Bilge Ebiri

Beyond the many jump scares involving aliens and the terrifically terrified-out-of-their-wits performances, what makes A Quiet Place Part II special is the sheer joy we get from feeling like we’re in the hands of a confident filmmaker.

Drolly funny and rigorously executed, Corneliu Porumboui’s The Treasure offers a fine example of the conceptual boldness that characterizes much of New Wave Romanian cinema.

Knight of Cups might be both the most intoxicating film he's ever made—a deluge of gorgeous, kinetic images and sounds—and, in some ways, the most perplexing.

Tight as a drum and almost nauseatingly suspenseful, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 presents an unexpected angle on a familiar event.

What distinguishes Two Prosecutors is not its overall narrative trajectory (which reads more like a bitter cosmic joke than anything else) but rather how Loznitsa subtly colors in Kornyev’s journey through the halls of power.

Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia is an existential drama masquerading as a comedy masquerading as a thriller.

This doc could have been a mess, frankly. But Philippe has put the film together smartly, taking us from the general to the particular.

Far beyond the courage of its convictions, The Armor of Light also has the intelligence and grace to embrace its contradictions. It’s a beautiful, conflicted piece of work.

With this cast, and such a vivid sense of play, Results manages, in its own subtle, unassuming way, to reinvent the rom-com. It’s enchanting.

There’s nothing particularly surprising about the story, but Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen finds a way to make an old tale feel new.

In restoring Cousteau’s human side, Becoming Cousteau shows us both his brilliance and his shortcomings, and it suggests that these extremes were fundamentally connected. He was soft-spoken and modest on the surface yet consumed by an ambition that was driven as much by his remorse as by his vision.

Whether this new picture is a masterpiece, or a masterful reimagining of a troublesome original, will have to remain in the eye of the beholder.

Blonde is beautiful, mesmerizing, and, at times, deeply moving. But it’s also alienating — again, by design — constantly turning the camera on the viewer, sometimes with Marilyn directly addressing it. That’s going to be a tough sell, especially for a film that’s so nonlinear and elliptical.

It’s an artful portrait of a world that refuses the order we try to impose on it when we close ourselves off to heartache, doubt and pain.

The Great Beauty is a subtly daring cinematic high-wire act — an entire film built around one character’s unrealized, unspecified yearning. And it might just be the most unforgettable film of the year.

Akin holds nothing back, and Kruger, starring in a German film for the first time in her career, brings the grief and anger and pain to life — never overdoing any of it, yet refusing to submerge it.

With previous films like the Oscar-winning Great Beauty and the politically charged biopics Il Divo and Loro, Sorrentino indulged his fondness for boisterous, bunga-bunga stylization. He is contemporary cinema’s mad poet of unchecked hedonism. But he holds himself back this time around. The Hand of God isn’t realistic or gritty (or, God forbid, subtle), but it is more subdued.

For all its charm, Anora is a movie in which just about everybody’s fighting for survival, and they only ever manage to succeed when they start working together.

It’s funny, joyful, and sweet, and yet down below, running beneath everything, is a sad counter-narrative about how the world always throws obstacles in your way, and how you could just turn your back and retreat.

With The Wild Robot, Sanders has found another way to create a visual dissonance that almost subconsciously insinuates its way into our brains and feeds the central idea of the film. And it’s hypnotic.

The secret of this beautiful, bittersweet film about a group of people like no other is that, in the end, it’s all so shockingly relatable.

A cinematic centrifuge of acrobatic stunt work, breakneck chases and immersive action, Mission: Impossible – Fallout is a perfectly calibrated piece of filmmaking that plays the viewer like a drum right from the start.

It’s all supremely touching and evocative without ever feeling too on-the-nose or heavy-handed.

Kusijanović conveys all this through the way her actors move against and look at one another. That’s filmmaking of the highest order — intimate and gripping.

There are many elements that make The Fall Guy enormous fun, but what makes it genuinely artful is the way that Leitch and his team (including writer Drew Pearce and stunt coordinator Chris O’Hara) have conceived the film’s stunts as extensions of the characters.

Aware of the raw, incendiary power of her subject matter, Ben Hania doesn’t sensationalize this story, keeping the action fixed entirely in the call center itself, with actors portraying the dispatchers on the line.

Playground is bleak, bleak stuff. It’s also electrifying.

Jauja is a rapturously bizarre movie that resists knowledge. That’s its secret, intoxicating power; the less you understand, the more mesmerized you are.

Not an image is wasted. Not a single line of dialogue feels unnecessary, or a subplot tangential.

For all its airy lightness and apparent simplicity, it’s hard not to watch Claire’s Camera and sense beneath its placid surfaces the fretful voice of a filmmaker who longs to return to the elements of his art.

It’s rich and dense, but it’s also propelled along by current events, accelerating as things reach their fearsome climax with the assault on Brasília — on those very federal buildings that 60-plus years ago held such promise. The terror and the tragedy on display are matched by the beauty of Costa’s filmmaking.

The breach between these two worlds is part of Rosi’s formal and moral gambit.

It’s the closest I’ve seen a film come to an act of genuine hypnosis.

For the vast majority of its running time, The Big Sick astutely pulls you between the twin poles of agony and glee.

The film’s set pieces are built around comedy, with bits of (cleverly choreographed and directed) action and suspense to add some urgency, not the other way around.

