Chase Hutchinson

It is one worth putting on your radar even as it magnificently goes all over the map into the cosmos the longer you get lost in it.

Skin Deep is the type of quietly ambitious film that never forgets about the personal while immersing us in vast ideas about the underpinnings of identity itself. It is a poetic and profound gem of an experience you wouldn't dare swap for anything else.

It is almost like a novel in how expansive it is, providing a sense of scope that can frequently leave this story feeling scattered. As the city is in a constant state of change, the lives of the characters are similarly in flux as their already pressing problems only become more and more dire.

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.

Where a lesser film could fall into feeling like it is just hitting issues without exploring them, Young Mothers always grounds the bigger issues in real characters. It finds genuine emotion in capturing how this is not something abstract, but a reality with which they’ll have to contend.

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

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

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

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.

The Settlers' is a beautiful yet brutal look at historical violence and the lasting impact it has on all who come into contact with it.

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

It takes a group that bumped up against the boundaries and instead just operates within them.

It’s this generation’s answer to “Cry-Baby” and also distinctly Early.

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

The characters may cut into the cinematic canvas with a knife, smother it with glue, and just generally wreck it, but they can’t destroy what Soderbergh has achieved.

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.

Daniela Forever is afraid to ever dream big, leaving nothing more than a banal nightmare.

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.

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

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

It’s the exact type of film that you could see a new generation of kids finding and causing them to fall in love with movies.

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.

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.

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.

Actors turning to directing is nothing new, but it’s unlikely you’ve seen a performer’s directorial debut as boldly confident and emotionally precise as Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water.

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 is an experience built around surprise revelations and plunging into the unknown. What is found there is not nearly as impactful as the actual journey itself, making for a mixed bag of horror and humor that rises above its lesser parts enough to hold together.

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