Bilge Ebiri

There’s a lot jam-packed into this movie, but it’s in such a rush to get through it all and to not bore us that it … well, it bores us. We’re lost, and we’re clearly not supposed to be.

Ghostlight is one of the best movies of the year, and if that’s a meaningful enough statement for you, then feel free to stop reading now.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die serves as passable entertainment. But one does miss the gonzo action spectacles of yore, which this franchise once embodied.

The off-kilter, absurdist vibe of the picture is enchanting, but it’s rooted in deep horror: The whole movie is about the ways that cruelty and injustice become codified. Sometimes, the only way to preserve your sanity is to go a little insane yourself.

Watching Robot Dreams, we find ourselves reflecting on how our own lives have changed as we’ve grown: the friends we’ve left behind but haven’t forgotten, the cities that have transformed around us, the wisdom we’ve accrued, and all the ways in which we’re still slightly damaged from all that living.

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.

Universal Language is a magnificent film, one that feels warm and familiar even as we realize just how startlingly original it is.

The danger of movies based on conceptual wit is that they will lose steam as things proceed and the filmmakers run out of ideas. Thankfully, Maddin and the Johnsons effectively develop their story — goofy and absurd though it may be — so that these constant digs at our ineffectual leaders do coalesce into something meaningful and alarming.

Cronenberg is transmitting to us from the borders of death, behind the enemy lines of inconsolable grief. And the man’s mind is still so alive that it seems churlish to ding this movie for being so — God, this isn’t the word I want to use, but I must — lifeless. Sadly, the inertia eventually gets to us.

Horizon feels like the opening chapters of a grand novel patiently rolling into place, carefully delineating characters and offering telltale glimpses into their lives. It’s rich in period detail and filled with majestic vistas that seem to match the expanse of its story. But this can be a curse, too, at least while the film only exists as this one installment.

Whenever it finally opens, we’ll probably all be too busy trying to cancel each other over this or that, in part because, despite the fact that he makes grandiose, overstuffed films, Audiard rarely holds our hand when it comes to telling us how to feel about his characters; he has a maximalist’s eye and a minimalist’s heart, which is a fascinating tension to bring into a musical.

Oh, Canada might be a movie that was conceived in the long dark night of the soul, but it moves towards brightness and possibility.

It’s a cheap-thrill movie, and on that score it mostly delivers.

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.

Megalopolis might be the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy every single batshit second of it.

Furiosa — somber, steady, and supremely twisted — is a reminder that none of this stuff is really supposed to be cool.

The Planet of the Apes movies were built on rage and shame about the world as it exists. And whatever its many flaws, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes gets that largely right.

In its own discreet, modest way, Evil Does Not Exist leaves us with a haunting sense of personal and ecological apocalypse.

What makes Alex Garland’s Civil War so diabolically clever is the way that it both revels in and abhors our fascination with the idea of America as a battlefield.

With The Old Oak, Ken Loach goes out with one last, full-throated call for brotherhood and solidarity. It’s the most hopeful the old soldier’s been in years.

As an action flick, Monkey Man is often quite entertaining, but it keeps distracting you with images of the film it’s trying, and often failing, to be.

Like the best studio horror directors, Stevenson understands that we’re not here for logic. The First Omen is soaked in style and mood with images that are both textured and shocking and that tap into tantalizingly visceral fears.

At times, it feels as though it has emerged — dusty, tattered, and beautiful — from the storied earth of Italy itself.

There’s style and skill to spare in Asphalt City, but the movie also feels like a victim of the very numbness and emotional emptiness it seeks to expose.

By the time the movie is over, we feel, perhaps for the first time, like we’ve gotten to know this legendary, almost mythical figure. Despite the tumult of her life and her singularity as both a person and an artist, this Frida seems downright familiar.

The cast makes Late Night With the Devil more than watchable, but they also raise our hopes for something better. While the talk-show approach makes perfect structural and narrative sense, it also drains the film of suspense, as we pretty much know where everything is going.

The jokes are witless, the emotions artless, and the film joyless. At the same time, there’s also little to repel or offend, which, after all the truly idiotic culture-war battles fought over the Ghostbusters franchise, probably counts as a win. Maybe one day we’ll get an actual movie.

Mohan seduces us with form while the central performance engages us on a more elemental level.