Alison Willmore

That unnatural quality of drone footage, its ability to pull up off the ground and pivot as if you’re fiddling with Google Earth, is something Martel turns into an asset throughout the film,.

The film is not just a means of trying to understand if there was some better possible outcome but also a fantasy of opening up the past and slipping back inside it to see what you missed when you were there.

Lowery — who made A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, and whose last film was a live-action Peter Pan remake that Disney shunted directly to streaming — is too compelling a stylist and has too earnest a heart for what he’s made to be easily shrugged off.

The uncommonly entertaining horror film, the third from the Cam and How to Blow Up a Pipeline team of Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei, is a clever, nastily contemporary riff on what the original represents — not just the blurring of what’s real and what’s not, but the urge to rubberneck at gore and treat the ability to be unshaken by it as a point of pride.

For all the undercurrents about fame, commodification, and reputation that flow through The Christophers, at its core is a more plaintive lament about what it feels like to love something that doesn’t love you back.

There’s an elegance to the way that Kawamura incorporates his theme into a very straightward premise, making the movie feel like it’s building on the essence of its source material rather than being trapped by so many mobius passageways.

Miroirs No. 3 has nothing on Phoenix, Petzold’s post–World War II masterpiece about a woman haunting her own life, but it is entrancing. The key to its unsettling pleasures is the way it acknowledges that what is happening is disturbing only if one of its characters says it is.

Undertone is creepy enough without needing to knit its haunting into its main character’s background so clunkily; ironically, its most effective moments are ones of stylistic indifference.

Wuthering Heists is Fennell’s dumbest movie, and I say that with all admiration, because it also happens to be her best to date.

For all the personal hardship each of the main characters has encountered, they’ve also lived lives of unquestioned security, such that they’re able to pass through a country in an apparent state of emergency without believing such a thing would affect them. Sirāt brilliantly depicts that bubble breaking, its characters confronted with what it really means to be a citizen of the world, rather than gliding above it, with the music turned up loud enough to not have to listen.

Raimi indulges Send Help’s gore and gross-out moments with the zest of someone returning to his cult-favorite roots. But when it tries to cast Linda as a figure who, in her own way, is just as uneasy as Bradley, the movie loses its nerve.

The result is scruffily endearing, though it teeters on the verge of collapse at times, as the pretense that what’s unfolding onscreen is all a serendipitous journey gets stretched to the breaking point.

In The Secret Agent, there’s no line between a refugee and being part of a resistance movement — there’s only the state and the people who’ve been designated its enemies.

Christy, which was directed by Animal Kingdom’s David Michôd from a script he wrote with his partner, Mirrah Foulkes, isn’t rote Oscar bait, and Sweeney isn’t doing the sort of studied showboating that so often comes with the territory.

Lorenz is the kind of role that Hawke thrives in — a big talker and a self-mythologizer who everyone can’t help but like, despite being aware that he’s mostly full of shit. He wisely approaches the character like he’s giving a performance of a performance, his Lorenz committing himself as thoroughly as he can to acting like someone who’s happy and having a good time despite everything in his life crumbling away.

Some films make a point of not pulling away from their main character’s uglier moments. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, brilliantly and suffocatingly, turns its unrelenting photography into a manifestation of Linda’s self-loathing, her anxiety so intense there’s barely room for anyone else in the frame.

We’ve seen Arnett play variations on his character before, sardonic and self-deprecating. It’s Dern who’s the revelation as a woman who truly doesn’t know what she wants, and who is figuring it out in real time in a way that’s a delight to watch.

It sprawls across genres and tones and defiantly refuses to anchor itself to a single character.

The adaptation frames the relationship it depicts less as a romance than as the intersection of two individuals in their own moments of transition. It’s a much better movie for it, though I’d guess that one of the reasons it’s getting such a quiet release is that it’s not a desperate melodrama about people trying to save each other.

Jonsson, despite some worrying initial forays into a twangy accent, is the stand-out as Peter, with his crumpled smile and his insistence on solidarity, however much it goes against the spirit of the competition.

The splatter comes more easily to this new movie than a grasp of overall tone does.

Matthew is a ruthless worm who demonstrates in disturbing ways how far he’s willing to go to preserve his place at Oliver’s side, and Pellerin — who was previously seared into my mind as the persistent creep on the bus in Never Rarely Sometimes Always — delivers a masterful performance always riding the edge of cringe.

