Kristen Stewart’s a smooth ‘ Shopper’
Few actresses this year have commanded the screen as forcefully, or with such seemingly little effort, as Kristen Stewart does in “Personal Shopper,” now out in a new Blu- ray/ DVD edition from Criterion Collection. In this second English- language collaboration with the French director Olivier Assayas, who directed her to a César Award in 2014’ s “Clouds of Sils Maria,” Stewart makes a quietly magnetic impression as a lonely American in Paris, where she buys couture for a local celebrity by day and tries to contact the spirit of her dead brother by night. It’s a wonderfully preposterous setup for a movie that begins as a ghost story, accelerates into a breathless railway thriller and ends somewhere astride the abyss separating this world from the next. Befitting the auteur behind “Irma Vep,” “Carlos” and “Summer Hours,” Assayas never makes the same movie twice, and his storytelling instincts here are as unpredictable as they are marvelously assured. Movie recommendations from critics Kenneth Turan and Justin Chang.
Battle of the Sexes
This enjoyable and entertaining film, with the gifted and innately likable actors Emma Stone and Steve Carell as Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, is most involving when it deals not with sports or society, but with the personal struggles both players, especially King, were going through in the run- up to their 1973 tennis match. ( Kenneth Turan) PG- 13.
Blade Runner 2049
You can quibble with aspects of it, but as shaped by Denis Villeneuve and his masterful creative team, this high- end sequel puts you firmly and unassailably in another world of its own devising, and that is no small thing. ( Kenneth Turan) R.
Faces Places
A participatory art project takes director Agnès Varda and photographer- artist JR on a tour of the French countryside in this wonderful documentary, which, like Varda’s other personal essays, becomes an exquisite trip down memory lane. ( Justin Chang) PG.
The Florida Project
Absorbing us in the day- today rhythms of life at a dumpy Florida motel complex, home to a wildly spir- ited 6- year- old girl named Moonee ( Brooklynn Prince), Sean Baker (“Tangerine”) goes to a place few of us know and emerges with a masterpiece of empathy and imagination. ( Justin Chang) R.
The Meyerowitz Stories ( New and Selected)
Funny, moving and psychologically complex, this is writer- director Noah Baumbach’s latest foray into the intricate paradoxes of dysfunctional family dynamics, and, starring Dustin Hoffman, Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller, it ranks with his best. ( Kenneth Turan) NR.
Novitiate
A hit at Sundance and already nominated for a Gotham breakthrough director award, this drama about the emotional content of nuns’ lives in the mid- 1960s sure- handedly takes us inside the world of belief with care, concern and a piercing, discerning eye. ( Kenneth Turan) R.
The Square
A Stockholm museum curator Claes Bang) undergoes a crisis of conscience in Swedish writer- director Ruben Östlund’s sprawling, virtuoso satire of the modern art world, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. ( Justin Chang) R.