Clint Worthington

McQueen’s focus is on the community, not the individual; his focus is on the party as a whole and the optimism and community it engenders. Films about the unabashed celebration of Black joy and success are few and far between, which makes Lovers Rock all the more remarkable.

The glory of Hittman’s film is in finding those moments of beauty among the brutal silences, and the magnetic grace that can be found in a person’s most difficult days.

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.

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.

It’s undoubtedly one of the best films of the year, and of Anderson’s career.

Mangrove elevates the oft-creaky genre of the courtroom drama with striking, evocative compositions, stunning performances, and a real sense of place.

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.

Wang, along with her stellar cast, manages to deftly weave droll, observational family comedy with deeply resonant examinations of the role of family and culture in our lives. It’s naturalistic without feeling downbeat, farcical without being goofy, and treats its cultural signposts with a sensitivity and honesty few filmmakers can achieve.

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.

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.

Education is a tinier, more intimate button on McQueen’s set of stories, but it’s one of its most potent: the simple act of learning is powerful actualization, so proven in the white establishment’s efforts to make it so inaccessible to Black people.

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 master class in discomfort.

There’s just more under the hood than your typical imitators: the antic disposition of the idle rich, the way infinite money can absolve the rich of any accountability, and the ever-predatory nature of colonial tourism. Wrap it up in a package this wild, shocking, and perverse, and it makes for a delightful bloody mess that you’ll want to go back to.

David Lowery deconstructs the hero's journey with this sumptuous dark fantasy.

The Rider is nothing short of a masterpiece, an elegant work of cinematic poetry that elevates the everyday struggles of real people to the level of high art.

More than a concert doc and less than an artist profile, Oasis Knebworth 1996 hits that sweet spot of giving misty-eyed Oasis fans what they want: A glimmering look back at one pleasant weekend and the life-changing music that defined it.

Park comes through with his typically vibrant, inventive command of tone and camera. Virtually every composition and camera movement from DP Kim Ji-yong is gasp-inducing, aided by some truly exciting blocking from Park.

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.

Tonally, McQueen and co-writer Courttia Newland’s screenplay flits capably between character study, issue film, and cop drama so seamlessly you’ll barely notice it’s changed gears, and at eighty minutes there’s not an ounce of fat on it.

Despite its frustrating flaws, In the Heights ultimately succeeds in its aim to craft a big, rousing, blockbuster musical meant to escort us handsomely into summer.

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.

The most important thing is that it’s funny and charming in all the right ways, a slight but sweet meditation on the viability of long-term relationships.

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.

With its painterly, brutal beauty and folk-horror underpinnings, it’s tempting to dismiss Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone as “Terrence Malick’s The VVitch.” But it’s so much more than that, a devastating yet highly-attuned exploration of the brutality of the world, and our yearning for identity and connection to protect us from nature’s capriciousness.

It’s a brave, uncompromising debut.

Nuts! manages to create a fascinating, thrilling portrait of the weirdness of industrial-age America that’s as side-splitting as it is deeply haunting.

Sarnoski’s debut is a scintillating tone poem about the inextricable links between love, creativity, and commerce, and what happens when the latter encroaches too much upon the former.