Alison Willmore

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.

It’s a work of masterful and almost unbearable melancholy.

Zero Dark Thirty makes you feel every step of Maya's journey, but it's her impressive achievement and that of the film itself that we're left contemplating, not her humanity - a stunningly well-realized whole with few soft spots to latch onto.

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.

There’s a disconcerting shrewdness underneath its patina of tastefulness — it’s too calculating to achieve the transcendent almost-romance it strives for but never inhabits.

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.

The mechanics of Sciamma’s film are simple, but they’re realized so delicately, and with the help of such unaffected child performances, that they feel miraculous.

It’s a total knockout, both austere and dryly hilarious, and its quality is impossible to consider separately from its colossal lead performance.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always isn’t agitprop for an era of increasingly restricted abortion access, though it’d be entirely justified and effective in being so. It is, simply, a depiction of a reality of our present, and the fact that it often feels like a thriller is a damning reflection of how much peril those restrictions have created, especially for the already vulnerable.

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.

Time is an extraordinary documentary from director and artist Garrett Bradley, who didn’t make a film about Rich and her family so much as make one with them.

It feels, exhilaratingly, like the throwing down of a gauntlet. Gerwig’s Little Women demands its viewers reconsider these familiar characters and what we’ve always assumed they stood for. It doesn’t just brim with life, it brims with ideas about happiness, economic realities, and what it means to push against or to hew to the expectations laid out for one’s gender.

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.

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.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is instead an incandescent work that examines Goldin’s personal life, her evolution as an artist, and her later turn toward harm-reduction advocacy, and understands them to be part of the same journey.

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.

Licorice Pizza — a movie as exasperating as it is delightful — could be described as an exploration of the unstable ground where Alana’s arrested development and Gary’s precociousness meet.

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.

There’s a sealed-off quality to The Souvenir Part II that the first installment doesn’t have, a sense of surrendering to the idea that it’s possible to authentically portray only oneself — which may be true and may be a creative dead end. But even that turns out to be by design, something both the film and its protagonist can acknowledge and then escape.

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.

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.

It’s a film about language in ways that are promising but more often exasperating.

Chung is a patient filmmaker who works in small sequences that accrue imperceptibly into something grander.

Masterful and agonizing, The Father is a gorgeously crafted film about a doomed arrangement entered into with love, even though it can only end in tragedy.

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

Napoleon is not, thank god, a hagiography. But it has the faltering rhythms of a rough draft — it plays as though Scott gave up on trying to carve a good film out of what actually ended up on screen.

The Human Voice is all about the muddied lines between the fabricated and the genuine, and about how much a performance can be divorced from the sincere feelings that might be undergirding it.

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.

It’s uniquely pleasurable in how self-contained it is.

At the age of 78, Andersson continues to make films that desire to capture no less than a grand sense of human existence — and that somehow achieve it. Here’s hoping this one isn’t his last.

It’s not a seamless combination, though that’s not the fault of McDormand, who, with her wary eyes and careworn expression, slots in easily alongside actual travelers like the nature-loving Swankie and the savvy Linda May. Fern is just more obviously a creation, her utility evident when she’s stringing together episodic encounters with strangers or enabling someone to make a point that didn’t need to be spoken aloud.

The Banshees of Inisherin is like watching two cars slowly set out on a collision course ending in a crash that would be easily averted if one would just give way. But it’s also a caustic masterstroke of anti-romanticism, a counter to every starry-eyed screen portrait (often made by an American) of rural Ireland as a verdant sanctuary of close traditions, quirky characters, and a more authentic way of life.

Washington manages the near-impossible feat of delivering his lines as though he’s putting the words together in the moment, speaking some of the most famous sentences in the English language as though they’re actually being dredged up out of Macbeth’s roiling consciousness.

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.

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.

Showing Up is more than worth surrendering to. It’s one of Reichardt’s best — warm as one of the sunny Portland, Oregon, afternoons Lizzy’s perpetually fretting her way through and an affectionate rumination on the relationship between art and all the day-to-day stuff of life that can get in the way of making it.

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.

In addition to being a film about soulless jet-setters as a new form of walking dead, grounded in and caring about nothing, Infinity Pool is a phantasmagoric ode to the sensation of staying too long at the party.

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.

The Green Knight is about someone who keeps waiting for external forces to turn him into the gallant, heroic figure he believes he should be. But at the film’s heart is a lesson that’s as timeless as any legend — travel as far as you like, but you’ll never be able to leave yourself behind.

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.

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.

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.

The most interesting parts of this baggy, inevitably indulgent, and often spectacular work find him grappling with the idea of putting himself onscreen versus adapting part of his life into the stuff of a movie.

If the grown-ups in this coming-of-age story keep drawing all the focus, it’s no shade on Margaret — they just have so much more going on.

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.

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.

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,.

It’s an homage to radio dramas, maybe, but also works as a reminder that while film is a visual medium, sometimes sound can be enough to sustain you. It’s a sound, after all, that opens up the cloistered world that Everett and Fay are living in, exposing them to something terrible and awe-inspiring and new.

McBaine and Moss are the team behind 2014’s The Overnighters, a wrenching film about the North Dakota oil boom, and they’re interested in something beyond the contrast of adolescent faces and grown-up topics — or, for that matter, serving up simple optimism about Gen Z when taking in these young men at the cusps of their political lives.

