David Ehrlich

A singular, hypnotic, and formally unbound psychodrama that’s staged between a Lady Gaga-like diva (Anne Hathaway) and the only person who might be able to quiet her demons (Michaela Coel), this talky chamberpiece of a film is almost entirely confined to an unheated barn somewhere outside of London, and yet it grows to feel as vast as the synaptic gap that stretches between literalness and metaphor. A wound and its memory. A pop song and the person who wrote it.

Here is a smart, fun, and deeply unsettling post-modern slasher that know it can’t manufacture anything scarier than what people scroll past on their phones every day, and leverages that awareness into a multiplex-ready meditation on the terror of living in a world where even the worst atrocities have been flattened into digital wallpaper.

If The Drama is effectively a one-gag movie, there’s no denying that its gag is a good one, or that Borgli — a hyper-online shit-stirrer whose salable provocations, combined with his sometimes not so salable ones, continue to position him as an A24-friendly Lars von Trier — milks it for all that it’s worth. Possibly more.

An ultra-immersive portrait of grief, acceptance, and the role that hope can play in delaying them both.

A schematic but sensitive prison drama about a maximum-security lifer who begins to care for an older inmate suffering from early-onset dementia, Petra Volpe’s Frank & Louis soberly interrogates what it really means to “serve time.”

The most striking moments that Ataei and Keshavarz create here are the ones in which their characters are forced to negotiate between self-expression and self-preservation rather than choose between them.

The director shoots the place with a Haneke-like remove that makes every member, caddie, and Chinese tourist feel like they’re conspiring to bury an awful secret of some kind.

“The Oldest Person in the World” remains an affecting watch — and potentially the first installment of a worthwhile series — because of how vulnerably Green interrogates why he cares so much about the subject at hand.

The nuance and specificity that makes the film so interesting is also why it requires a decent knowledge base to appreciate — this is about as far from an introduction to the Harlem Renaissance as you’ll find.

Despite an occasional tendency to speed through its most compelling passages and flatten their mottled texture under the weight of Simon Russell’s emotionally instructive score, “One in a Million” is still a raw and absorbing epic about “what comes after” — one that naturally unfolds with all the joy, anguish, and unresolvable inner conflict of life itself.

If you’re hooked, which I wasn’t, or haunted by it, which I was, that will likely have less to do with an acute emotional connection to these characters than with the overflowing rewards of watching someone rediscover the sound of their own voice, and hear a way forward into the future in its echoes.

A Gregg Araki movie will never be boring, and this one is a good time even when it’s tripping over itself to complicate its story and disguise the fact that it’s trying to serve as a teachable moment.

Between meaning and mayhem. This meandering but laser-focused essay film is, like the best episodes of Wilson’s show, sustained by parallel dramatic questions that inevitably answer each other by the end.

But the most important reason why The Rip is a slight cut above the average streaming fare is the lived-in history that Affleck and Damon bring to their characters’ dynamic.

A strange, hysterical, and thrillingly audacious continuation of a saga about the nature of faith in a godless world, “The Bone Temple” might appear to be a more traditional genre offering than its immediate predecessor, but don’t be fooled by the fact that it wasn’t shot on an iPhone: This is very much the part two that 2025’s smartest and most humane studio horror movie deserves.

I know that Cameron has committed himself to another two sequels, and now I know why he’s starting to hedge about whether or not he wants to direct them himself; even the most orgiastic moments in “Fire and Ash” left me feeling like he’s ready to come back down to Earth.

The result is a roman candle of a movie that feels like it was shot out of a cannon, despite being burdened with the gravity of an implausible dream; a totemic Jewish-American odyssey about where such dreams come from, where they might lead to, and where they’re liable to come apart at the seams along the way.

In a crumbling empire where common sense has been eroded by ideology, and the political will to solve a problem can’t hope to compete with the ghoulish impulse to profit from it, creating a new business sector might just be the only kind of healing that the richest country on Earth can afford.

Angus Wall’s super watchable Being Eddie is among the more convincing films of its kind, because instead — or by way — of trying to show us who the real Eddie Murphy is, it commits itself to arguing that Murphy has always known.

