Chase Hutchinson

It isn’t always a pretty picture, but it is a truthful one, proving to be a loving tribute to those lost.

It’s a compassionately constructed film — it never looks away from the agony before us, and the subject is of the utmost importance.

It is a film you won’t fall head over heels for, but one you can’t help loving many parts of. You’ll just have to do your best to fondly recall the good parts, namely Quan and Lynch, while hopefully forgetting all the rest.

When you arrive at the final bittersweet destination, swept up in its dizzying collage of history, emotion, time, and space yet floored by the vision you experienced, you’ll find yourself drawn to watch it back all over again.

A sporadically interesting though ultimately superficial exploration of online connection, video games, and modern alienation, writer-director Flora Lau’s Luz is a film in search of something greater than it is never quite able to grab hold of.

OBEX is a lo-fi stunner of a video game movie, merging a deeper understanding of the way games work with playful and creative sequences that also pack a deeply emotional punch.

Rabbit Trap finds some occasionally effective moments of atmospheric dread and sadness, only to leave those moments stranded.

Without all of the performers being completely at the top of their game, none of this would work, and it could grow tiresome rather quickly. Luckily, all of them give such refreshingly vulnerable, funny, and lived-in performances that make you more than happy to spend time with all of them.

Last Days is a film that is so contrived, superficial and misconceived, it does a disservice to the story with every choice it makes.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley doesn’t do much of anything new with the documentary form, though still excavates plenty of interesting details within a familiar package.

More a forced, one-note farce than the sharp satire it’s trying to be, Atropia is almost impressive in how it manages to allude to so many complicated subjects surrounding U.S. militarism without authentically skewering or even poking at any of them.

It’s a deeply painful, necessary watch that confronts the way cruelty and repression leaves deep, lasting wounds over lifetimes. But some blunt narrative decisions and a rushed conclusion ultimately keep “All That’s Left of You” from greatness.

The result is a film that’s not just funny, skewering so much of the lazy yet still effective tropes of so much of true crime, but also a wake-up call for the genre.

Lacking anything resembling a remotely conventional narrative, it just lets the conversation flow naturally and thus, Peter Hujar’s Day lives and dies based on its performances. Luckily, both Whishaw and Hall are outstanding, disappearing completely into their conversing characters.

Thankfully, even when sudden exposition about past trauma lands clunkily, the rest of the film remains light on its feet and properly fun as we observe the couple being tormented by whatever is drawing their corporeal forms together.

A Western epic of breathtaking visual splendor and formidable lyrical cinematic poetry, it’s a work containing all the wondrous, devastating layers of an entire life, which it explores with a gentle grace without hiding from the agony that comes with it.

In a world that often rewards mediocrity where true artistic greatness is hard to come by, a work like Opus had the potential to be a defining movie of our current moment, but the film’s half-hearted swipes at celebrity culture are never sharp or incisive enough to get under the skin.

Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out in terms of where things are going, a new wrinkle will be introduced that delightfully sidesteps all of your expectations.

Rather than serve as a shallowly classical body swap story that provides a moral lesson about her growing to appreciate the life she had, the aftermath of this decision is more thematically complicated and engaging. It’s also sincere, tapping into anxieties about being not just liked or even loved, but truly seen.

It’s a cute premise that ultimately gets wrung so dry that you’re left waiting for it to finally stop. The majority of its jokes either land flat or are run into the ground. Even worse, it pulls on the heartstrings with such force and impatience that the audience manipulation is palpable in every painfully predictable scene.

It’s far from perfect and is at its brutal best in the final stretch, though it manages to get there in mostly one piece — even when its characters do not.

The film could be mistaken as cringe comedy, but it’s much more than that, and Sweeney never lets the film’s delightful twists overtake the emotion at the root of the movie.

The result is a film that’s not just incisive and compassionate, but fully attuned to the rhythms of this modern family.

An exercise in riveting restraint and painful poetry, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is an emotional knockout.

Even as Paulson is putting her all into the film and can firmly grab hold of you at some moments as her strong-willed matriarch comes undone, much like the dust that is floating around the confined setting, it all slips through her fingers.

Even with a more gleeful performance by Kate Hudson, Shell is merely a fine film that’s far too tame to completely pay off.

Seo excavates universal truths that transcend all generational and cultural divides. The many geographical, social and emotional pains these young people are grappling with are ones everyone faces down. As they find ways to fight this, coming to realize all the many ways they may not be so easily able to, there is something both genuinely heartfelt yet quietly haunting about it.

It’s a meandering experience defined by the broadest of narrative strokes, cardboard cutout characters and musical numbers that start fun before growing more oddly obligatory in nature.

It’s a movie about the forces that consume anything and everything to make them into something that is a part of a collective. The more it expands on this, the better it gets, sweeping you up in stunning visuals that swallow you whole.

This void of a movie has plenty of the right pieces to work with at hand, but continually arranges them in the most blunt, least interesting manner possible. It’s a film that bolds, underlines and then shouts at you what it’s about, though never authentically earns your emotional investment.

As Salles shows us, such a seismic loss spans many generations just as it does entire histories that are still being written. We must then always remember the people, their individual stories, and what it was that they endured so that others may never have to do so again.

