Chase Hutchinson

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.

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.

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.

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.

Like the shadows dancing on their home, the film is overwhelmingly beautiful and agonizingly incomplete, a refraction of a refraction of a time that has now long since passed. It’s a work of rich layers that offers something new each time you watch.

It’s a compassionately constructed film — it never looks away from the agony before us, and the subject is of the utmost importance.

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.

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.

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

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.

Anora is Sean Baker's most searing and shattering film yet with a breakout performance from Mikey Madison.

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.

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.

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

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.

This is a dynamic, delightful film and the introduction of an exciting, uncompromising new voice.

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.

While Magellan is still a haunting vision, the ghosts of a more impactful film you remember most are also the ones that can feel pushed to the margins of the frame.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

Robot Dreams is a beautifully animated look at life, friendship, and what it means to grow apart.

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.

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.

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

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.