Alison Willmore

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.

A deliciously absorbing documentary.

In its constant asterisking of its own material, I’m Thinking of Ending Things feels like an artistic dead end, like the confession of someone who can only burrow deeper and deeper into himself instead of looking outward.

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.

Pearson, as happy-go-lucky charmer, also brings a burst of much-needed vitality to this droll but overly thought-through film.

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.

After Yang has the structure of a subdued mystery, though at its core it has no answers to these, or any, questions. Instead, it provides a slowly dawning and utterly devastating understanding of the hidden richness of its title character’s existence.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a boundlessly generous and frequently surprising two-hander.

Roadrunner may have been made too soon, and made with a misguided approach in mind, but in its closing moments, it manages a sudden magnificence in affirming that there’s no right way to mourn. Grief, in all of its ugly reality, is a part of life too, and there’s no tidying it up for the camera.

What makes The Card Counter so delicious, aside from the Mad Libs quality of the way it connects card playing and government-sanctioned torture, is that the movie undermines the Spartan swagger of William’s half-existence as often as it basks in it.

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.

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.

The artifice of the aesthetic premise overwhelms any of the film’s other intentions.

What his vampire drama is missing is precisely the quality that’s given Eggers’ earlier work its unsettling energy, which is that he’s able to render the past as an alien landscape whose inhabitants don’t just look different, but conceive of the universe in ways very different than we might.

There’s a resilient buoyancy running through The Personal History of David Copperfield that proves irresistibly moving by the end of its journey. Its protagonist weathers hardships and cruelties in addition to benefiting from acts of kindness, and yet he never loses his capacity to be fascinated by people, a quality that’s comforting without feeling cloying.

By framing Mamie’s story entirely in the context of her son’s death, Till keeps us on the outside of her transformation from a woman focused on her own life to one who believes, as she says in a speech at the end, that “what happens to any of us anywhere in the world had better be the business of us all.”

Nope is a work of sly devastation from writer-director Jordan Peele.

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.

If there’s a complaint to be made about it, it’s only that it feels like another sign of a stylistic trend that’s inexorably cohering, as seen in other recent (and enjoyable!) work like Emerald Fennell’s "Promising Young Woman" and like "Killing Eve," a show Fennell wrote for and that Murphy has directed episodes of.

Suzume may be a less effective romance than something like Your Name — it’s tough when half of your main pairing is a piece of furniture — but that’s because its real love story is with the stuff of everyday life, making it almost unbearably inviting and worth fighting for.