Splitsville is a comedy that’s grounded in its characters, but also has a downright old-fashioned devotion to the visual, to the ways in which the farcical sight of four guys crammed onto a sofa can be just as capable of generating laughs as a good line.

The movie is called Americana, not America, and while it treats characters as mixtures of what they were born into and what they chose for themselves, it suggests that there’s something kitschy about the very idea of national identity, whether it’s defined by what’s in your display case or the color of your eyes.

Architecton comes across as a more plaintive depiction of our desire to imagine ourselves able to leave a lasting mark on this planet.

There’s a lot about how we complicate and obfuscate what should be obvious goods, such as saving the lives of children. But the film’s approach isn’t ham-fisted, and it makes room for gleefully fun stuff, too.

While Ballerina doesn’t start off as a real John Wick movie, it sure ends as one.

It’s not a film that fully works, but it’s a performance that’s monumental — and very grown up.

Bring Her Back is a more emotionally ambitious movie than Talk to Me, though it’s also messier. Hawkins’s performance as a woman who was destroyed by the death of her daughter, more so than anyone around her seems to realize, both powers and unbalances the film.

Yes! becomes an anguished film, though that eventuality isn’t as nauseatingly propulsive as its first chapter, which is such a caustic depiction of cognitive dissonance that it stings to watch.

Like so much of Reichardt’s output, The Mastermind feels modest when you’re watching it and downright brilliant once it’s had some time to settle in your mind.

Reinsve, with that phenomenally open, oval face, does an unreal job of transmitting emotions that Nora is barely aware that she’s feeling. Skarsgård is at turns infuriating, charming, and pitiable as an aging artist filled with regret, but also too stubborn to yield.

Highest 2 Lowest is an old man’s movie, and I don’t mean that as a criticism.

A film that is, chain collars and ass-eating aside, surprisingly mild at its core — or, at least, it ends up positioning dominance and submission in counterpoint to emotional intimacy in a way that echoes E.L. James more than you might expect.

It delights in its characters’ rule-breaking and playfulness and experimentation.

It’s an astonishing work, twining together the lives of four generations of families with an intricacy and intimacy that feels like an act of psychic transmission.

It’s the little comedic cul-de-sacs that make the movie work as well as it does, sustaining it as much as the growing tension between Craig and Austin.

Thunderbolts* recaptures some of the magic of the early Marvel productions, when they felt like some alchemical phenomenon of corporate entertainment, and not just slop. The secret, which should have been obvious, is taking pleasure in the people these movies put on screen, rather than just treating them as marketing materials for future installments.

If Gazer doesn’t pick up the momentum needed to match Frankie’s increasingly dire situation, it’s nevertheless a pleasure to watch — a project that feels, like its heroine, unstuck in time, reminiscent of a whole other, more vibrant era of American independent cinema when the films themselves were the point and not just calling cards for a bigger commercial opportunity.

While The Rivals of Amziah King is as overstuffed as a comfy sofa, if it’s about one thing in particular, it’s about the work that goes into holding together a community.

It’s a perfectly preposterous set-up for a thriller, but the core of Fahy’s agonizingly distracted performance is something real and recognizable.

Bong specializes in crushing capitalist dystopias, whether he’s skewering present-day South Korea or an even more stratified post-apocalyptic society, and the near-future in which Mickey 17 takes place is perverse enough for each detail to constitute its own dark joke.

Even if it’s the weakest of the Paddington movies, it succeeds. The innate sweetness of the series carries it past figurative and literal rapids and into shenanigans involving bear carvings, a bear temple in the mountains, and a secret bear community.

Where the film really shines is in reuniting Bridget with her faithful friend group (Shirley Henderson, Sally Phillips, and James Callis), her withering gynecologist (Emma Thompson), and, of course, with Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), the red flag-laden lothario who represents everything Bridget knew she shouldn’t be attracted to.

With its clever construction and comic timing, it’s a mean romp with an escalating death count and some nice quips.

You can’t stop art, motherfuckers, and whether it’s in Grand Theft Auto Online or during a global pandemic, the show must go on.

Honestly, watching One of Them Days, you start to wonder why Palmer isn’t one of the biggest stars in the world by now, though part of the problem is that she’s a creature of comedy, and studios barely make them anymore. Even when the writing and pacing falls slack in this one, as it definitely does on occasion, she wrings laughs out of scenes with screwball physicality and surprising line readings.