Its ending might cop out of the novel’s most ghoulishly prescient detail, but that isn’t enough to completely neuter the rare Hollywood product that dares to stoke our anger rather than mollify it — that reminds us that our rage is a valuable resource worth a lot more than money, and one that we can’t afford to waste on each other.

The genius of the franchise-reviving “Prey” and last summer’s utterly awesome “Killer of Killers” is that they both cast the Yautja as a foil first and an antagonist second. Now, the super fun and fantastically spirited “Predator: Badlands” takes that approach to its logical conclusion by making one of these creatures the hero of a story in which he gets deprogrammed of his culture’s “The Most Dangerous Game”-inspired approach to other species.

Complicated enough to lose a casual viewer but never so convoluted that André and co. are sublimated into the system around them (which would have been fatal for a film so attuned to the relationship between personal interest and collective perception), Bonitzer’s plot spins forward at the speed of an auctioneer’s mouth until raw suspense becomes appropriately inextricable from meaningless gibberish.

Its brevity allows it to maintain that delicate balance between joy and grief — discovery and heartache — from start to finish, and to use the sweet cocoon of childhood as a way of crystallizing how that dynamic grows with us as we get older.

Life and art will always be more tightly entwined for Stiller than he knows how to untangle; that he’s at least learned to become aware of that is perhaps as touching and honest a tribute as he ever could have paid to his parents’ legacy.

Even the most formulaic scenes in the film bop with the zest of history being lived first-hand, as if the script were happily oblivious to its own clichés, and while the filmmaking itself falls well short of creating the chaos that it aspires to celebrate, Fluk at least taps into the fun of telling us about it.

Every scene is relaxedly suffused with the tension between the limits of perspective and the empathy of storytelling, until the act of seeing becomes as problematized as the refusal to look, and the boundaries between reality and fiction grow as blurred as those between the various genres that Gavagai swirls into an unclassifiable sludge.

While this isn’t quite the stuff of vintage Black, it’s close enough that I wouldn’t mind seeing him crank another one out every two years for the next decade.

The action is taut, the stakes are clear, and Kirk never misses a chance to remind us that all of these are just regular people who’ve crossed paths in a dark place.

One Battle After Another might be among the sillier films that Anderson has ever made, but there’s no mistaking the sincerity of its horrors, or how lucidly it diagnoses the smallness of the men inflecting them upon the innocent and the vulnerable.

A propulsive (and hilarious) comedy that gradually melts into a dreamlike (and not so hilarious) modern fable, this hyper-stylized whatsit might be at its best when shooting fish in a barrel, but Gavras’ film is much less interested in poking fun at easy targets than it is in leveraging its characters — terrorist and hostage alike — towards unformed ideas about truth, performance, and the cleansing power of death in the face of a society so ego-driven that it’s impossible to tell the difference between heroes and clowns.

Hypnotic from start to finish and unexpectedly hopeful for a movie with so much arsenic in its blood, Islands knows that even the greatest of vacations can never compete with the rewards of fostering a reality you actually want to return to when it’s over.

Real or fake, finished or not, a genre exercise or a full-hearted statement of purpose, the things we create have an impact on the world that no market could ever be able to measure. And, for better or worse, the same is true of the people who are brave enough to create them.

That Bad Apples is so much fun to hem and haw about is a testament to Ronan’s typically excellent performance, which showcases both her low-key comic charm and also her pronounced talent for ambivalence.

This is a nice movie: the kind that’s lit brighter than a dentist’s office, scored by the lead singer of Sigur Rós (along with Alex Somers), and aimed towards a heart-stirring conclusion about empathy, isolation, and the power that we all have to affect each other’s lives. It’s about the hard areas of being human, but it only displays a passing interest in exploring them.

Charli xcx’s casting adds a metatextual richness to the movie and vice-versa, as the friction between her pop star persona and Bethany’s somnambulant everywoman deepens the sense of a woman divided between the superreal and the literal, the spectacular and the mundane.

At a time when the American government is waging a sustained attack on investigative journalism, and on the very nature of truth itself, to watch Cover-Up is not just to wonder what they might be trying to hide, but also to recognize that we’ve seen it before.

The ultimate brilliance of Fastvold’s movie, which remains without question for all of its peaks and valleys, is that it has the courage to reimagine the essence of belonging itself; to see it not as something we find, but rather as something that we create together.

