Adrian Horton

No Other Land, for its many images of despair, still offers a stirring vision for what could be – Israelis and Palestinians working together in the name of justice, collaborating toward a world where both are free.

The film’s spareness has lasting power – as Skylar and Autumn boarded the bus home, I realized I had been clenching my jaw the whole movie. It’s a testament to Hittman’s portrayal of fear and frustration in navigating American reproductive healthcare as a teen. I just wish her characters had more to say about it.

Sharply written, smartly structured and well-acted, with a star-making turn from Victor herself, the 93-minute black comedy is not only nimble and consistently funny, but one of the best, most honest renderings of life after sexual assault that I’ve seen.

At its best, writer/director Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar have crafted a gorgeous and poignant film of quiet, bruised life in a fragile place, anchored by a magnificently sensitive and restrained performance from the still-underrated Edgerton.

Chasing Summer at least outruns the charge of being boring, though at what cost.

It may not always land and gets lost in itself on the way there, but Jackson has crafted a beautiful experiment indicative of ambitious vision, one whose magic outweighs its weaknesses.

Tatum manages to ground the viewer in his abject bewilderment and pain. It’s a instantly memorable performance in a haunting movie, one that I have carried with me in the hours since I’ve seen it. Perhaps that is the best thing I can say about this remarkable feature – for its viewers, as it is for its meticulously rendered subject, the disquiet lingers.

Brisk, lucid and sweeping, Cover-Up assures that some, at least, will not.

A Real Pain is occasionally insightful on the subject of suffering, sometimes funny, a bit endearing, a little pretentious, often dry.

Clever, heartfelt and frequently stunning, The Wild Robot offers the type of all-ages-welcome animated entertainment that will delight kids and leave a lump in one’s throat.

This is, against great odds and surely some western expectations, a beguiling hangout film – an invitation to the dinner party, a fascinating window into a group of underground artists who carry on despite the risks, a representation of creativity under surveillance. A snapshot of everyday resistance, the fight for a freedom from the bottom up. And most effectively, a moving portrait of one nutritive, symbiotic friendship in transition.

It persuasively makes the case that Hite, who argued that most women cannot orgasm from penetrative intercourse alone, deserves renewed recognition as a feminist trailblazer, particularly in the still-fraught arena of sexual politics, self-knowledge and liberation.

Given His Three Daughters’ fidelity to the cold facts of dying, the final minutes makes a bold and uneasy logic leap that pulls on the heartstrings but feels too neat for a drama this lived in, for sibling bonds this spiky.

For all the characters’ misery and misfires, Between the Temples is a winsome journey. It’s a little weird, a little sweet and a lot of awkward – a testament not just to the Jewish tradition but the faith we can learn to have in each other.

At its best, the Eras Tour film manages to capture the why of that bond, the shock of her vast stardom against the startling emotional clarity of her songwriting. The Eras tour, she says, has been the most special experience of her life; in this deft rendering, it’s easy to feel the intoxication of being in her temple.

The Kupferer-Mallens are Chicago theater stalwarts, having founded their own company, and the affection everyone involved with this project feels for the stage – as an art, therapy and practice – is so evident as to be contagious, even in the film’s most theater-y meta moments.

If you’re coming in with a blank slate, then Navalny is a feast of evermore unbelievable details and a window into a movement against a state of increasingly boldfaced, demeaning lies.

As a standalone film, The History of Concrete is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, compelling and surprising, if 20 minutes too long. And, of course, about much more than just concrete.

White smartly weaves Gibson’s evolution as a poet and performer, commanding stages like a rockstar –“we called them the gay James Dean,” Falley jokes – with their hopes to stage one final show, a celebration of life before their death.

There are many things working well in Rockwell’s debut, Taylor’s performance chief among them, but the end result doesn’t match her character’s formidable strength.

Written by Colby Day, In the Blink of an Eye attempts no less than the sweep of life from big bang to unknown verdant planets, with the emotional depth of a tide pool and the complexity of a cave painting.

Mr Nobody Against Putin ultimately stands as both an act of service and a tribute – to a school that once was, to students whose lives were and will be irrevocably changed for the worse by the regime, to a once fruitful job. Talankin has produced a must-watch, indelible document of ideological warfare that echoes far beyond Russia. How’s that for a nobody?

