Chase Hutchinson

It reveals its most haunting truths to us slowly even as it seems to lay all its cards on the table early on. In doing so, it confronts us with deeper truths we would otherwise ignore.

It isn't swayed by anything other than the truth as it crafts an uncompromising and steadfast deconstruction of whom the artist the world knew as XXXTentacion actually was. Moving beyond the headlines, it emerges as an absolutely essential piece of filmmaking.

A film whose quietly flooring opening frames of a vast landscape becoming home to a compassionate story of a Hungarian-Canadian family navigating an uncertain world together already signal it as a major work, writer/director Sophy Romvari’s intimate and incisive Blue Heron only grows even greater from there.

Whatever you take away from it, the uniting fear Skinamarink creates ensures it will be remembered as an unparalleled achievement in horror cinema in how it paints a portrait of oblivion that beckons us into dark recesses from which there is no escape.

Not only is it a stunning piece of filmmaking that is as rich in detail as it is patient in its exploration, but it also makes the most of absolutely every single element of its slice-of-life portrait.

What is undeniable is its sense of vision, a fully realized work that marks Colbert as a director to watch in absolutely anything she takes on next.

Patterson’s latest film sees him painting on a broader canvas with such boundless care and unwavering confidence that it becomes beautiful to witness him spreading his wings as fully as he does here.

With its strong character work that gets interwoven with a striking story of sabotage, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a riveting tapestry of the plight facing the modern climate justice movement.

In a world of so much noise, it is Reichardt’s Showing Up that proves to be present and powerful in its accumulation of small moments that come together into something spectacular.

While the humorous heights of both the situation and the people within them can be exaggerated for comedic effect, the conclusion we arrive at is anything but. When we see these people for who they are and the frightening whole they have come, it will leave you shaken to the core because you can recognize just how familiar this all is.

While there is often a necessity to condense potentially decades of context to fit within a bounded runtime, history is much broader and more expansive than that. What makes The Territory such a stunning and standout work is that it never loses sight of this history that is inexorably intertwined with those living with its repercussions now.

The way the visuals all dance across the screen in flashes of brilliance that strip away the barriers between form and feeling until they become one is nothing short of spectacular.

It is a dynamic, deadly work of filmmaking that achieves all its lofty ambitions and then some to become an absolute masterwork.

Telling the story of an obstetrician working in a rural town in the country of Georgia who also performs abortions outside work, it’s a quiet wail in the darkness of the night, hurtling along with all the force of a lightning bolt.

It’s a film that almost entirely takes place in a handful of locations, but it feels vast in scope as the first-time filmmaker taps into deep existential questions about how you carry on after experiencing cruelty that nobody seems to care about.

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.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another — the most entertaining, exhilarating movie you’ll see all year — is an incision into a raw nerve. A thrilling, tense portrait of modern life, it’s Anderson’s most urgently relevant work yet.

When all the echoes which Jackson delicately explores come into harmony, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt strikes a resonant chord that will be heard for time eternal.

Both everything and nothing happens in Filipiñana, the cutting, confident, and ultimately formally captivating feature debut from writer-director Rafael Manuel.

Kelly Reichardt’s heist movie The Mastermind is crackingly, urgently alive, an assured and magnificent addition to an already storied body of work.

While it is undeniably a character study with both the actors at the very top of their game, the story itself is perfectly suited for them to shine.

Wishful Thinking is then one of those great films about love that treats it not just as an abstract concept, but as a living, breathing, and constantly evolving state of being, painting a full portrait of its couple who find themselves swept up in it. You fall in love with the film just as you do both of its characters, together and separately, even as they may, too, break your heart.

Even as the film pulls out all the stops, the character work remains subtle in a way that gets under your skin. The magnificent performances of Reyes and Ireland align perfectly, peeling back the humanity their two characters had only tenuously been clinging to.

Even as it eventually loses steam on the way towards a rushed conclusion, the film’s prevailing charm and characters shine through such struggles.

We are left with a shattering sequence of bittersweet joy crossed with sadness that serves as a testament to the power cinema has to linger forever in our memories.

Ambitious yet focused, it is a film that draws from both history and fantasy that it then shapes via joyous music. The result is an epic that makes the most of its magic, eschewing the regrettably typical constraints of the form to become something that is both deeply reflective and beautifully realized.

Even in the moments where it can feel a little rough around the edges, the portrait being painted is a breathtaking and unrestrained one. It all comes together to ensure that, in the long cinematic history of American road movies, The Unknown Country carves out an indelible legacy of its own all the way to its final series of shattering shots.

Across each twist in time and place that can rush together without warning, the grounding force to it all is Seydoux.