The violent beauty of this film, which rips your soul out of your chest so completely that its seismic grief almost feels like falling in love or becoming a parent, is that it’s as much about the experience of having a child as it is about the experience of losing one.

Cooper’s film wants to be the “Nebraska” of rock biopics, but it lacks the finesse to retain the essence of that sound when transferring it into the body of a commercial biopic. In that sense at least, it all too perfectly articulates how difficult it can be too move forward when something is holding you back.

There are any number of movies about people who try to reinvent themselves in the face of a crisis. There are many fewer movies about people who violently refuse to even consider that idea — people who would rather kill someone else than become someone else. Park Chan-wook’s bleak, brilliant, and mordantly hilarious “No Other Choice” is the exception that proves the rule.

Baumbach lacks Sofia Coppola’s singular ability to leverage a character’s wealth for the wanting it reveals of them, but he, Mortimer, and Clooney share a vivid understanding of the resentments that can form in the space between who we are and how we’re seen — and of how stardom can widen that space to the point that friendships and families are liable to fall into it unnoticed.

Megalopolis is one of those movies that feels like it offers an accurate window behind the scenes of its own creation process, and Megadoc confirms as much without ever becoming redundant.

Radu Jude’s gleefully stupid Dracula proves much too expansive — and much too invested in the centuries of barbarism that paved the way toward Silicon Valley — to be misunderstood as a simple rebuke against the grotesqueries of algorithmic image-making.

The non-linear shape of its story doesn’t just allow Weapons to disguise the age-old genre pattern of tension and release, it also allows Cregger to condense it until he’s completely elided the distance between horror and comedy, terror and relief, self-control and surrender.

As is clear from the very first scene, and made all the more so by the very last, She Rides Shotgun is Polly’s movie at its core, and Heger’s face — a detailed portrait of love and loss, its colors all the more radiant by how they run together when she cries — is expressive enough to make it a movie worth watching even when it feels like one we’ve already seen a number of times before.

While it’s a mild shame “The Naked Gun” peters out a little bit toward the end (at least before rebounding during the credits), it’s even more of a shame that it has to end at all.

Empowered by the indivisible viscerality of Monk’s work (a massive Zoom discussion on her career immediately devolves into a mess of voices unintelligible enough to sound like one of Monk’s performances), Shebar’s film relies on creative urgency to compensate for what it lacks in specific insight.

Huang will never forgive Smith for killing the golden goose, and Smith will probably never take responsibility for it (to judge by the Instagram message with him that Huang shares in the film), but that’s not really what this raw and well-relished documentary is all about.

It’s a topic so vast that even a sprawling miniseries would struggle to contain it, and yet directors Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene, and Rob Grobman manage to wrap their arms around the disaster in a little more than 80 minutes; not by simplifying the situation, but rather by contrasting the apocalyptic plainness of the problem with the infinite complexity of solving it.

The film’s unflinchingly repetitive shape allows viewers to lose sight of their perspective at the same time as it invites them to draw their own conclusions, a vertigo which proves to be more involving than the didacticism that a traditional documentary might bring to the same topic.

28 Years Later effectively uses the tropes of its genre to insist that the line between a tragedy and a statistic is thinner than we think, and more permeable than we realize.

It’s a knowing smile of a drama that leaves you eager to follow Haugerud through his other two new films about the life of the mind, the last and best of which (“Dreams”) recently won top prize at the Berlinale.

Inside is a small and constrained prison drama, even by the inflexible standards of its genre, and yet Williams’ debut is so replete with such moments of raw compassion that it almost invisibly accumulates a deep well of emotion — one that allows the film to feel much bigger than it looks by the time it arrives at its absolute knockout of a final scene.

An awesomely violent and artfully staged piece of animated pulp, Predator: Killer of Killers feels like a movie that was dreamed up by a couple of stoned teenage boys in a suburban basement one night during the summer of 1987, but this is the rare case where that feels like a good thing. A very good thing, even.

A bigger, more confident sequel might be just what this franchise needs to enjoy a peaceful transition of power — and to make good on the full potential of a Hollywood action movie that meaningfully tries to iterate on John Wick instead of just copying his moves.