A Complete Unknown doesn’t attempt to offer up a solution to the enigma that is Bob Dylan. It does something more achievable — shows us what it’s like to bob around the wake of greatness.

The pleasures of Flow come from the expressiveness of its animals, whose personalities come through so distinctively that, blessed absence of celeb voices aside, it becomes a fun game to start casting the actors who would play each type if they were human.

Bird is the newest feature from Andrea Arnold — her first scripted film since the 2016 U.S. road odyssey American Honey — and it serves up an endearing, ungainly mix of the gritty and the magical.

If the rest of the film takes a somber, poetic perspective on the symbolic and literal nature of this partial restoration of a lost heritage, its youth represents a bold, discordant, and exciting counterpoint — vital and engaged, looking toward a future they demand be better than the past.

Union is a rare thing — a documentary that is undeniably political in its focus while being artful and observational in its approach.

Loktev’s film is a stunningly stressful experience in what it’s like to actually decide when the desire to stay and fight should give way to the need to cut and run.

It’s the sly way that the film starts off lodged in one character’s perspective, and makes its way to the other’s, that enables its rollicking final act to work as well as it does. Sleep is a wild ride, but it refuses to lose sight of the emotional state of the people it puts onscreen, even as they fall apart.

In the new Speak No Evil, the ineffectual nature of the characters becomes not a shortcoming so much as a teased-out joke — a Straw Dogs moment that never arrives, leaving us instead to wince at these bumbling fools as they strive, however poorly, to save themselves.

My Old Ass has the premise of a broad comedy and the soul of a bittersweet coming-of-age story. And one of the reasons that it works so disarmingly well is that it doesn’t treat the former as a means of sneaking in the latter.

Chalfant is one of those acclaimed theater actors who has never found the same showcase for her talents onscreen, and the delicacy of what she does in this role is astounding.

The Room Next Door is an alternately rapturous and ponderous meditation on mortality, though in a very Almodóvarian fashion, that exploration comes by way of a fantasy of set directing one’s own death, down to the moment, location, and outfit worn.

It is an unabashed platform for basking in the rapport of its two leading men, who are in familiar and fine form as a pair of hypercompetent cleaners, and that makes it a consistently enjoyable watch even when the pacing gets a little slack.

It’s impossible not to be impressed by the sheer audacity of The Brutalist’s existence, even if the finished product doesn’t end up matching its ambitions.

Babygirl never bothers to genuinely reckon with the damage that could be wrought by the head of a company having an illicit affair with a junior employee. Instead, it approaches its own potentially sordid scenario with a giddy deliriousness.

It works so much better than should be possible because of Hartnett, who gets a showcase on par with the one the filmmaker gave to James McAvoy in Split.

It recreates the sensation of drowning in your own hormone-churned emotions so vividly that the film would be difficult to watch if its very existence didn’t serve as a kind of pressure valve. And it provides reassurance that while things may get worse before they get better, this period of life does pass, and eventually you get enough distance to look back on it from the outside as well as from within.

Sing Sing may be an awkward chimera of a film, combining vibrant source material with synthetic attempts to serve as a star vehicle, but its insistence on the healing capacity of art is enough to soften the hardest of hearts.

A family drama as masterfully propulsive as a horror movie.

As the crowning touch on West’s horror-movie mille-feuille, MaXXXine demonstrates that the trilogy never really had all that much going on, depth-wise, despite its sprawl. But Goth does her own synthesis of the characters she’s played across the titles, and the result is alternately disturbing, touching, and downright triumphant.

When I came back to the film months later, the intricacy of its emotional undercurrents bowled me over, as though I just needed to know what was coming to fully appreciate what Baker was up to.

A generous film that’s ragged at the edges but manages bursts of the sublime.

As Solène, Hathaway gives a particularly lovely and vulnerable performance. She’s radiant as a woman reconnecting with big, swooping emotions, and reminding herself that those feelings are not the exclusive territory of the young.

It overflows with intriguing ideas, even if they aren’t all fully explored.

Despite the mercenary nature of its existence, Road House is better than it has any right to be — perfectly enjoyable schlock that’s helped along by how unserious it is.

Of the many things that make Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of World exhilarating, from its egalitarian mix of high and low references to its delightful profanity, what stands out is its willingness to acknowledge the general horror of modern existence, and then to suggest the only reasonable response is to laugh.

Villeneuve’s facility with this stuff doesn’t just come from his talent for spectacle, though there are set pieces in Dune: Part Two that aim to blow the top of your skull off.