Rosaline . . . understands what makes a good adaptation: a sense of humor at least on par with if not exceeding the original, lighthearted lines with serious delivery, crackling romantic chemistry. And in the case of Rosaline, an unmissable lead in Kaitlyn Dever as a lovelorn medieval schemer left on read.

A Different Man is a slog, made worse by the fact that it seems to mistake darkness for insight.

As the years go by and the trauma festers, the film grows into something thornier, surprising, beautifully textured and deeply moving.

Its tender blend of emotions is evergreen. Dìdi’s final touching, soft note of growth – so much internalized and overcome already, so much to go – would be moving in any year.

The Starling Girl, anchored by a bristling performance from the always solid Scanlen, is at its best when it hews to the combustible suspense of a teenage girl glimpsing her own instincts – for honesty, for autonomy, and most threateningly for pleasure.

It is as noble an execution of tragic historical record as one could hope for within the limits of a biopic – neither confirmation of doubters nor enough justification to relive it.

Squibb is as understatedly funny and commanding as you’d expect. Both actor and character remain, despite all societal and personal forces to the contrary, absolutely vital even as the circumstances and potential of life shrink. What a joy to witness it.

The film’s chief enjoyment is seeing how motivations transform, and character is forged, through the sliding doors of new people, victories and losses, and the sharpening of the young women’s disparate judgments on the genuinely disappointing differences between boys and girls state.

[A] remarkably unguarded documentary.

The road through year 10 may be rocky, but Manners is a confident guide – her film-making is splashy and stylish throughout, shrewdly conveying just how much one can learn, and break, in a year.

It’s an often subtle (even in its many XXX-rated shots) and surreptitious study of an industry built on explicit, aggressive imagery, an arresting film which, though it doesn’t stick the landing, thankfully delineates between the legitimate work of adult film performers and the toxicity, misogyny and abuse the male-dominated industry allows to fester and lacerate.

Civil War works on the level of intellectual exercise: a film clear-eyed on the horrors of war and trauma in which journalists are the unsentimental heroes, and which relies on the audience to supply their own assumptions of American politics rather than spoon-feed reality. But the distance makes for an at times frustrating watch – stimulating on the level of adrenaline, not emotions.

The first half is so energetically surefooted as to establish trust in Manzoor’s instincts and hopes for a second feature. But like The Fury’s would-be signature kick that Ria struggles to nail, Polite Society banks on one big swing it just isn’t able to pull off.

In Dunham’s hands, the throughline of enduring and discovering one’s worth, however historically imagined, is at once a comfort and a lark.

It’s an altogether promising debut for Webley and should-be breakout for the young Wright, who makes you believe that though this film may ultimately fail to distinguish itself from the many tight, slight dramas at Sundance, Ella will always be remembered.

She Said delivers on the dopamine hits of a journalism movie: proficient pace (the film runs just over two hours but feels shorter), tactile work, the thrill of pavement pounded into revelation.

It’s trite to say a debut performance is a revelation, but the whole film simply does not work without McInerny, who is fully convincing as a girl on an emotional precipice. It’s an astoundingly calibrated turn, one of barely lidded emotions that eventually skitter about

The Von Erichs endured so much loss, and Durkin manages to convey some of it.

It’s all a fizzy, funny, convincingly romantic delight, a tribute to the craft of making big movies with big stunts that is heartfelt in its appreciation without taking itself too seriously.

A ride somehow both warm and stressful, and an inviting mashup of familiar beats made fresh by a trio of grounded, endearing performances.

That Splitsville stays on track to the finish is mostly credit to chemistry – that ineffable, unpredictable thing between two, or three, or maybe four people, with just enough variation for each relationship here. Splitsville may take shots at the loose-boundaried, but they’re laced with truth: partnered or single, open or closed, we’re all working with the same raw material.

Alyssa’s self-absorption may be harder to swallow, but Palmer and SZA enjoyably ham up what could otherwise be try-hard, too gimmicky fare.

Even as a fan, I am honestly shocked that what basically amounts to a 97-minute ITYSL sketch stays actually funny throughout, though a good 15 or so minutes of that threaten overexposure to the brand.

Am I OK? is strongest when embedded in the two friends’ well-worn, effusive bond, in sickness or in health – when the fight comes the barbs are believably lacerating, the kind only best friends can wield.

The Outrun is the rare two-hour movie that made me forget to check the time. That it does so while avoiding the many cliches of the cinematic memoir adaptation . . . is its own achievement, a testament to the source material and Ronan’s tremendous performance.