My Father’s Shadow resolves as a movie less about a father than it is about the absence of one — a vibrant, deeply felt love letter to Lagos, written in blood.

As sincere in its satire as it is satirical in its sincerity, the deliriously provocative Yes is a veritable orgy of self-loathing surrender that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director on a shot-by-shot basis.

To no one’s surprise, Reinsve is immaculately attuned to Trier’s energy, and Sentimental Value is carried by the manic frustration she brings to her part, which is as fun as it is freighted with crisis.

Despite its eventual willingness to resolve certain ambiguities, “It Was Just an Accident” derives so much of its throat-clenching power from the uncertainties at the heart of its premise.

Renoir — with its faint traces of sentiment, and complete absence of sentimentality — delicately articulates the girl’s inner child in a way that allows us to feel it expand across the season.

Titled like a sequel, plotted like a remake, and shot with enough of its own singular verve to ensure that most people never think of it as either of those things, Spike Lee’s deliriously entertaining — if jarringly upbeat — Highest 2 Lowest modernizes the post-war anxieties of Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low” for the age of parasocial relationships.

Dickinson clearly hopes this story will make it that much harder for people to dehumanize the homeless population, but the power of his film — and the promise of his intelligence as a filmmaker — is that it recognizes how a portrait of mottled ambivalence might better accomplish that goal than a million cheap sops of empathy.

With The Secret Agent, Filho exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up.

The Phoenician Scheme is the busiest of Anderson’s films, and also — at least on first viewing — the least rewarding.

The Chronology of Water can — and repeatedly does — churn itself to a forbidding standstill, and yet Poots makes every moment of it ecstatic in its immediacy.

Aster, who’s exclusively interested in making the kind of films that should be reviewed straight onto a prescription pad, is too beholden to his neuroses for his latest movie to play like a cheap provocation. This time, however, there’s a good chance those are your neuroses, too.

These girls can only see so much of themselves on their own, but Sound of Falling so vividly renders the blank space between them that it comes to feel like a lucid window into the stuff of our world that only the movies could ever hope to show us.

I’ve seen Julia Louis-Dreyfus bring more pathos to Old Navy commercials than she’s given the chance to wield as de Fontaine.

Rote as Evans’ plot might be, and wasteful as its treatment of certain characters definitely is . . . he has a well-developed ear for ice-cold gangster speak, and he isn’t afraid to make people pay a steep price for their penance. It’s enough to forgive him — and/or the movie gods — for making us wait so long to see him do it again.

Tsang’s debut is born from a palpable tension between the loneliness of leaving home and the tenderness of imagining a new one.

Sinners is nothing if not a film about genre, and the distinctly American imperative of cross-pollinating between them to create something that feels new and old — high and low — at the same time.

Even the worst capitulations to convention are short-lived, just as even its most eye-rolling moments can be seen as more of a feature than a bug toward the end of a fun sleepover movie that never forgets how hard it is to grow up without losing your head.

Warfare is a film that wants to be felt more than interpreted, but it doesn’t make any sense to me as an invitation — only as a warning created from the wounds of a memory.

Even as Benjamin Biolay’s dolorous string score threatens to flatten “Being Maria” into a more traditional rise and fall story, the film is buoyed by Vartolomei’s constant pursuit of the truth, and by the intensity with which Maria is always searching to see herself reflected in the eyes of those looking at her — our eyes very much included.

The Day the Earth Blew Up isn’t arguing for the past at the expense of the future, it’s simply trying to put a modern spin on a classic formula in a way that makes you wonder why we ever left it behind.

The Threesome doesn’t always feel like what you might think of when you imagine a “modern” rom-com, but that’s what makes this one of the rare movies that actually fits the bill.

If Black Bag denies us the kind of duplicitous confrontations that other versions of this story might take pains to savor, Soderbergh’s aversion to giving audiences what they want — and the severe angularity that he tends to offer us now instead — is almost as rewarding here as it was utterly indefensible in “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”

Cuttingly funny at times, The Actor isn’t much interested in answering any of those questions, but this semi-inert death trip of a film teases a certain pull from its cosmic uncertainty.

Last Breath is so taut — and the story it tells so remarkable — that you might just start to doubt even the most obvious of assumptions. That’s all the more impressive in a movie that is this happy to be hackneyed.

