Alissa Wilkinson

Ad Astra is beautiful, contemplative, and loaded with meaning — not an action movie, but one that leaves you with plenty to ponder.

Visages, Villages is quite a moving film, and speaks to a particular cultural mindset that knits art into the fabric of public life.

Nonfiction films often grapple with mortality and the meaning of existence, and usually those center on grief. This one wraps its arms around the full range of feeling that follows a terminal diagnosis: fear, love, desire, anger, wonder, hope, despair, even joy.

Santosh is equally about the methods by which the poor and oppressed are kept in their place, and about what it means to be woman among men who aren’t at all interested in sharing their power.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is a worthy sequel, repeating some of the same beats as its predecessor, but cleverly reinvented so that it’s still unpredictable and hilariously bizarre.

By the time the breathtaking final moment arrives, we have learned, a little better, how to really look at the world, as a lover of both beauty and the strange bits of ourselves that make us really human.

Time is slipping away for Tangier Island, just like its shoreline. Been Here Stay Here beautifully captures what it is right now, then asks us to consider what will probably be lost soon.

Mother! is a mad fantasia of fire and water and insanity, a spinning, flaming plume that is not here to make you like it, though it wouldn’t mind if you decided to just bow down in worship.

It’s a beautiful and haunting film, and another examination of what makes us human from Garland.

The End is about one version of the end of the world, and about how the people who could have prevented it might feel when they get there. But to watch it is to think about yourself, at least if you have a conscience, and to ponder the sort of cognitive dissonance you live with every day.

Schrader’s approach to this material — it’s his second movie based on a novel by Banks, the first being “Affliction” (1998) — is fascinating, a filmmaker’s translation in every sense of the word.

The film boasts a stellar cast led by Letitia Wright (Black Panther), who plays Altheia Jones-LeCointe, the leader of the British Black Panther movement.

The landscape in which this family makes its domestic life is wild and lovely, and Palmason signals the changing of the seasons by showing us all of its beauty: the snow and ice, the sunshine and greenery, beautiful skies, placid water. The weather can be both delightful and harsh, warm and chilly, and that’s mirrored in the characters.

It’s often said that New York is a city of neighborhoods, little galaxies contained within themselves, but the truth is more granular: We walk by a dozen massage parlors like the one in Blue Sun Palace every day, and never dream the whole cosmos of human emotion is inside.

What Descendant demonstrates is how ignoring the real story — the ship sunk to the bottom of the river by people who find its truths uncomfortable — doesn’t just steal people’s history from them. It impoverishes the future. More than that: without facing the past with courage, exploring it without succumbing to emotional panic, there is no future.

It’s a work of unspeakable beauty, one that doesn’t leave you when the film ends, and its deceptively simple focus on a love story can’t mask its cinematic achievement.

Dunkirk wants us to sense what made this moment so pivotal without reducing it to an individual tale. And at that, it succeeds richly.

In place of magical thinking and a happy ending, The Old Oak serves up something harder: a meditation on hope.

The Nest isn’t a haunted house movie, per se, but it draws on some of the visual tropes of the genre. It frequently feels as if something sinister is lurking around every corner.

Good One is the writer and director India Donaldson’s feature debut, and an astounding one, full of the kind of emotional detail that can only come from personal experience.

Your mileage will vary according to your stomach for this stuff, but I found myself breathless with giggles at times, sometimes the therapeutic laugh of recognition and sometimes because Aster has a keen eye for what’s most absurd about human nature.

Yes, there are tricks of the camera and computer going on. But Tom Cruise is actually driving a motorcycle off a cliff and then plummeting down. That’s real — real enough to gasp and hold your breath and get a little shaky. It’s as much a mainstay of the movie as the mask trickery, and that subtle play with what we’re seeing, with the real and the unreal, suggests the movies might be doing this very much on purpose.

It’s funny and beautiful and lively.

The sharpest critique isn’t about bodies, but about the way we’ve trained ourselves to look at those bodies, and the effect that has on our own. The movie is, appropriately enough, a mirror, and our discomfort reveals our own hidden biases and fears about ourselves.

There’s a pure joy to this documentary, a sense that creativity is miraculous and we ought to be grateful that we get to participate in it. I left both screenings full of ideas for my own work.

Pham manages to float existential and spiritual questions into Thien’s consciousness and ours without trying to offer solutions, at least in language.

American Factory tackles the challenges of globalization with much more depth and nuance than most reporting on the topic, precisely because it steps back to watch a story unfold over time and resists easy generalizations. It’s both soberly instructive and fascinating.

There’s some John Carpenter in this film, and some Woody Allen, and some John Cassavetes, and a healthy dose of Charlie Kaufman-style surreality. The result is shrewd, and fantastic, and something all its own.