Bilge Ebiri

Is this art or is this prophecy? Is there even a difference?

Through heightened control of imagery and mood, attention to composition and texture and sound, Manuel turns this simple, languid setting into something far more sinister without ever betraying the beauty of what’s onscreen.

The film seems content to be the class clown of the Marvel Universe, which is all well and good. But like most class clowns, sometimes you wish it would apply itself — because it seems capable of being so much more.

The tonal mismatch I feared could have turned one giant movie into a bit of a slog turns out to be among its greatest strengths. The reflective second half recontextualizes the first, and the progression of colorful action fantasia to quiet existential reckoning is overwhelming.

One of the greatest documentaries I’ve ever seen.

Through this unique figure, and through this highly specific portrait of one country, The White Tiger achieves a kind of universality.

Kurosawa films psychological torment with real gravity, and he films physical cruelty with humorous detachment. The absurdity of his vision matches our topsy-turvy reality.

The film manages to be both intelligent and visceral.

For most of its running time, The Student is immensely compelling, a terrifying ride between hothouse realism and dreamy metaphor. If by the end it feels unresolved, perhaps that’s because the nightmare is far from over.

Nichols has a light touch when it comes to genre, which is Midnight Special's great blessing and curse.

Wingard is also clearly enamored of the synthesized soundtracks of Giallo and John Carpenter films, and here, he turns that into a whole thing, too: A mix Anna makes for David becomes a plot point, giving the director an excuse to practically drench his scenes in dreamy electronica.

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.

The kids’ ambling chatter, the dogs’ routine of rest and play, lull us into a contemplative state, which allows us to better appreciate the mystery of existence.

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.

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

Jodorowsky’s fondness for the surreal and grotesque is in full evidence here. What makes his films so captivating, however, isn’t their strangeness, but their refusal to divide the world into good and bad, even when it’s easy to do so.

Tim’s Vermeer starts off in a playful fashion, but as he soldiers on, our intrepid, mild-mannered technologist finds himself getting emotional. In the presence of art, something happens. By the time it’s over, don’t be surprised if you’re more in awe of the work of an artist than ever before. Maybe this is Penn and Teller’s final, subtle rug-pulling moment: An attempt to demystify the artistic process ends up posing even greater mysteries.

When King Richard works, it sings.

Getting sucked into these people’s lives means experiencing the story in all its immediacy, sans judgment. Holler is too entertaining and well-made to be overly dour, too full of suspense and throwaway bits of cinematic elegance. It marks the arrival of a major new directorial talent.

The audacity and beauty of Asteroid City lie in the way it connects the mysteries of the human heart to the secrets of science and the universe.

The Truth possesses the observational power and intimacy we would expect from a Kore-eda work, and we recognize the quiet cadences of the director’s storytelling, but the film also has an uncharacteristic air of desperation and insistency. Everything — every scene, every line of dialogue — feels like it’s working toward a point.

One of the very best American independent films you’ll see this year, John Magary’s The Mend, takes what could have easily been a mundane tale of brotherly dysfunction and turns it into something abstract and electrifying.

While the film does take some twists and turns — some fairly contrived — it mostly drills down and explores her emotional conundrum without drawing symbolic conclusions about the world we live in.

As playful as it is, Lenny Abrahamson’s film is mostly a surprisingly earnest story about the compromises and conflicts of art, stardom, and mental illness.

Here comes The Naked Gun, unabashedly crude and stupid and brilliant and weird and obvious and current and archaic and, finally, fall-out-of-your-seat-and-roll-on-the-floor hilarious. See it with the biggest audience you can find. It might just heal you. It might just heal the world.

The artistry here lies in the mutations and permutations of language and rhythm that are spoken onscreen. Bodied is uneven, but it has the fire where it counts.

Love Me, despite having two incredibly expressive actors at its center, remains furiously literal-minded in its questioning. And unfortunately, the more questions this picture asks, the more maudlin and shallow it becomes.

Law and Hoult’s differing energies turn the film into something more than a mere crime drama; it begins to feel like an eternal struggle with existential, civilizational consequences. This is an unforgettable movie.