Like the imposing, unadorned structures of brutalism (think: Boston City Hall, the blocky public housing of the Soviet Union, modern additions to any university campus), it can feel at times intentionally ugly or rudimentary. But it’s also a breathtaking work that’s simultaneously maximalist and minimalist – a searing movie that’s poetic on a formal, storytelling, and thematic level.

When Queer wanders in its own direction in the shaky latter half and captivating conclusion, it may lose some watchers in this descent into dreamlike despair. Still, it crafts a critical last paint stroke in its delicate portrait of desire.

Anora is Sean Baker's most searing and shattering film yet with a breakout performance from Mikey Madison.

It’s not only his best film yet, but it’s the work he’s been building up to over his entire career.

If Howard and Sweeney can make movies together like this all the time, may neither of them ever stop.

You can practically see the more complicated layers of the two men through the eyes of the performers alone, but they’re both left staring at a story that almost stubbornly refuses to excavate them.

For every moment where it seems like it’s getting somewhere more thoughtful, it will dance away into something else, lacking focus even as it remains faithful to the rather short source material.

It may not always come alive in the way Heller, or us, would entirely hope for, but one can still be glad “Nightbitch” exists, especially with Adams there to lead the way. In every facet of her performance, she paints a full portrait of a character herself figuring out who she now is.

In every piercing stare, you can see Terry’s determination and drive just as you do brief flashes of overwhelming despair at the depravity that surrounds him. It becomes surprisingly emotionally impactful at key moments, all of which Pierre plays perfectly. For all the restraint both actor and character embody, the joy of the film comes in how you see the righteous fury growing inside him. It's just waiting to burst free to set things right in a world gone awry.

Slingshot is more of a murky mystery where the big revelations don't hold up under scrutiny.

Andra Day delivers a commendable performance as matriarch Ebony Jackson, but the entire experience is neither scary enough as a horror film nor insightful enough as a drama to leave a mark.

This is no romanticized look back at a past film, but a deeply honest one. In every frame, both within the production of the film and outside of it, it feels like we're witnessing something profoundly personal that may soon slip through our fingers. It's worth cherishing every moment of.

It’s a breathtakingly melancholic film infused with mourning, journeying its way through subtly painful yet often poetic conversations about searching for something lost that may never be found. That only makes all the discoveries it makes that much more stunning to behold.

There is just enough magic that it discovers by the end to give it a closing spark, but there is a mighty long road to get there, ensuring it all just remains merely okay as opposed to comprehensively good.

All through the scattered experience, Page is a shining light. Every move he makes gives the film something greater that it is never able to grasp.

Hell Hole is a solidly gory, goofy little ride that cuts through any hiccups to get to the meat of a madcap indie monster movie.

There is much that could easily lose some people when they behold elements of its grand design, but for those willing to get on its wavelength, you’re in for a treat as beautiful to look at as it is unexpectedly haunting.

Jérémy Clapin’s Meanwhile on Earth is a mesmerizing work of science fiction with a magnificent performance by Megan Northman.

Oddity is another horror gem from writer-director Damian McCarthy with an enthralling performance by Carolyn Bracken.

My Spy: The Eternal City is an underwhelming action-comedy sequel that is best as a covert coming-of-age tale, but more frequently suffers as a grab-bag of tonality that abandons what helped My Spy succeed in the first place.

This is a film where the trappings of the procedural plot matter infinitely less than the moments that come when you glimpse the visually beautiful yet bleak pit into which Harker is going to fall.

Without going too far into detail, as the sudden swerve it makes is too delightful to dare give away, it takes a plunge into its own distinctly offbeat, frequently absurd, and ultimately melancholic vision.

If you’re willing to take the plunge, it’s a haunting experience. Whether you come up for air or retreat back into the woods, well, that’s another thing entirely.

It’s like a good theatrical production. It’s often charming and more than a little chaotic.

You get wrapped up in the whimsy of it all just before it all hits you like a truck, finding plenty of resonant emotional flashbacks that contextualize and deepen the experience just in time for the conclusion.

The film does pull out all the stops for the finale but, for nearly every moment it stands tall in this conclusion, it also stumbles and falls in the getting there.

While the more extreme moments of the film may capture the most attention on first watch and are remarkably well-executed, Potrykus deserves praise for how precisely he captures the depths of pain that come pouring out of people like the ash out of a firework.

Morrisa Maltz’s Jazzy is a gentle, impressionistic wonder that authentically captures growing up.

Robot Dreams is a beautifully animated look at life, friendship, and what it means to grow apart.

Along with his co-writer Bossi Baker, Erkman has made a distinctly eerie and sinister debut that succeeds at sneaking into the depths of your subconscious.

What makes The Damned so effective is how grounded it all is in the characters and their perception of the world.

I see dead people in this film, but their cause of death is simply boredom.

Though it assembles some of the right ingredients before laying them out before you, it never proceeds to arrange them in any particularly interesting or entertaining way.

It doesn’t deliver a knockout like some of Miike’s other films, but it still manages to beat all it has working against it into submission. One can only hope it manages to beat the odds again and find the audience it deserves.

