Clint Worthington

Structural quibbles aside, “Nuestra Tierra” is a powerful work of reclamation and advocacy for native peoples who have long been disenfranchised and dehumanized by systemic forces in colonial Argentina.

It’s a film whose tranquility and humility sometimes work against it, even in those moments where it overcorrects with didacticism.

As is, “Bunnylovr” feels like a stone skipped across the surface of a pond; we could go deeper, but instead we choose to skim the surface. It’s a glossy, moody surface, mind, but surface nonetheless.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie moves through you so briskly that you’ll get whiplash by the time the film reaches its deeply abrupt ending. But maybe that’s the point—after all, this is not a movie to be scrutinized, but to allow beleaguered elder millennial dads to sit their tots down for a precious two hours (if you count the trailers) and get some much-needed rest. It’s cute, and breezy, and rock-stupid, and will probably make a billion dollars again.

As much as Lilly’s work feels like, and probably is, quack science, the appeal of his ideas becomes clear in his cultural footprint. That’s the hypothesis “Earth Coincidence” spends its time proving.

Miroirs No. 3 feels positively Hitchcockian, a recurring preoccupation of Petzold’s oeuvre; shades of “Vertigo” abound as characters attempt to replace what’s missing in their lives with doppelgangers willing to fill that role.

It’s a testament to .Paak’s own journey, and the seemingly healthy relationship with both this genre of music and his child, that this movie eschews so many of those struggle-bus tropes. I just wish it translated to something with a bit more oomph, rather than another blandly sincere family film.

It’s movies like these that prove that cinema still has the capacity to surprise, even in criminally goofy comedies like this.

Jimpa is a story that feels like it’s arrived about a decade too late for its intended audience: Queer people want more from their rep than being anthropologically observed from the sidelines, and straight people have watched enough “Drag Race” to already be familiar with the concepts this film treats as novel.

The Love That Remains plays out with remarkable intuition and sensitivity about its troubled characters, ones who try to love and reckon with hard feelings when those endeavors don’t work out, and you have to sift through the rubble to find meaning.

It’s tempting to knock Primate for its dumb characters and contrived plotting, and for the various hoops it throws its characters through to get to the goods. And make no mistake, this script and its inhabitants are rock stupid, to the point where you might want to yell warnings at the screen. It’s an instinct that, frankly, I don’t get; don’t you want these people to get killed off in increasingly grotty ways?

The Plague isn’t a horror movie per se, but it moves with the mood and music of one.

At the end of the day, “Atropia” feels like Gates gesturing vaguely at a few really interesting notions about the military-entertainment complex, and how it can bleed through into the people waging the actual war.

At its heart, it’s an assured tale of queer resistance, blended with the supernatural rhythms of the folktale, and it feels suitably transgressive for its gender-nonconforming characters. It’s sweet, and affirming, and hopefully opens a few people’s eyes (and hearts).

An intriguing doc that juggles ’90s nostalgia with an optimism for student journalism that avoids over-sentimentality.

The evil that men do, a character says near the end, “tethers us to proof of the divine.” That Crowley packages these ideas in such a bleak, bloody curiosity as this is something to celebrate.

Roper, who came up directing music videos, shapes a post-heist getaway between four unscrupulous criminals, all strangers until they get to know each other far too well, with surprising style and panache. It’s a shame, then, that all that table-setting (and a quartet of riveting performances) gives way to agonizingly cheap turns by the end.

The concept, in classic King fashion, is simple but alluring, and designed to explore the kind of adolescent male bonding the author honed in works like Stand by Me and IT.

While there’s a lot to like about “Everything to Me” (Abigail Donaghy’s performance, in particular), Lacob’s heart-on-sleeve script and uncertain direction often leave the whole thing feeling a bit scattered.

As the film progresses, Russell’s grasp of the subtle can sometimes get away from him; while “Lurker” doesn’t lapse fully into violent thriller territory, the stakes of each one of Matthew’s calculations grow larger and larger to the point where the script sometimes gets away from the filmmaker’s otherwise impeccable sense of control.

In fits and spurts, it casts quite the campy, thrilling spell.

A tight, restrained, worthwhile first feature from a cast and crew whose next jaunt into the woods will surely worth sharpening our teeth for.

It’s frustrating, then, to see such high-concept potential, some decent production design, and a couple of game leads fall victim to a mystery that unfolds with thudding obviousness.

There’s nothing in “Ice Road: Vengeance” that isn’t in any given Redbox/Saban Films Neeson actioner you’ve seen in the last dozen years, and you’ll at least get to the good stuff quicker there.

