Carlos Aguilar

Not one to shy away from sincerity, Desplechin brings his beloved Paul Dédalus full circle in a satisfying project about the grandeur of the force that unifies the fictional character with the real man.

It’s a Garfield movie for audiences who have never heard of Garfield, which reads as an attempt at erasing history and reintroducing him in this high-octane, overly stimulated form for a generation with reduced attention spans.

Thelma the Unicorn avoids being rendered completely unoriginal by its overly familiar premise thanks to consistent splashes of acid humor and a plethora of wacky supporting characters.

A gripping, heady and refreshing 2D animated take on the perils of man and machine coexisting, Périn’s first feature as a director inserts the necessary exposition in a mostly natural manner so we incrementally become aware of how this reality functions.

This tale of parents and poultry more than earns the exclamation point in its title. It sweeps you into a whirlwind of ingenuity, bite after animated bite.

McCarthy and editor Brian Philip Davis deploy high-voltage moments with expert timing, using the dark to their favor in refreshing fashion.

While “Absence of Eden” lacks narrative originality, it often dazzles visually.

Abigail is a hilariously gory romp that banks on a memorable ensemble cast and a witty screenplay that invigorates vampire tropes with a refreshing drollness.

This caper-slash-personal essay is an admirable endeavor that honors, above all, a filmmaker’s fixation on a medium that makes him whole.

As with Rohrwacher’s previous movies, there is an exquisite blurring between the tangible and the ethereal, the urban and the pastoral, life and death, past and present — all of it overlapping with the same ease as the hues of a twilight sky.

As with plenty of memorable comedies, what makes “Dad & Step-Dad” a special treat is that beneath its well-mannered raunchiness and stoic silliness there’s an undercurrent of something truthful about the human condition.

Like a comedy sketch that overstays its welcome, “Society” undermines both its caustic intent and its romantic-comedy subplot.

Little insight is gained from what’s on screen.

You can get the facts about these migrants anywhere, but Garrone knows the tool of cinema is more effective. By presenting these adolescents in all their fragility and strength, he comes as close as is possible to getting us to feel how they felt. Io Capitano is as unflinching as it is robust with empathy.

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan spends his latest engrossingly verbose, three-hour opus, “About Dry Grasses,” warning us that every truth is partial as it’s tinged with the teller’s perspective.

No doubt comparisons to “Saltburn,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” or “The Talented Mr. Ripley” will abound, but what Lin conceived is far more subcutaneous, with a sobering tone and disinterested in building up to a grand plot twist — though the resolution is unexpected.

A work of tremendous lyrical potency, even more intricate in meaning and scope than the pair’s earlier stunner, Sujo thunderously demonstrates why Valdez and Rondero stand among those soon to be regarded as the new masters of Mexican cinema.

Bursting with unruly energy that practically escapes the confines of the screen, Kneecap is a riotous, drug-laced triumph in the name of freedom that bridges political substance and crowd-pleasing entertainment.

In the Summers is the type of personal, confidently executed first outing that should hopefully put the filmmaker on an auspicious track to produce other keenly humanist work.

Though Sehiri’s third feature offers a seemingly minor concept, it’s certainly bountiful in its power to unearth the unspoken codes that reign over this community, where some men demand reverence from women solely for their gender-based status in the social hierarchy, where the notion of absolute loyalty to one’s extended family guides every decision, and where romantic companionship remains mostly transactional.

Even those already familiar with the trajectory of Kahlo’s existence may find the delivery here raw, vulnerable, and refreshing.

Where others could have made a less sophisticated pastiche, Schoenbrun has filtered the familiar through their nonconforming lens to beget a bona fide original.

Ilker Çatak, a German writer-director of Turkish descent, has shrewdly crafted a taut and tight examination of the concept of justice folded into an absorbing character study.

Though the humor and acting in “Concrete Utopia” can occasionally feel broad, Lee’s viscerally monstrous performance grounds a high-stakes drama.

The year’s most succinctly perfect film, Fallen Leaves aims to do for us what companionship does for its couple: make this treacherous life a bit more bearable.

While Wish is enjoyable, this new Disney fairytale doesn’t measure up to those that came before.

Even at her character’s most vulnerable, the Oscar-winning actor presents Lee with an edge of defensiveness, her guard never fully down, likely tied to a traumatic event in childhood.

For some, Nikou’s deliberate intent to portray a subtly warped reality may read as forced. But there’s an endearing bizarreness to “Fingernails,” his first film in English, that allows him to grasp at some of the intricacies of the human condition, steeped in silences as much as heartfelt analysis.