Bionic is another sci-fi dud for Netflix, bringing nothing new to the genre and not much more to its action sequences.

It is a wholly uncompromising experience that dances with mirth and melancholy. Proving to be evocative in one moment and unrelentingly exhausting in the next, it’s as gorgeous to behold visually as it is hard to completely embrace thematically. And yet, if you abandon yourself to it by the end as one character says, you can catch glimpses of something spectacularly sublime in the vast journey that it takes on.

It’s incredibly effective and culminates in one of the best closing shots of any film to show at this year’s festival. Without ever once overplaying its hand, it ensures the smallest act of resistance and compassion hits like a train.

It's a remarkable, revolutionary work of art. As precisely focused and tightly constructed as it is expansive in its aspirations, it’s a rallying cry for the irreplaceable value of artistic expression in a world that will repress it at all costs.

It's a frequently fascinating and often moving film despite its many, often glaring, flaws.

Benjamin provides just the right balance of sincerity and snark to hold this dark action-comedy together. When combined with bloody good action choreography, the film mostly knocks any flaws aside.

It lacks the electricity of his past works but, as we come to see, the lifelessness of it all, is, in many regards, the point of the whole thing. It's about carrying on when nothing makes sense.

A lot is going on all at once, but little of it coheres into anything substantive, let alone actually memorable or meaningful.

Much as he’s done in the past, this film dissects the casual cruelty of love and relationships through a combination of the filmmaker’s distinct sense of dark humor that occasionally flirts with something closer to a more strange sociological horror.

Much like the city being built in the film, it’s all more interesting in theory than it ever is in actuality. Now that we will all have the chance to take it in for ourselves, the greatest revelation is that there just isn’t that much there to see.

While Schoenbrun’s film embraces its many influences, it is a distinct work that lingers in the very soul. It’s not just one of the most original American films of recent memory, but the best of the year.

From a talented cast in Léa Seydoux, Louis Garrel, Vincent Lindon, and Raphaël Quenard to an initial willingness to be ruthless in tearing apart the messy art of moviemaking, it could have been something truly great. nstead, just when you think this movie about making movies is starting to get somewhere interesting, it reveals itself to be only a sporadically funny satire with a surprising lack of teeth.

The performances are all giving the necessary punch even when the writing is not. It may frequently get lost in its own narrative woods, but Bana manages once again to bring it all back to humanity.

It wants you to buy into the heart and the humor without earning either.

There is much about it that remains imperfect, especially in terms of some of the broad character beats that it begins with, but it proves to be proper fun once it gets going.

[Bartholomew] gives us insights into her character more naturally than some of the occasionally forced dialogue, showing us glimpses of her increasingly fractured mind through an embodied performance. Even when the film doesn’t fully capture the spirit, the spell she casts gets awfully close.

It isn’t the worst shark movie out there, but that’s not saying much. By the time we get to the “big final confrontation,” it loses a handle on what it was going for.

Mars Express finds deeper truths that are as tragic as they are transcendent. This makes it a sci-fi tapestry not just worth getting lost in, but one that is deeply human as well. What a painful joy it is.

Even as it comes awfully close to overstaying its welcome just a bit, much like the spiders in the home of the characters, it very quickly grows on you.

Breathe is empty bluster and nothing more. It’s like a vacuum of where a movie should be, sucking all the air out of the room until nothing is left.

Though the ending is somewhat disappointing and less dynamic than everything that preceded it, this can’t take away all that the film still has going for it.

It is grimly funny at times, though no less terrifying because of it. Everything compliments itself as we observe the beautiful forest being made into a hunting ground where there is nowhere you are safe for long.

When watching The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed, the brilliant comedy from writer-director Joanna Arnow in which she also stars, both comedy and tragedy are expertly wielded in her hands.

There is no other horror film you’ll see this year as incessantly cruel and mean-spirited as The Coffee Table. This is both a compliment and a criticism, as, while the film is plenty committed to twisting the knife into its audience, it can also be rather repetitive before rushing to the finish.

Even when it can risk falling into being a little repetitive and dulling its impact, it will swerve in just the right way to keep you on your toes.

Not only does neither part of Rebel Moon work, but The Scargiver is such a downgrade that it could prove difficult for the franchise to bounce back for more.

Sting is a horror movie about a killer spider from outer space that somehow falls short of the fun potential of such a premise.

There are masterful works of horror that have proven less can be more. Despite some of its promise, Baghead is not one of them.

Where the original remains a work of art that is as entertaining as it is well-made, this remake proves to be nothing more than an empty and thunderously stupid approximation of an action film. Neither thrilling nor tense, it's simply dead on arrival.

Carter may remain quite lousy, but with Krumholtz at the helm, this film is anything but.

While the title promises fire, the only riddle remaining is where the adventure it was searching for ended up disappearing to.

Expansive yet focused, it is a work that is dense in terms of its ideas while also making room for more delicate emotional notes when you least expect it to.

Cuckoo will most certainly not be for everyone, but for those looking for a horror film that draws you in just as it defies any of your expectations for where it is supposed to go, it’s hard to think of a trip this year you’ll find that is as bold and bonkers as this one.