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.