Bob Strauss

Grievous, loving, organic and mysterious. What a celebration.

The suffering artist story is as old as time. Yet “The Brutalist” tells it with such specificity and visceral conviction, it feels entirely fresh. Modern, even.

Farmers may wonder what the big deal is, but Gunda is quite a cinematic achievement whether you’re familiar with the livestock or not. Plus, the piglets, whom we see grow from birth to adolescence, alone are worth the price of admission.

It’s an ode to the satisfactions of facing life head-on with whatever time you have left. And writer-director Maria Sødahl semi-autobiographical drama earns every iota of its hard-won uplift.

The suburban world Owen and Maddy feel so out of sync with, seen mostly at night, flickers with blue, magenta and sickly green light. It’s unnerving, yet mesmerizing, like a small-screen nightmare that won’t let your psyche go.

Sanders likes to mention Monet’s colorful influence, but the realistic, primeval wilderness of “The Wild Robot” is what stirs the soul.

The Truffle Hunters takes us to a part of the world where time appears to have stood still.

Winner of both the Camera d’Or and an audience award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, writer-director Hasan Hadi’s feature debut is both beguiling and unforgiving, culturally specific yet universal, funny and heartbreaking.

The filmmaker’s default setting is to tell each person’s story with dignity, a significant achievement that goes a long way.

The first feature by Rose Glass, Saint Maud delivers shocks with confidence.

Setting political movies in the past is an easy, usually safe way to signal virtue. But with its eerie resonances of 2021 reports from Moscow to Washington, D.C., this monochrome aesthetic object looks like something that draws real blood.

Rye Lane keeps winning you over by being a satiric-yet-sincere love letter to creative expression as much as to love itself.

A touching combination of fact and fiction makes The Unknown Country one beautiful road trip.

Naturally, laws protecting LGBTQ+ rights are quite different in the United States, especially in California and the Bay Area. Nonetheless, “All Shall Be Well,” in addition to being a skillful, absorbing story, serves as a gentle reminder. After dabbing your tears as the credits roll, your next move should be to send an email to the family lawyer.

An innovative and intriguing plot, credible characters with edgy relationships navigating increasingly insane situations, plus jokes and scares built up with care or blasted out of disruptive nowhere with equal effectiveness — it’s all here, and even better.

The main effect this film’s commitment to emotional intelligence has is to show us what has been missing from the franchise all along. That, and to deliver a climax that will bring tears to your eyes — unless you’re some sort of beast.

Mixing in citizens’ harrowing cellphone footage and heartbreaking emergency call recordings, Walker’s teams immerse us in the flaming terror as few features have before.

The film’s overall aesthetic is a pleasing blend of naturalistic drawings, cartoonier designs and Heavy Metal magazine futurism.

This is a transcendent cinematic vision you can dance to. By God, it’s inspired.

Grafted onto a true underdog story, it makes for a salvation show that could move Brother Love himself — as well as those of his who think we can resist such things.

It’s a remarkably life-affirming message coming from a mess of animated puppets and a monster-loving filmmaker.

Killer of Killers continues the concept co-director Dan Trachtenberg applied to his 2022 live-action “Prey,” only with the more elaborate action, wider scope and graceful, graphic kineticism animation can accommodate.

An unnerving thriller that never goes quite where you’d expect, this feature writing/directing debut from Zach Cregger (“The Whitest Kids U’Know”) also does monstrously amazing things with lighting, sets and special effects makeup.

Longlegs is a conjuring of dark, poetic cinema where the devil is definitely in the details.

In the end, though, “Kneecap” is a dramatically well-structured tale of cultural and personal reclamation – done in the cheekiest, craic-talking way imaginable. It’s as if “The Commitments” had a bastard child with “The Crying Game,” and it mutated into its own, magnificently defiant thing.

It’s tougher than it looks to sidestep revenge movie shortcuts and formulaic payoffs while keeping matters engaging. But Saulnier does it. Off-kilter and fresh, Rebel Ridge may frustrate crude expectations, but its satisfactions are many.

These people seem real, even if their primary motivations are ideological. Perhaps more than they intended to, Goldhaber and the actors make the political personal. That’s a triumph of craft over appetites for destruction.

Uncertainty is a genre trope this director is particularly gifted at manipulating. So many horror films are incoherent due to a lack of good writing; if anything in McCarthy’s script isn’t fully clear, it’s in the same manner that life itself fails to make sense.