Chase Hutchinson

A frequently stunning work of animation that’s also a haunting portrait of isolation, the destructive insidiousness of bullying and our own capacity for cruelty, Kohei Kadowaki’s formidable feature debut “We Are Aliens” is a film of fascinating layers.

Playing like an extended fever dream defined by shallow snapshots of memories, incessant narration by Travolta himself, a gallery of cartoonish, one-note characters, and a poisonous, perfunctory sense of nostalgia, it’s a disaster that leaves no survivors.

Yet for all the sadness at the core of its story, “Clarissa” is captivating in how honestly and openly it confronts that emotion.

It writes what can feel like the equivalent of a hate letter to the movies (or at least the potential for abuse that can come from how they’re made) before eventually coming to his own halting emotional upswing about the enduring power they still hold.

Much like the central sculptures that become the focal point of its best scenes, Kôji Fukada’s “Nagi Notes” is a film defined by a sense that the filmmaker is trying to chip away at something.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It makes for an entertaining watch in which the attention to detail in every technical element helps smooth over the scattered and superficial story’s many residual shortcomings.

Heimann is so focused on the spectacle of it all that he forgets to do anything with it emotionally or formally, dragging everything to a close, as we return back to the beginning with little of anything meaningful or engaging occurring over the film’s running time.

In the end, “Rhythm Is A Dancer” remains a classic banger, but Pretty Lethal never finds any remotely memorable rhythms of its own.

They Will Kill You is a modern action gem with a knockout leading performance by Zazie Beetz, who more than cements her status as a star of the genre we ought to see more of.

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.

It seems like Over Your Dead Body is caught between deconstructing itself and just going through the motions.

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.

Even with some perfectly fine comedic gags, Power Ballad can never overcome the emptiness of its characters and the equally flat, overlit visuals that make the entire thing look more like a bad TV episode than an actual film.

All you’re left with is the echo of what was better before. You watch only able to wish Weaving was given more to work with than this, or, at the very least, greater room for her iconic scream to rattle you once more.

Riley, proving himself to be a romantic just as he is a believer in revolution, clearly not only loves these boosters with hearts of gold, but anyone that is trying to make it all work for themselves and those around them.

While neither Tommy nor the film itself was ever likely to be immortal, the closing frames prove to be a fitting sendoff for him as well as his long, sad saga. For what could very well be the last time, he and Murphy burn bright.

In the Blink of an Eye is a disaster of its own making, living in the shadow of far better sci-fi films of old, and never doing anything interesting with any of the ideas it throws out.

Critically, the film’s many revelations aren’t neat and tidy, but they are revealing in all the ways that matter.

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

This film, though not formally revolutionary, is the type of defining, delicate portrait that moves beyond the often tiresome trend of music documentaries that simply shower praise on their subjects.

Credit where credit is due to Wicker, it’s not every day you get to see an Oscar-winning actress mount a Hollywood heartthrob made into a literal wicker man. Alas, despite the novelty of seeing icon Olivia Colman climb a towering Alexander Skarsgård like a tree, the magical fable within which this happens is not only regrettably far less fun than this description sounds, but an oddly wearisome affair.

Throughout it all, Hawke is mesmerizing. The action scenes are tense and well-executed, though it’s the way he grounds it that makes you feel every setback.

There is a tension that comes from the humor clashing with the tragedy, but it’s a worthwhile one. Life is full of sudden loss and then also ridiculously funny moments. Capturing that authentically is no small feat, but Duplass does so with delicate care.

Though there are flashes of more chaotic comedy that get the pulse racing here and there, for the most part Chasing Summer is a surprisingly safe genre riff.