While he isn’t an unstoppable hitman, the cold capitalist Julio Blanco rivals the most ruthless and calculating characters Bardem has ever portrayed. Even when the film can’t match his strong performance, he still elevates everything with overwhelming ease.

While the film is rich in meticulous details from its crushing central performance to the delicate way it is all captured, any writing about it requires withholding to preserve the experience.

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.

It’s a simple yet effectively haunting work that’s well-shot, written, and acted across the board, especially for a first feature that takes on as much as this does.

It is a triumph in every sense of the word just as it is a humble portrait of life's small moments. The way Kaurismäki strikes this balance is breathtaking in its patience, proving how the most moving works of cinema can come from the simplest of places.

The Woman King is a film that has the confidence to be completely sincere in both the sharp moments of humor and the stunning battle sequences. The way it all grapples with history is subsequently clear-eyed, making some closing statements feel especially resonant. It is a film that ensures there is no denying Prince-Bythewood's dedication as a director and visual artist who can take on any cinematic challenge with ease.

It is enigmatic and eerie in a manner that crawls under your skin until you feel like you can't escape it. It is proof that films like this, even as they are enormously painful, can reveal the dark truths of being alive in ways other works shy away from. It reflects how life can often have no respite from tragedy, instead burrowing deeper and deeper into it. It succeeds in capturing this state of being, meticulously and ruthlessly ripping away the past until the future comes crashing down.

When it all comes together, Wendell & Wild ends up feeling liberating, both artistically and thematically, with top work from all involved.

All you need to do is open your mind to its wonders and you may too discover something about yourself along the way.

It is a work of patient yet painful observation that exposes how a community of struggling people can easily turn hateful.

It’s a film with the power to fundamentally rewire your brain as it puts itself in conversation with the ghosts of cinema’s past.

Whatever one takes away from it, the final moment of melancholy it taps into is crossed with the joy of seeing a film free itself by eschewing our expectations to just be. It may leave some feeling adrift as a result, but the truth of its emotional experience would demand nothing less.

Giving life to a horror vision that would not have nearly the same power and potency without her at the forefront of it, Sweeney has never been better than she is here. What a darkly beautiful yet brutal, bloody and bold film this is for her to wield.

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.

Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a joyous blast of a film about sex, desire, and death with a killer yet vulnerable performance by Hannah Einbinder.

As shot by his frequent collaborator, the cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, and cut together by Kogonada himself, Zi blurs the lines between tone poem and hangout movie, letting both merge together to become something unexpectedly moving.

The Zone of Interest is a formally precise yet completely shattering cinematic intervention that emerges as one of the most monumental films ever made.

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.

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.

Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things is a beautiful film that finds splendor in both its characters and their culinary creations.

Cinema as an art form is made infinitely richer via films like Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. As we let it linger in our minds just as the camera does up until one final unbroken shot, you drift somewhere you've never been before and may never be again.

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

Following a failed father and filmmaker attempting to connect with his daughters by turning the former family home into a set, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is a subtle yet sweeping tapestry of art, family and connection that takes the breath away.

It’s the least Charli XCX movie yet, with her disappearing into her role so completely that it's often breathtaking to witness, but it's also the one that marks her arrival as an essential voice.

For all the ways a four-hour experience may seem daunting, every facet of the film is necessary to understand all of this world and the people that populate it.

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

The passion that was brought to creating the perilous and dark world is just so spectacular to take in. If modern superhero films had even one iota of the creativity of this one, they wouldn’t grow so tiresome.

Although “Wake Up Dead Man” is the “Knives Out” movie that’s most preoccupied with existential questions surrounding death, writer/director Rian Johnson’s third film in the series is also the one that’s most full of life.

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.

Better Go Mad in the Wild is transcendent not because of big speeches or underlined ideas, but because of how it lets us sit back and watch two people, both flawed, funny and deeply human, struggle through another day.

Just as credit must be given to Baker for how she so completely captures a moment in time and place, it is Nicholson who inhabits this world so naturally that you feel like you’re just peeking in on Janet’s life.

It’s a scalpel of a film that cuts into how stacked the deck is and how solidarity — or the lack of it — can determine whether you survive unscathed.

Never could the story be described as a series of sketches haphazardly stitched together as many comedies can fall into being. It looks and feels like a drama that is coming apart at the seams as Robinson careens his way through it.

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.

Through it all, Collias is so confident and assured that it feels like this is her fiftieth leading role instead of her first.

It’s not only properly unsettling, making great use of darkness and sound, but also becomes a quietly poetic reflection on loss when you least expect it.

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.

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.

Through it all, Scott gives one of the year’s best performances, creating life in small moments.

One scene cuts right to the next, eschewing a typical progression of shots or exposition to instead just let us observe the little details. It creates an arresting experience that feels as if we are merely witnessing memories fading into each other as Sandra tries to find solace amid her growing sadness.