It’s a fascinating meeting of three minds, and perspectives. Chief among them is Salgado himself.

Tate Taylor’s film cares less about narrative clarity and more about portraying a life lived between the extremes of sin and grace, between the abject and the sublime. It’s lively, stylized, and genuinely surprising.

Mermaid is a very, very funny movie, but its caustic swipes at China’s nouveau riche, combined with its despairing look at the devastation of the country’s environment, suggest a filmmaker trying to find ways to reconcile his buoyant sense of fun with deeper, darker themes.

In its own pleasantly dreamy and lilting way, the film embodies what it preaches: As life gets rougher, people endure not by hardening themselves even further, but by continuing to find the freedom to be kind. In Istanbul, the chaos never really stops. Kedi slyly reminds us that the humanity, too, has always been there.

This picture about people obsessed with criminals and their grisly crimes confronts us with the mystery of who the obsessives truly are; the questions we ask of Kelly-Anne could also be asked of all us genre fiends. The expressionless, fascinated gaze at the heart of this film is ultimately not the protagonist’s, but our own.

In Logan, we have an example of a superhero story taken to new extremes and a franchise to a spare, sad, apocalyptic finish (or “finish”), with R-rated action scenes that are both rousing and unbearably violent.

Directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen take this dumb-clever, fake-movie-science idea and run with it as hard and as fast as they can in one straight direction, using Nate’s condition as an excuse for pure, unchecked mayhem.

It’s light on its feet but gradually gathers real emotional weight. It’s also beautifully shot and steeped in atmosphere. We walk away from it feeling like we’ve actually been somewhere and felt something.

It may not quite have the explosive charm of some of the classics, but Black Souls is an elegant, unsettling addition to the gangster-movie canon. Get on its unique wavelength, and you may find it transfixing.

Mackenzie and his cast dance around and through this drama so elegantly and delicately that the twisty, generic ending feels like even more of a letdown than it might have in a more ordinary picture. The details are not worth getting into, but Relay is the rare movie where I might recommend leaving ten minutes before the end.

Bone Tomahawk is terrifying and strange, to be sure, but it’s the old-fashioned veneer that makes it beautiful.

It’s a movie that sings, poignantly, from many times at once.

John Wick is a violent, violent, violent film, but its artful splatter is miles away from the brutality of "Taken" or the gleeful gore of "The Equalizer." It’s a beautiful coffee-table action movie.

You don’t have to believe in divine intervention to be moved by this story.

Lanthimos’s unwavering, matter-of-fact style embodies the unquestioning nature of his characters. And while the internal logic of his controlled worlds feels ironclad, it never really is. The filmmaker’s precision is a ruse, a magic trick designed to make us think one thing while quietly building a case for its opposite: the reality that none of this makes any sense.

Byrkit’s film is very much its own thing. It’s an urbane dinner-party movie that turns into something magnificent, terrible, and strange – and yet it never quite stops being an urbane dinner-party movie, never lets up its tone of ironic refinement. Coherence is a gentle film, but you walk away from it with your brain on fire.

Beneath the goofy plot, the tacky fashions, the fronting rappers, and the exploding bodies, there’s an undeniable earnestness to Tokyo Tribe. It’s the craziest film you’ll see this year, but it’s also — dear God, am I really saying this? — one of the sweetest.

In its blunt, inelegant, but surprisingly gripping way, Catfight is the (im)perfect movie for our rotten times.

Because Rocket is not just an object, and because the film’s flashback structure invests the quest with emotional power, the plot of Guardians 3 never feels like paint-by-numbers gamification; it feels like something we might actually want to care about.

This understated, generous film quietly sneaks up on you.

Branagh wisely gives the movie the quality of a childhood memory, of stolen moments and eavesdropped conversations.

The Forbidden Room is often maddening, occasionally beautiful, and ultimately unforgettable.

For all of (T)error’s topicality and its thriller-like qualities, what makes the film is Sutcliffe and Cabral’s compact, complex portrait of Saeed — paranoid, chatty, mired in self-loathing, but also oddly reflective.

Gibney’s a bit like a kid in an exposé-candy store here, and you can sense him trying to cram as much as he can into the film. Good for him: Going Clear is jaw-dropping. You wouldn’t really want it any other way.

Berger’s film is adapted, quite faithfully, from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, and it combines the pulp velocity of a great airport read with the gravitas of high drama.

Giannoli knows exactly which buttons to push and for how long. He takes what could have been a fussy adaptation of a dusty tome and turns it into something hugely entertaining.

Rush satisfies our lust for both grand character combat and deadly gearhead spectacle.

What makes it work is the solemn efficiency of director David Oelhoffen’s storytelling and the quiet intensity of the two leads.

A film that turns on this kind of ambiguity would ordinarily be cold, grim, paranoid. But Boden and Fleck give this world texture and warmth; their widescreen interiors glow, and it’s hard not to be lulled into them by the siren song of conversation and clinking drinks and possibility.

It’s a tale of class privilege gone wrong, the relentless hunger for fame, stoic mourning and submerged family neuroses, and the crazy contortions caused by money and ownership. In 82 svelte minutes, Finders Keepers encapsulates something ineffable about the modern American experience.

The Devil’s Bath is a deeply fucked-up picture. I say that with admiration.

Ernest and Celestine is a modest, beautiful little children’s fable with a wise, grown-up heart.