Everything in the characteristically hyper-literate Kontinental ’25 is shaped by influence and allusion, which itself points back to Jude’s singular predilection for refracting film history through the prism of modern life. The movie itself is essentially just one big riff on Roberto Rossellini’s “Europe ’51,” another hyper-topical story about a guilt-stricken woman’s search for peace.

This isn’t just another great Bong Joon Ho movie about how much he hates capitalism (though it definitely is that too), it’s the first Bong Joon Ho movie about how much he loves people.

Most of us could never hope to be as smart as Ricciardi was, but the movie he’s left behind does everything in its power to ensure that we’re not as dumb as he was either.

Frustrating as it can be to watch such an intriguing movie get so high on its own supply . . . Chainey’s aggressive refusal to engage with the specifics of Darcy’s inner “rot” or to unpack Daphne’s artistic insecurities allows this delirious three-hander to remain appealingly immune to the “everything is trauma” approach that has made so much of modern horror feel like a form of collective psychotherapy.

A collection of wistfully effervescent vignettes that resists the usual highs and lows of its format by drawing a gentle power from the stillness of the water that runs through it.

A documentary whose strengths and weaknesses all too perfectly reflect the nature of the crisis at its core — a crisis that stems from a vast confluence of geopolitical issues, but expresses itself through the siloed misery of loneliness and longing.

Rebuilding accrues a lasting power from all of the impermanence that it collects along the way. Even the film’s most schematic moments make it feel as though Walker-Silverman is simply unearthing something that was already there.

Like “This Is Not a Film” before it, Zodiac Killer Project sees its director leveraging their misfortune into an impish and hyper-resourceful attack on the oppressive strictures of modern storytelling (in this case the rigid conventions of the true-crime genre rather than the mandates of a censorious regime), one that allows Shackleton to achieve a measure of freedom through the act of detailing his own cage.

Split into three parts that reflect an infinite pattern of crime, punishment, and cultural recidivism, Predators fixates on our shared complicity in continuing that cycle with every click.

Gandbhir’s unforgettable documentary crystallizes the horrors of stand-your-ground laws by examining their effects through the lens of a single case — one that harrowingly illustrates the defects of castle doctrines (among other policy failures) by painting a microcosmic portrait of white America’s inability to parse between fear and anger.

Twinless mines a steady drumbeat of solid laughs from the mismatched energy of its co-leads, and the Pinter-like precision of Sweeney’s dialogue is especially well-suited to the scenes where Dennis and Roman are talking at each other on completely different wavelengths.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You vibrates with a primordial love and respect for its heroine, one that self-evidently stems from Bronstein’s own experiences as a mother, but the film refuses to wink at its audience or often even the slightest hint of memeable solidarity.

While Yen makes sure to acknowledge that he isn’t as young as he used to be, such admissions prove needlessly self-effacing.

That From Ground Zero exists is both a tragedy and a miracle in unequal measure, a fact that proves impossible to forget over the course of a film whose every frame has been rescued from the rubble of an ongoing genocide.

There’s no denying that Los Frikis were punk as hell, and errant traces of that anti-establishment attitude can be found in Nilson and Schwartz’s refusal to judge their characters for injecting themselves with HIV as a “fuck you” to a government that hadn’t left them any other choice, but the declawed safety of their storytelling undercuts that energy at every turn.

Carry-On doesn’t aspire to be too much more than good, trashy, yuletide fun, but it consistently over-delivers on that front in the process of telling a sweet little story about a guy who learns that a difficult career setback doesn’t have to result in a lifetime of surrender.

Eggers doesn’t want us to see in the darkness, he wants us to see the darkness itself. To recognize it not as the absence of light, but rather as a feral and undying force all its own — one that we carry within ourselves like a secret corseted in virtue.

Beatles ’64 does what it can to emphasize the positive — and downplay its sociopolitical theorizing — by seeing the British Invasion through the eye of the storm.

A Photographic Memory is guided by a probing specificity, and the deeper it pushes into the weeds of Sheila’s past — and the harder it listens for how they might reverberate through Rachel’s present — the easier it gets for viewers to hear echoes from their own lives in the stuff of the filmmaker’s search.