The film makes cogent, sweeping sense of the record for perhaps the most illuminative, swift and damning case against the institution of policing – the real fourth estate, as one subject puts it – of the many investigations conducted in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. But there’s a dryness to its procedure.

Like a great routine, beneath the jokes lurks something tender, grounded and real.

The initially alluring casualness of Ohs’s project fades quickly into a mildly irksome shallowness – lots of unearned and unconvincing staring, docile conversations, should-be evocative images that do not evoke.

It’s both amiable and original enough to distinguish itself from the slush pile of youth-appealing Netflix content. Couple that with a moving finale on the supreme joys of best friendship, and that’s reason to celebrate.

The predominant mode of Problemista is playful, its comic sensibility curious and askew – enough to make the film, a promising if uneven debut, a delight throughout.

For all the grand gestures of musical theater, there’s an odd flatness to Theater Camp, a half-hearted and lackluster comedy from a group of Hollywood friends set at a summer performing arts community.

It can be borderline maudlin and easily teary, though The Friend is grounded enough, and Watts sufficiently understated, to not become outright eye-rolling.

If you have the stomach for singularly focused revenge and some truly graphic, visceral hand-to-hand combat, Monkey Man delivers the goods.

Its strongest element, aside from Eilish herself, is the generosity and empathy afforded to the experience of fandom.

Inconsistent but never insubstantial, Materialists is far from perfect, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of a date.

This specific concoction of absurdism, sentimentality, childish humor and dark punchlines may have stayed off-key for me, but seemed to strike a chord with others, at least judging from the many guffaws at the screening I attended.

Martha is, after all, the star – a fascinating narrator of her own life, sometimes direct, sometimes curiously opaque or self-contradictory, always evincing a glowing, undaunted ambition. As the OG influencer, she lived the rule: whatever happens, just keep pushing forward. The people will keep watching.

Keshishian, as in Truth or Dare, works in moments which complicates Gomez’s angelic image: being short with a too-glib interviewer, refusing to listen to a friend, reacting poorly to genuine concern. My Mind & Me is strongest, and bravest, in moments like this, illustrating Gomez’s humanity through universal capacities we don’t want recorded.

Although the whole concept is quite daft, Winter’s energetic and committed performance adds a bit of heft without ever forfeiting the comedy entirely.

The ending chorus of conclusions wraps up a bit too neatly, though that doesn’t invalidate the enjoyably deranged ride before.

Decker infuses Nelson’s screenplay with a potent dose of whimsical fantasy, morphing Lennie’s tortuous bereavement into a lonely house, a romantic musical journey and a garden where other complicated, confusing emotions grow.

Its outsized mean girl ruthlessness with a candy-coated shell, led by Mendes and Hawke’s commanding performances, is a biting, if overlong, good time.

McConaughey may be a capable driver, but this is an unwieldy vehicle – oversized, overlong and altogether way too many parts to run smoothly.

Where the Crawdads Sing never really had an interest in complications, or hardship, or racism as anything beyond wallpaper for its central nature girl fantasy of self-reliance. It would rather stay above the fray, gliding prettily along the marsh without actually getting dirty.

Williamson knows how to write a horror script – Sick offers moderate to intense thrills delivered in a compact frame whose Covid 2020 specificity adds more to the tension than it distracts.

The final serving of this three-part confection rarely strays from enjoyable, even if it doesn’t match the seductive sweetness of the first bite.

[Fahy's] dialed-in performance is thankfully matched by an overarching crispness to the proceedings – just enough flourishes, an enjoyable but not unbearable amount of stress, no wasted time, a perfect match of star, script and style.

Riveting, seamless, at points genuinely shocking, Last Breath exemplifies the possibilities of human collaboration – a feat that has stuck with me and, yes, took my breath away.

In a sea of family content that’s more often than not annoying, Thelma the Unicorn surfs, for the most part, above the crowd.

Sitting in Bars with Cake careens from zany bar-hopping to hospital, cake baking ASMR to cancer weepie. You could argue that that’s life itself – a lot of chaos, bathos amid the profound – but that’s giving too much credit to the film’s murkier, underdeveloped bits. Still, it has a lasting bittersweetness to it.