What Trachtenberg seems to get about the Predator franchise, between “Prey” and this, is that the central appeal of the Predator is conceptual: How would we fare, we at the top of the food chain, if placed in competition with a hunter far more well-equipped than we?

Problem is, this doesn’t reinvent the formula as much as follows it by rote, which makes it an enormous step down.

Hurry Up Tomorrow takes its star’s caterwauling about how hard it is to be famous and heartbroken for granted, and expects its audience to roll with every self-inflicted wound. It’s vapid, meandering, and insistent on its own profundity as a tale of an artist reckoning with fame.

The sitcommy scenes of family arguments and droll wisecracks clash with the grimmer aesthetic Carnahan wants to give it, so “Shadow Force” feels like an action film serving two masters and fulfilling neither’s needs. It’s laughable, all right, but in all the wrong ways.

If Robinson’s style of humor puts you off already, rest assured that Friendship doesn’t break his existing comic bold. But for those shirt brothers in the Tim Robinson cult already, the Dan Flashes buyers and zipline pullers among us, Friendship offers next-level cringe packaged in something far more Kaufmanesque than his usual fare.

It’s a mid-budget riff on “Bullet Train,” after all—but meet it on its altitude, and it’s a bloody, funny good time.

Párvulos remains a largely successful, if sometimes too idiosyncratic, take on the zombie story. The creature prosthetics remain grisly fun, and even among the washed-out cinematography, the blood thrums with crimson terror in one gory sequence after another.

It may not be quite as entertaining as the last time Weaving ended up in a murderous melee after a wedding ceremony. But there’s a least a few bits and bobs to keep “Borderline” from borderline failing.

This is a warmed-over remix of crime comedy and thriller tropes, as awkwardly paced as it is murkily shot.

I can’t decide whether it’s the relative disposability of the narrative, the unremarkable animation, or the fact that this just feels like another spoonful of content thrown into Netflix’s trough, but “Sirens of the Deep” reads like so many empty calories.

As it sits in this passenger’s estimation, “Flight Risk” is a supremely bumpy ride that doesn’t quite justify its logline.

Harris, as always, imbues his characters with a wearied conviction, which goes a long way towards making Stan feel a bit more layered than the feel-good Ned Flanders type the script saddles him with.

Star Trek fans have been waiting nearly a decade to see a proper film in the franchise since 2016’s sorely underappreciated Kelvinverse entry “Star Trek Beyond.” “Section 31,” a cynical whimper of a Trek adventure, isn’t likely to scratch that itch.

Oftentimes, that didacticism gets in the way of the picture’s aims, with clunky metaphors and treacly microbudget indie quirks. But a couple of scenes, and some strong performances, make it ultimately worth the sit.

You won’t see another music biopic quite like “Better Man,” regardless of your level of familiarity with its subject. There’s a surfeit of charm here that helps sell the nonsensical gimmick.

The personal doc can often feel stifling and self-congratulatory; Tavel makes it feel personal and disarming, an earnest and sincere attempt to understand herself through the father she never got to know, and the big, plastic box of wires that might bring him closer, even if just a little bit.

If you’re a Herzog diehard, “Theater of Thought” offers plenty of new material to chew on, just as ol’ Werner does his consonants. But for most, the questions regarding the nature of reality and the ways our brain interprets it may not be the most insightful, save for how it affects Herzog’s understanding of his artistry.

Y2K doesn't want to break stuff; it wants to dig it out of the trash and pine nostalgically for it. That's just not as interesting.

In Hong's movies, conversations are battles, and words are weapons used to strike down the neuroses of even the gentlest of combatants. "Traveler's" is no different a battlefield.

Grief and loss can take hold of your soul, not unlike a possession; what Clapin explores here is the temptation of reconnection, and what that oft-impossible yearning can do to a person.

There’s a lot unexplored about fandom, queerness, and the ’90s indie movie scene in “Chasing Chasing Amy,” focused as it is on one filmmaker’s adoration of the subject at hand. But what’s left out of “Chasing”—and what the filmmaker decides to do, or not do, when faced with moments of clarity—can inform our own relationships with the art we love.

For all its comparative lack of insight, there’s something intriguing about the ride, due chiefly to a pair of fascinating lead performances and a fatalistic sense of humor.

It won’t exactly hold you under its spell, but it might charm just enough for the sparse 90 minutes of attention it requests.

The Featherweight elevates its been-there story of middle-aged guys chasing their glory days with some smart, unexpected performances and a genuinely intriguing aesthetic frame. It might not deliver a total knock-out punch, but it gets a few good blows in before the bell rings.

As the saying goes, inside of me are two wolves: one wishes “Out Come the Wolves” dared to explore the wounded masculinity and murderous love triangle of its first half, while the other wonders if that’d be any better or more interesting than the bone-cracking, arrow-shooting carnage of its second.