A magnificent work of minimalism, the film is about these minute moments just as it’s about the most existential parts of life.

Josh is flying solo this time, but Marty Supreme shows he’s capable of achieving a greatness that’s all his own. While brief plot elements weigh the film down, Safide defies gravity even as Marty cannot.

It’s faithful to the book without being overly devout, asking a multitude of deeper, more probing questions while reflecting on the same unsettling and existentialist ones that the book did. By the time it closes with its unexpectedly mournful yet gently searing final frames, reinterpreting and expanding on the enduring source material one final time, it names all that Camus did not.

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.

The film may have begun with a joke on one man, but with the cutthroat world we’re increasingly building for ourselves, it may soon be on all of us.

Glander’s debut has vibes to spare, but he never coasts on them even as Billy coasts around the Florida landscapes. In the end, he delivers a full meal of a film that, like the giant hot dog we see in one shot in the middle, is a mesmerizing work of art worth taking a big bite out of. It will never be to all tastes, but to those who find themselves on its wavelength, it couldn’t be sweeter.

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.

Unabashedly silly, yet effectively sincere, it is a film that grows on you.

Etzler wields the film’s urgent satire like a scalpel, precisely cutting away at all the lies we so easily find ourselves telling that mask the darker truths about who we are.

It all makes for a clever, measured, mirthful, and joyous film with the real potential to be a modern monster movie classic whose legs could easily see it sprinting into being a routine rewatch every single year.

The cruelty at the core of this vivacious vampiric farce is blended up with sharp yet silly gallows humor, ensuring the grim absurdities Larraín gracefully teases out increasingly take flight even as he continually drags us into gruesome and gory depths.

It is via a willingness to push beyond the headlines and discover something more about humanity that 2nd Chance reveals a deeper sense of the truth behind its scandalous story.

Splitsville goes off the rails in increasingly entertaining fashion, with every single part offering something new and unpredictable. It’s a film of well-crafted jokes that are based in character and a willingness to more than go for broke when needed.

Whether you can stomach it enough to make it all the way will depend on the viewer, but Talk To Me has plenty that promises to capture the souls of horror sickos looking for a sinister spectacle.

Throughout all of it, Ebrahimi gives a performance that, even in immense isolation, tells a whole story on its own and leaves a lingering impression long after the film itself comes to a close.

What makes The Stranger work is how this all creates an experience that feels as though the two men have become almost doomed to a life where they will aimlessly wander in what feels like an Australian purgatory. Whether they ever manage to escape and uncover some sort of closure is irrelevant to the growing rot that threatens to consume their souls no matter what they do.

There is a wonderfully withering sense of humor in how American Fiction explores this as all of the conversations Monk begins to have around the book he wrote as a joke sees it spiraling out of his control.

After the Bite could initially be mistaken for just another part of a trajectory of movies that has become defined by this trend-chasing rather than something more. However, if you begin to look closer, you’ll discover a measured reflection on our relationship to both the predator of the deep and the habitat that has come under threat.

When it all comes together it proves to be yet another poetic and patient cinematic reflection on the families we build for ourselves from one of the best observers of humanity to ever do it.

It is a character study that creeps up on you, deploying well-timed darker comedic moments that set up the cutting dramatic ones all the better. There is no pretentiousness or ego to either of the stunning performances, ensuring we are hit with the maximum impact of a maniacal masterclass of acting from Abbott and Qualley.

It’s a film where every detail of the craft is worth taking in even when the story starts to lose steam a bit towards the end.

Though it works better in its individual moments, there is still something stunning about how it will frequently submerge us in a more subtle and sinister sense of looming dread that soon becomes emotionally shattering.

A descent into darkness that will swallow you whole, In My Mother’s Skin is a beautiful and brutal work of historical horror with visuals that will echo through your mind.

Polite Society proves to be a triumphant action comedy with wonderful characters you only wish you could get to know even more.

Some well-timed edits maximize the impact of the jokes and help leave necessary horror elements up to the imagination. Even when we don’t see everything, our minds fill in the gaps to make the gore and gags that befall Wes land.

Godzilla Minus One more than carves out its place among the best entries of this long-running series.

It is the vibrancy to the presentation that remains the standout though the performances are also good fun.

Even as there are some moments where it can fall into feeling like a greatest hits recap of the group that dances along the surface of the story, the more complicated reflections it offers on their lives and music cuts quite a bit deeper when it counts.

The grim absurdity of it goes hand in hand with the horror, making the escalations and chaos properly fun.

There are many aspects to her legacy as a writer, but what makes Judy Blume Forever such a valuable documentary is that it reveals the person underneath her work that made it all come alive.