Brianna Zigler

While not Park’s best work, nor a masterpiece, Decision to Leave is an extravagant and hopelessly romantic thriller that weaves past and present into something entirely its own.

Bones and All is a heart-tugging portrait of wayward spirits searching for belonging that deadens the genre of cannibal horror into digestible, prestige-glossy arthouse.

As a story about a mother and daughter trying to move on from old wounds and contextualize their relationship, the film is perfectly adequate. But as a film watched on a chilly, damp fall day—not unlike the day I write this review—with a mug of hot cider, the coziest pajamas and Halloween just a few weeks away, I could not ask for anything better.

In reality, Triangle of Sadness is neither as smart nor as interesting as it clearly thinks it is.

In her fourth collaboration with Reichardt, Williams is better than ever. Possibly overdone in beleaguered, regular-woman makeup this time around, Williams still best showcases just how lived-in of an actress she can be in Reichardt’s work.

Girl Picture is sweet, tender, and frequently amusing: a love letter to that time we ache to leave in the rearview mirror but which shapes who we are and how we love more than anything else.

While countered by a throughline which is a bit on-the-nose—that loss comes for us all, and that what matters is how we choose to live with it—Mothering Sunday still succeeds as a moving, beautifully crafted and sensual period picture.

While Mother Schmuckers may hit a sweet spot for fans of the delightfully vulgar and distasteful, it reads mostly as a film aiming only to provoke.

A far cry from Bates’ elegant 2012 bloodbath Excision, King Knight is a mostly insipid, overlong sitcom episode not worth tuning in for.

Sundown is not a sunny film, it’s true. It’s deeply nihilistic and unpleasant, and even a bit silly. But Franco’s film is nonetheless a warped and fascinating take on class as it ties to egotism.

Clean is irrefutably, deliciously bad. But there is something unironically beautiful about movies that are just plain awful, movies that dare to provoke your senses at all instead of simply sating them with something pleasant and “competent enough.”

The King’s Man is an off-putting installment in a series that should have already ended.

As is, Don’t Look Up is an exhausting and meandering “What if? But also, what now?” If the world really is going to end in my lifetime, these were 145 minutes that I’m never getting back.

Still, House of Gucci would not be what it is without the sheer weight of Lady Gaga’s portrayal of Patrizia, a woman who wants to “have it all” and then some.

Jones suffuses slow-burn tension, disturbing visual elements and murky folk horror into a film that’s foundation rests on creeping uncertainties—making The Feast pleasantly obscure and occasionally quite upsetting.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain can’t quite live up to its magnetic subject, but it’s still a warm celebration of a renegade artist and revolutionary forbearer of the funny cat video.

Antlers is a film that, not unlike most of its ilk, wants to be an overstuffed analogy for hot-button issues first, and a horror film second. Unfortunately, it can’t seem to get either right.

Ridley Scott directing a grand, riveting medieval epic that doubles as an analysis of gender dynamics might be unexpected, but The Last Duel manages to effortlessly combine Scott’s action sensibilities with an empathetic thread between the past and present.

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is an apt, simple fable that feels somewhat hopeful for our modern world—one where evil wins, but love overcomes.

With a gentle touch, Sciamma crafts a profound, easily digestible film that takes heavy themes and makes them bite-sized. She looks at the way we speak to one another, and to ourselves, at every age, and how these conversations are inevitably dulled in the schism between a child and their parent.

It’s easy to find yourself so wrapped up in the austere unease of Campion’s first feature in over a decade that one might fully overlook the obviousness laden in Peter’s opening words, and uncertainty as to the film’s overt approach to its subject material is recurrent.

The film becomes a wry showcase for the director’s evolution as a creative who has been refining an unparalleled style for over two decades, with a sharper humor but without the more deeply felt pulse of films like The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox or most recently, and most effectively, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

The Velvet Underground will leave one less acquainted with the band with an incomplete picture in mind, but it’s unfair to say that the film is only for true enthusiasts. Instead, Haynes is interested in capturing a mood: A feeling of creative interconnectedness, of change, innovation and of a revolving door of people and art that will never again be replicated.

Vortex, while visually captivating, only functions as a window through which to look at death detached from the beauty of life.

Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World is as indecisive as its endlessly curious heroine, but it is an invigorating, exceedingly kind portrait conveying that the journey is just as—if not more—crucial as the place we end up.

Titane is not just 108 bloody minutes of bodily mutilation and perversion, but of blazing chaos inherent in our human need for acceptance. Ducournau has wrapped up this simple conceit in a narrative that only serves to establish her voice as one which demands our attention, even as we feel compelled to look away.

He’s All That is, yes, a nightmarish, joyless commentary on influencer-beholden adolescence told through the crutch of nostalgia and starring a charisma-less TikTok star, but it’s hard to know if one is merely an example of “Old Man Yells at Cloud” or if the teenagers of today are truly living in a Hell on Earth

As can be said of its real-life subject, Val is moving, inspiring, funny and fractured. It’s a look at the man and an expansion of the myth, revealing just as much as it continues to obscure.