As a film, it’s warm and beautiful without being sentimental about the temporary intimacy that alcohol can provide, creating bonds that can dissolve in the daylightlike haze but are no less legitimate in the moment for it.

It’s whimsical and bold and also easier to admire in the abstract than to get deeply emotionally invested in, though it features a late-breaking burst of beauty that will soften the hardest of hearts.

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.

Effervescent and ridiculous and grounded in a pastel-shaded Toronto and the nearby throwback details of 2002, it has texture and specificity to spare, and the only person it cares to speak on behalf of is its 13-year-old heroine, Meilin Lee (Rosalie Chiang).

The Lighthouse is such an effective exercise in projecting claustrophobia, in both a physical and psychological sense, that it’d be unbearable to watch if it weren’t so funny. Thankfully, it’s a scream.

As is often the case with Hosoda, it’s the extracurricular details that make his work so moving, the textures of the everyday lives of his characters that become something larger and more profound when placed in contrast to the genre elements at the center of his story.

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.

Palm Springs would have been a scream and likely a word-of-mouth hit in theaters, but maybe there’s something fitting about its going straight to streaming in the middle of a pandemic. What is quarantine, anyway, if not waking up and going through the same routine over and over without end?

For all that it has been positioned as the comeback of the rom-com queen, Marry Me isn’t really a return to form for the genre. Instead, it aims to have things both ways, to have the glamour and the buoyant fantasy and to also be more textured in its treatment of its characters and their relationship.

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.

Agrelo steers clear of the straight-up hagiography that plagues so many docs framed as tributes to their subjects.

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.

Rye Lane asks you to fall in love with Dom and Yas, but failing that, it will have you hopelessly smitten with its South London setting and with that feeling of having the day open and nothing to do but wander and see what may happen. With the city spread before you, you never know who you might meet.

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 Northman doesn’t invite its viewers into its world, but instead dares them to try to catch up.

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.

The frustrating thing about Fingernails, which is directed by Christos Nikou from a script he wrote with Stavros Raptis and Sam Steiner, is that it’s so disconnected from the physical side of romance even as it has an intensely anatomical phenomenon at its center.

Everything Everywhere All at Once may be a kaleidoscopic fantasy battle across space, time, genres, and emotions, but it’s an incredibly moving family drama first.

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 film also comes across like a rough cut that was never looked at as a coherent whole, and some segments that start off as promising become interminable while others feel entirely unnecessary. There's no pressure on or expectation for Tarantino to please anyone other than himself, and the film feels overstuffed with ideas that should have been pruned.

Glass Onion is bigger and more precisely designed than Knives Out, but what makes it a more satisfying movie is that it sits with its characters more rather than immediately showing off their decay.

As a statement on a decade of consumerism, The Nest doesn’t have anything particularly new to say, but as a fable of familial dysfunction, it’s resonant and, yes, frightening, with nary a ghost in sight.

A Thousand and One is rich and complex overall, the saga of someone battling to build a family and a stable home with no real experience of what that looks like.

They don’t feel like black characters grafted onto roles that were initially conceived of as white, but they don’t always feel entirely formed either, an impression that’s not helped by the choice to keep the siblings in largely separated narratives.

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.

Like most of West’s films, X is not particularly ambitious in its psychology or storytelling. It’s his technique that makes his work feel like it has one foot in the arthouse, with its elegant compositions and the way the camera moves as though daring us to see something the characters have yet to spot.

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.

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.

It’s warm and inveigling, but what it could use is a little more emotional ugliness.

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.

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

In its glimpse into the lives of partnered-up fictional directors, Bergman Island invites its viewer to guess how much it’s a reflection of Hansen-Løve’s actual relationship, while also acknowledging the gap between the art someone makes and the person they are.

There’s a streak of defensiveness to Barbie, as though it’s trying to anticipate and acknowledge any critiques lodged against it before they’re made, which renders it emotionally inert despite the efforts at wackiness.

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

Shot in black-and-white with occasional accents of color, and given to camera-facing testimonials from characters around Radha’s neighborhood in a nod to Spike Lee, The 40-Year-Old Version feels like a ’90s indie throwback, loose and left raw at the edges, marked by an intimacy that can only come from drawing from the stuff of its multi-hyphenate creator’s life.

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.

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

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

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.

Jackman gives his best dramatic performance since he played the obsessive, hollow Robert Angier in "The Prestige."

Its most impressive trick is its underlying warmth, its understanding of the vulnerability and fallibility of its supposedly fearless artists and preening industry experts as well as of the downtrodden writer standing just on the outskirts, trying his best not to let anyone see how much discomfort he’s in.

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.

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.

The film’s litany of details about growing up in the Houston area in the ’60s isn’t enveloping — instead, in its drone of vintage sitcom titles and reminiscences about fecklessly riding in the back of a pickup on the freeway to the beach, it feels, for the first time from Linklater, like a lecture about how things were better back then.

What makes the film such a spare but searingly insightful treatment of the issues at the core of Me Too is the way it refuses to separate its unseen executive’s sexual predation from the larger structures that enable it.

Kimi threads its increasingly tense interactions with a modern melancholy.

The delight of the exuberantly bittersweet closing sequence comes from the way it fulfills a promise the audience doesn’t realize, until that point, has been made.

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.