Pictures of Ghosts is so lovely and alive that, if anything, it only reassures you that movies aren’t going anywhere.

The marvel of Tótem is that it feels so organic though it’s clearly the result of an enormous amount of preparation and precision, the camera winding its way through crowded spaces to catch the most delicate of interactions. It overflows with love and pain, sometimes both intertwined, and it’s openhearted about death existing alongside life in a way that feels rewardingly mature, even if its protagonist is a child.

I Saw the TV Glow manages to be enveloping without being inviting and to offer a sense of emotional intimacy without requiring that those emotions be comprehensible.

There’s an admirable defiance to Haigh’s interest in characters who aren’t easy in their own sexual identities, who don’t feel in sync with queer culture, and who struggle with scars from the past and internalized shame that doesn’t go away just because it’s unreasonable.

The weirder its treatment of the treat becomes, the better the movie is, cutting through the script’s more potentially sentimental tendencies. It never reaches the singularly compelling strangeness of the source material, but it lands somewhere close enough to be mostly satisfying.

Eileen may ultimately be a little thin, but it’s a bracing watch, powered not just by its two main performances but also by Ireland in that small but powerful role as a wretched enabler.

The marvel of Priscilla is in its dual awareness, how it’s able to immerse us in the bubble-bath-balmy perspective of a teenager experiencing an astonishing bout of wish fulfillment and, at the same time, always allow us to appreciate how disturbing what’s happening actually is.

Green has a talent for depicting the way women constantly recalibrate their behavior when moving through male spaces, trying to figure out how to attract enough attention but not too much, to come across as pleasant without inviting unwanted intimacies.

The Creator may be an effective interrogation of American imperiousness and imperialism, but it also has a tender, anguished heart.

There are surprises to be found in The Holdovers, but they come from the characters, not the story — from the ways each of the three main figures reveals new depths and confounds expectations.

The literary world jabs are sharp and funny, but it’s the rueful family dynamics that make the film so rewarding, as well as the performances.

The pleasant surprise of Dumb Money is that it’s such an effective entertainment, even if it oversells the revolutionary impact of what it’s depicting.

The Boy and the Heron is irresistible in its dream logic, straddling the adorable (white blob creatures called Warawara that inflate like balloons) and the dark (parakeet soldiers that are on the search for fresh meat). But what makes it most compelling are the ways in which the real and the magical are equal presences.

It delivers the goods, thanks to Washington’s performance and Fuqua’s zest for going graphic.

If anything, I wanted Bottoms to be even more anarchic. . . As is, it’s still a great — and audacious — time.

This winning coming-of-age comedy understands that, when you’re 13 years old, the world really does feel like it could end if you’re not able to wear the dress of your dreams to your bat mitzvah, or if, God forbid, your crush expresses interest in someone other than you.

The turtles’ unceasing, rapid-fire banter is all affectionate dunks on one another and pop-culture quips, and the look of the film is never less than entrancing, with computer animation that creates the feel of something handmade.

Tomas is the film’s most captivating element as well as its limiting factor because it’s only possible to bear so much time in his company. It’s a testament to Rogowski’s performance that Tomas’s appeal remains apparent despite his behavior, that his gravitational pull is understandable even as you long for the others to escape it.

Talk to Me doesn’t quite have something pointed to say about it, or anything else, but that’s okay — it’s just here to show you a good time and then usher itself out before overstaying its welcome.

Oppenheimer is a movie so sprawling it’s difficult to contend with. It’s rich, uncompromising, and borderline unwieldy, but more than anything, it’s a tragedy of operatic grandeur despite so many of its scenes consisting of men talking in rooms.

Seriousness does eventually descend on Afire like the check at the end of a meal, but until then the film, the latest feature from German filmmaker Christian Petzold, is a beguilingly funny affair about getting in your own way.

Theater Camp really just wants to bask in the world it’s created, and it’s hard to complain about something being too affectionate.

What makes Nimona so refreshing is that it doesn’t just plunk these characters onscreen as a contribution to the battered cause of representation — it also has something to say about them and their respective relationships with the status quo.

Across the Spider-Verse looks incredible, even better than the groundbreaking first installment, but what’s truly impressive about it is how willing it is to entrust its storytelling to its animation.

Reality is filled with the sickening tension of a thriller, but it really plays like a tragedy, given that we already know what happened to its subject next.