Bob Strauss

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.

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

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 Man Who Sold His Skin may not be entirely believable, but its many great metaphors for multiple social ills create their own, withering truth. The film doesn’t ask us to turn our gaze away from the world’s ugly realities, but to see them in the very handsome images they inspired Ben Hania to make.

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.

The movie is silly and fun enough to enchant younger audiences, not to mention impart life-balance lessons that kids from 8 to 80 ought to know.

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

Amid scattershot pop culture references, flying cars and squads of armored knights with laser-guided crossbows, Nimona makes a cry for acceptance that has mythic resonance.

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.

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 not what it looks like” is both the marketing tagline for Emergency and an accurate description of this ingenious independent film.

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.

Utilizing plentiful archival footage, contemporary commentary, recent interview observations from people who were there and some dramatized recreation, director Cristina Costantini gets some sly laughs, edged with appropriate anger, out of the sexist mindsets Ride deftly steered her career through in the 1970s and ’80s.

Inhuman though it may be, this is far-and-away the most humane of “Predators,” expanding rather than skimping on the series’ blood hunt fundamentals. That kind of daring and intelligence makes “Badlands” the coolest science fiction adventure seen in eons.

No, you don’t have to be a fan of fake wrestling to appreciate “Iron Claw.” A love for classic Greek tragedy wouldn’t be misplaced, though.

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

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.

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

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

If The Harder They Fall doesn’t make Westerns popular again, I don’t know what can.

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.

Like all his films of the last dozen years, “No Bears” brims with paranoia and metaphors for the trouble Panahi’s pictures have gotten him into. This time, though, he implicates himself in a complex exploration of how his work can exploit and even exacerbate the real-life tragedies it’s always so powerfully depicted.

This is a perpetrator’s perspective on the business of violence, carried out with notions of professionalism while slowly shaking the sociopath’s sense of self. Michael Fassbender’s unnamed contract killer is as delusional as he is dead-aimed focused; it’s both chilling and humanizing.

Backed by a feral, driving score from Ukrainian folkloric quartet DakhaBrakha, “Porcelain War” makes the case for art as another protective weapon against imperialism. Like Ukraine, the film concludes, the delicate but resilient sculptures may break easily — but are very hard to destroy.

Armstrong crams just about every strategy and justification late capitalism can produce into densely packed dialogue that the film’s core quartet of actors make sound remarkably organic.

Fundamentally, though, “My Dead Friend Zoe” is a tricky story told exceedingly well. It earns our attention — and a few salutes.

The director succeeds most at giving an inkling of the real Chase, now somewhat frail in his 80s. But she also makes a case that at past points, when the public consensus was “God, he’s being an ass again,” the truth may have been rather more poignant.

Grading on the Tyler Perry curve, though, “The Six Triple Eight” respects its noteworthy topic — and its audience — as much as it possibly could.