Brian Tallerico

Mungiu doesn’t traffic in easy hero and villain narratives. He’s more interested in revealing how easily anyone can be both.

This is a ridiculously fun movie, anchored by a movie star in a part that fits him perfectly and a director who really has been working toward this film for his entire career.

The result is a project that feels true to its source, a well-crafted epilogue for a beloved character who vividly understands the concept of consequences.

Intercutting interviews with Marcos and her son with archival footage and other experts on the Marcos regime, Greenfield has put together her best film yet.

mother! is at times horrifying, at times riveting, at times baffling, and at times like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Chime is yet another reminder that Kurosawa is one of the world’s masters when it comes to unpacking the remarkably fragile line between good and evil.

La Cocina is a phenomenal showcase for Briones, who gives one of the most mesmerizingly multi-faceted performances of the year.

Logan is the rare blockbuster that could be a game-changer. It will certainly change the way we look at other superhero movies and how history judges the entire MCU and DC Universe of films.

An ambitious, challenging piece of work that people will be dissecting for years. Don’t miss it.

The Godfather Coda does seem different, thanks largely to how he opens and closes the film. Overall, this version feels even more elegiac—a true coda instead of just another part of the same story.

Like its subject has done so many times in his six-decade career, this one exceeds expectations.

More than just your standard horror/comedy, The Wolf of Snow Hollow is a tonal balancing act, a movie that doesn’t go for laughs or horror as much as weave various tones and styles through its excellent script. I thought Cummings was a talent to watch after “Thunder Road,” and now I’m sure of it.

Some will argue that all of the themes of “undertone” don’t connect, but that’s a feature, not a bug. This is a film that doesn’t feel the need to explain itself. Nightmares rarely do.

An adrenalin-shot of a comedy and a fearless dissection of identity politics, corporate malevolence, and the American tendency to look the other way when confronted with horror.

It’s just funny, sweet, and smart — three things that this father of three doesn’t get to say often enough about entertainment while watching movies with his kids.

This is an accomplished, moving piece of filmmaking, one that cares about its characters and trusts its performers. It comes from a relatively old school of dramatic storytelling but it connects emotionally because of Dano’s tender but confident work and what he’s able to draw from two of the best performers of their generation.

This story has been told several times before—and influenced other similar romances—but Cooper and Gaga find a way to make this feel fresh and new. It’s in their eyes.

After the Storm is one of our best filmmaker’s best films.

However suave the movie itself may be, it's another accomplished piece of work from a filmmaker who is now four for four, and continues to surprise with the range of his interests and output. And it’s a love letter to a cinematic legend, serving as a perfect final film for someone who long ago surpassed mere actor status to become an icon.

Queen of Earth is terrifying because it is so emotionally unmoored—Catherine is a character with little reason to care about anything or anyone, and Perry and Moss convey the danger of that brilliantly.

Again and again, I marveled at the humanist depth of the world Haigh creates, one that can only be rendered by a truly great writer and director, working near the top of his game.

These moments have a tactile intimacy that’s incredibly powerful, placing these ordinary people in an almost timeless continuum of seemingly ordinary behavior that becomes extraordinary in memory, or through the eyes of a camera.

It’s a deceptively well-made flick that appears to be Linklater in little more than his “let’s have fun” mode. But it can’t keep one of the smartest filmmakers of his generation from elevating everything that this movie is trying to do with remarkable depth.

Sometimes its meandering approach can feel a bit more detached than in Trier’s best work, but this is ultimately a delicate, complex film that lingers, unpacking itself in your mind. You remember it in the same kind of fragmented images that haunt its characters.

It feels both remarkably simple and complex at the same time, a vision on which we can place our own interpretations of what it all means instead of being force-fed superficial messages.

These movies are not WHOdunits as much as WHYdunits, and it’s everything that’s under the murder and its resolution that makes this sermon so entertaining and so powerful.

Trust me. It was worth the wait. Stahelski and writers Shay Hatten and Michael Finch have distilled the mythology-heavy approach of the last couple chapters with the streamlined action of the first film, resulting in a final hour here that stands among the best of the genre.

Arnold's films elevate the potential of youth, and for this one, it takes a little magic to fulfill it.