The successes are in large part owed to Merced’s sensitive, grounded performance, her open face able to pass amusement, anxiety, self-loathing vitriol, panic attack and relief like quicksand. Her performance alone can absorb the film’s rougher edges, vaguer lines and dramatic whiffs, especially when assisted by a strikingly natural Cree.

Anything’s Possible is another needed step in the right direction – a just-fine high school romantic comedy about an unapologetic, bold trans teenager on a major streaming platform.

Call Jane never quite rises to the level of a rousing battle cry, but does offer a studious examination of a past that could, terrifyingly, become our future.

Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield can’t save this dreary Valentine’s drama that lacks fizzle and emotional stakes.

Not Okay is like many “internet movies” before it – approaching uncanny valley, somewhat obvious, just a little off — but this unsettling darkness makes it a solid entry into the canon of just-okay social media films.

In the hands of director Alejandra Márquez Abella, it is impossible not to be charmed by this tale of tenacity, commitment and community

The ambition of Horse Girl ultimately gets the better of it, turning what could be a dark but insightful depiction on signs missed in a mental health crisis into an agreement on one’s madness – a game of what’s real, and what’s not, that feels unsettling to play.

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things holds a contained, idealized world – a trove of romcom enjoyment and small treasures I had no problem looping through.

There’s bits of misplaced humor, a firm sense of place and promising performances, but frustratingly little magic to be found here.

The 99-minute film is long on yelling and guffaws, short on punchlines.

In true streaming economy form, it’s a smooth, ambient operator, made more memorable than it should be by a still underappreciated Mendes, who will hopefully upgrade to more headlining adults roles sooner rather than later.

Another film might have mined Steinem’s remarkable life for its complications and contradictions, but The Glorias settles for slapdash iconography.

That’s mostly for the better. The Accountant 2 is a more fun affair than The Accountant, if you’re a fan of very loud shoot ’em ups, nonsensical crime webs and rogue good guys fighting obviously very bad guys, though this outing is sadly missing Anna Kendrick.

British actor/writer Nathaniel Martello-White’s directorial debut nudges at some uncomfortable fault lines of race and class, but tends to over-index unearned suspense for character development or insight.

The central romance here is, on paper, a love for the ages, a story of all-consuming passion. It’s not quite so in practice.

Birds of Paradise, then, settles into a weird, slightly unsettling middle-ground – beautiful yet hollow, intriguing yet distanced, skillfully performed without much of a beating heart. Like its principal dancers, its a portrait of contrasts, though the friction here doesn’t generate much heat.

You come to the Road House for a good time and some knuckle-cracking fights, and on that front, this film delivers, owing to some truly impressive stunt work, a fully convincing performance from Gyllenhaal in Southpaw form, and a crackling screen debut from UFC champ-cum-entertainer Conor McGregor.

Shirley gets the job done, though I wish it was more worthy of her complexity.

There will always be room for a good, breezy romcom, and the set-up of an Indian wedding is ripe for one. As churn-able Netflix content goes, Wedding Season is on the better end of the spectrum.

Sweethearts thankfully avoids full predictability – a welcome relief, particularly in a film that embraces the rampant horniness of 18-year-olds. Even if you’ve suffered through the turkey dump, this one is a treat.

As far as zeitgeisty nonfiction goes, Winner is one of the better ones, at once entertaining and illuminative.

True to its animated predecessors, Super-Pets pulls off what other superhero entries have struggled to summon from the CGI universe: lighthearted fun and self-aware humor woven with real evergreen themes – the fear of change, learning to love friends through transitions, trusting that love will remain through the seasons.

Though the two leads are capably charming – or, in the case of Tiffin, baseline attractive as a nice hometown guy not given much to do – the movie still has the imprint of a tech company’s content assembly line: cheaply made, over-lit, bumpily paced, ludicrously dialed-up characters without much comic payoff.

Love at First Sight isn’t a tear-jerker, rather a lump in the throat at best, and always watchable whenever Richardson or Hardy are pining on screen; the two make falling in love, losing each other, first fight and making up within 24 hours seem perfectly reasonable and emotionally obvious, if admittedly (to themselves and others) a little crazy.

More than two decades since the original, Rodriguez maintains his ability to invoke a child’s sense of adventure and absurdity.

It’s spectacle coasting on the evergreen draw of time travel paced with beats of occasionally effective human emotion – grief, regret, self-loathing and acceptance in sometimes moving, very manageable amounts.