consciously cool voiceover narration that is wearyingly intrusive. Especially in the film’s earliest scenes, which find the hitman waiting in an abandoned office for his target to appear in the hotel room across the street, there’s a strong sense that it would have been a significant improvement had Fincher scrapped the narration altogether and leaned into his talent for purely visual storytelling. That could have been bold and gripping. Instead, The Killer is, more than anything, flatly dull.

Maestro (Bradley Cooper, 2023). Over-designed and under-felt, Bradley Cooper’s second feature as a writer-director is about the relationship between Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and his wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), seeding in a few of their respective professional accomplishments along the way. Maestro skitters away from the conventions of the biopic, but they keep reverberating within it, like resonant sound echoing off of a theater’s back wall. The film strains to convey the importance of Bernstein’s career and his place and yet seems only marginally interested in the fascinating contours of his venerated yet imperfect place in U.S. music history. The emotional upheavals Bernstein and Montealegre are given far more lavish attention. By the end, Cooper is practically wringing them like a washcloth that he wants to rid of every last drop of moisture. Even so, the film’s moments of bruising emotional honesty are too rare, in part because Cooper’s lead performance is so mannered and showy (Mulligan’s is, too, but she is more effective at finding a balance). One of the few scenes that carries a chord of honesty is when Bernstein’s daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke) expresses relief when told a lie about her father’s closeted attraction to men. Briefly, Cooper drops the affectations and silently shows the complexity of how that statement wounds the character. It’s a welcome beat of subtlety in a film of oppressive crescendos.

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023). Director Yorgos Lanthimos knows there’s a slender line between commenting on exploitation and indulging in it. In his latest movie, Poor Things, he opts to erase the line altogether and traipse about freely. Based on a 1992 Alasdair Gray novel and adapted for the screen by The Favourite screenwriter Tony McNamara, Poor Things follows Bella (Emma Stone), a young woman who views the world with especially innocent eyes due to her own unique genesis story that was put into being by unorthodox scientist (Willem Dafoe, utterly marvelous as he finds the tenderness within an imperious man). Set in the nineteenth century, the film revels in a putting incongruously bawdy language and behaviors up against the buttoned-up mores of the time. As a gadfly comedy, the film is relentlessly winning. Its chaos-agent qualities prove more problematic when it comes to general storytelling and thematic consistency. Consider the protracted sequence in which Bella stumbles into lucrative employment while in Paris as the case in point. The storybook visuals Lanthimos cooks up for the film are vivid and memorable, if occasionally tipping over into being a little too resplendent. (The costumes designed by Holly Waddington, it must be noted, are uniformly superb.) Whenever the film threatens to stray too far into the wooly wilds, Stone sets it right with her performance. Stone is fearless, inventive, and wholeheartedly committed in playing a character that often resembles a broken marionette guided by a drunken puppeteer. More importantly, she expertly calibrates Bella’s gradual intellectual growth and the increased assurance that comes with it. To borrow and paraphrase a sentiment expressed in the film, I might have reservations about the particulars of Poor Things, but I do ultimately prefer a world that has Stone’s Bella in it.