Schwartzman's approach is sluggish and poorly-paced, the film color-corrected to within an inch of its life and unable to balance the delicate tightrope act of comedy and drama that good examples of this kind of movie can attempt.

Romulus feel torn between Alvarez’s desire to tell a new story in the Alien universe and 20th Century Studios’ desire for a fan-servicey thrill ride.The frustrating thing about it is that, moment to moment, it very much works.

At 90 minutes, one could hardly fault "Doctor Jekyll" for being languorous. But it's often too patient for its own good, content to slow-roll its inevitable outcome without giving us much to chew on besides Izzard and some cornflakes.

It's your standard warm, fuzzy tale of Christian love that plays to the church set in ways that are hardly objectionable, even as it plays those notes straight down the middle with little finesse.

MaXXXine can’t decide whether to be a showbiz parody or a giallo sendup or a cute ’80s throwback, and it stumbles when it tries to be all of the above.

With "Confessions of a Good Samaritan," Lane is in her most confessional mode yet, finally turning the camera fully on herself.

As these things go, two out of three ain’t bad, and it’s nice to see Lanthimos back in the saddle as one of our foremost mainstream explorers of abuse and malaise.

"In a Violent Nature" is soaked in as much atmosphere as it is blood and viscera, an inventively cozy approach from an exciting new filmmaker.

The doc struggles to land on whether MoviePass was a predetermined failure or something that was failed, and the lack of participation in many of the key players for the latter hurts its ability to probe deeper.

IF is a well-intentioned misfire—a kid's movie without laughs and a parent's movie without purpose.

Garland boldly asks us to take a step back, to forget about notions of who is right and who is wrong and simply focus on the horrors of what might happen if this happened at all. If you surrender to its abstractions, it proves a disquieting, terrifying watch.

It’s a film about outsiders, made by outsiders, that feels like outsider art, which is maybe the most exciting thing about it.

Lousy Carter, at its best, feels like a cruel joke on its own protagonist, the kind of guy so convinced of his own genius he doesn’t want to mess it up by actually putting himself out there.

At the ripe age of ninety, Shatner remains as alive as ever—his eyes wild with curiosity and humor, his honeyed voice barely worn down by years of voiceover and soliloquy. But he remains deeply aware of his own numbered days, which makes “You Can Call Me Bill” feel like something of a self-administered cinematic eulogy.

It’s frothy and insubstantial, but at least takes its central idea — life’s too short, start a polycule — seriously enough to be charming.

Rich Peppiatt’s feature debut spins the freewheeling cinematic language of Edgar Wright and Guy Ritchie into a fun, heartwarming, and suitably raunchy celebration of the Irish language.

Eclectic and unconventional in its presentation, Soundtrack’s density can throw you for a loop, especially if you don’t know the first thing about the geopolitics of the time and place. But it proves a healthy primer on the skeptical eye we should take towards world powers, and how even the art that’s meant to free us can be used against us.

It’s a brave, uncompromising debut.

Its essential components touch on the valuable insight that the white imagination often can’t wrap its head around what Black music is actually saying, and the ways it says it.

Amid Hammel’s acid-tongued approach and jaundiced eye, there’s a lot of intriguing potential; after all, cinema that imperfectly confronts is oftentimes more interesting than comfortable competence.

Donaldson has a tremendous command of pace and silence, laying the desperation of middle age (and how it looks to those whose lives are still ahead of them) bare with little more than a gesture or a closeup. It’s a killer debut for both her and Collias, and it will be exciting to see what both can do with the momentum a picture like this can provide.

It’s a little too “Garden State” in places, but Johnson smartly puts a grim enough layer on their dynamic to avoid turning the whole thing into a treacly rom-com.

Just don’t expect it to rewrite the genre playbook.

In its current shape, Rebel Moon isn’t just boring; it feels hopelessly compromised.

Wrestling, at its best, is a mythic art, an extension of the traditions of ancient Greece — with all the grand pageantry and theater that turns mere mortals into titans. Durkin knows this, and uses all that bigness to startling effect, transforming the tragedy of an American family into a bittersweet legend.

Besides the gags, there’s little to grasp onto, and try as it might to echo Barry Lyndon’s naturally-lit tableaus, Scott’s film lacks that film’s acid-dry wit.

It’s steamy and transgressive in a straightforward way, an in-your-face bacchanal of sex and violence of the kind Fennell so delights in depicting. But as the film barrels toward its bonkers but highly predictable twist, the shine on Saltburn begins to fade.

