Chase Hutchinson

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.

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.

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.

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.

It gradually starts to shift into something more comprehensively striking and somber the longer you sit with 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.

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

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.

Every detail, be they the mirthful jokes or the melancholic meditations it taps into, comes together to create a vision that’s existentially resonant. It proves Boonbunchachoke is not just an exciting new voice who pays respect to the ghosts of cinema’s past, but one who finds distinct beauty as he brings them all to joyous life.

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.

The result is a film that leaves a distinct impression, molding deeply personal elements and sweepingly profound ideas into something spectacular that sneaks up on you.

It’s a film whose magnificence sneaks up on you, delighting in plenty of clever silliness before hitting you with a succession of somber scenes that lay you flat.

If a film like this were to have anything less than perfection from its leads, it would likely fall to pieces. Thankfully, the story comes to life in the hands of two veteran performers at their very best.

Chiarella’s film is small in scope but shattering in emotional range, slowly burrowing under your skin. Once it makes its home there, there is no shaking free of its haunting, heartbreaking and surprisingly harmonious vision.

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.

There are many promising pieces here and some great performances, though little in the way of actual meaningful insights.

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

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.

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.

What makes Provaznik’s film most effective, beyond just the care it shows to its young characters and the way it keeps their humanity at the forefront, is the fact that its story, no matter how disquieting it gets, is also frighteningly ordinary.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Though an extension of the same tone that was experienced in his HBO series, this feature is more than just one very long episode of his show. Instead, it’s like Wilson has fully become a funnier, more frenetic version of Frederick Wiseman.

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

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