If someone decides they don’t like you, there’s nothing you can do about it. If enough people share that opinion, they can absolutely destroy you. Combine that with an always-fantastic Cage, thoughtful and buffoonish in every gesture and tic, and it makes for a delightfully mixed bag.

One wonders whether Fincher sees something of himself in The Killer — a man obsessed with process and precision, constantly tamping down the emotionality that he fears might violate the perfectionism he’s sought his whole career. In this way, it’s a perfect match of director to material, with a phalanx of great artists at the height of their powers aiding him in that mission.

Even amid its flaws — Scorsese’s sprawling focus leaving some characters in the dust, most of them the very indigenous Americans this film purports to speak for — Killers of the Flower Moon remains a staggering work of cinema.

The director of Dogtooth and The Lobster has been gradually making his way towards something this vivid and vibrant his whole career, inching toward his audience with one absurdist feature after another.

It’s a master class in discomfort.

It’s difficult to overstate how badly Foe fumbles its heady premise and firecracker cast, a film so dependent on its biggest secret that it’s both predictable and hard to grasp by the time the trigger is finally pulled.

If this film is Miyazaki’s true bow, it’s a magnificent final flourish that folds together many of the thematic and aesthetic threads he’s explored through his career: man’s relationship to nature, the majesty of flight, the twin pulls of love and loss. It’s stunning and inscrutable and measures among the best of his works.

As pretty as The Creator looks, and however well-considered its world may be, it feels like all sizzle and no steak. AI is an extremely prevalent issue facing us in the real world, but Edwards seems disinterested in exploring beyond its aesthetic surface (e.g. borrowing real people’s voices and likenesses in perpetuity) in favor of a warmed-over critique of American imperialism in the global East.

As a primer for one of the funniest, most emotionally satisfying thumbs in the eye to the super-rich in recent memory, Dumb Money is a pretty good time. That said, it leaves out crucial details and has little time to dig deeper into its cast of characters, making it feel like a cardboard glimpse into a complicated blip in the rigged game of American finance.

Like the superhero stories of the ’90s and 2000s that clearly inspired it, Blue Beetle feels like the scrappy origin story we need to get through in order to explore better things in the more exciting sequel. Hopefully, Gunn and Safran see fit to keep Jaime Reyes around for their version of the DCEU, and toy with the true potential of its hero.

Admittedly, big stretches of Demeter are a bit overwritten and unnecessary; there’s no real need for a film like this to exist, especially considering we know how it’ll all turn out. But as long as it’s here, it might as well be celebrated for what it is: lean, effective nautical horror of a type we don’t often get anymore. Seaside scares are a rare thing these days, especially when Øvredal packs this much atmosphere and characterization into such a wafer-thin premise.

I still don’t know whether all (or even most) of Asteroid City’s ideas coalesce, so scattershot is the film’s pacing and plotting. But from moment to moment, it charms and moves in ways only Anderson can deliver.

Cronin gets that the Evil Dead franchise doesn’t have to be limited to one wisecracking, lantern-jawed battle with the forces of darkness; the Book of the Dead, and its ability to turn those you love against you, is enough to hang a film on if you do it right.

It’s a huge, huge swing, and Aster skeptics will likely scoff at the egotism of it all. But for those of us who’ve been at the receiving end of a classic Jewish-mother guilt trip, Beau is Afraid will serve as affirmation, cinematic therapy, and the most relatably terrifying thing they’ve ever seen.

Fury of the Gods tries to recapture what made the first Shazam! a disarming breath of fresh air, but it just can’t quite do it.

If Sam Raimi were in the director’s chair, rather than just producing, imagine the kind of fist-pumping schlock feast we could have enjoyed.

It’s well-paced, the kills are inventive, and the gags largely land, especially for hardcore Scream devotees. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett finally have a lock on the amped-up Scooby-Doo mystery tone of Craven’s era, and that’s a blessing.

There’s something particularly galling about the laziness of this one — its flimsy gestures toward topicality, the piecemeal nature of the whole thing — that makes its failures acutely horrifying.

Operation Fortune is a spy “comedy” insofar as it generally shrugs in the direction of parody: its characters presume the air of cheeky sendup without actually committing to it, whether it’s Statham’s grumpy skull-cracker or Plaza’s confused deadpan.

It all gets a bit too loosey-goosey by its repetitive, redundant climax — there just aren’t enough good jokes left to cover for the fact that, yes, we get it, the bear did cocaine.

It’s not up there with [Shyamalan's] best, but it’s a solid thriller that traps you in the middle of an impossible question and leaves you, like its characters, to figure out the answer.

You Hurt My Feelings is a quirky, incisive study of ego death, of what happens when you learn you’re not the hot shit you thought you were and have to recalibrate accordingly.