David Ehrlich

But for all of its teachable wisdom, this movie knows that life is never sweeter than it is during the moments, and years, when we simply can’t accept that love is also made out of plastic.

This is the action movie of the year so far as American theatergoers should be concerned, and nothing else really comes close.

The Death of Robin Hood isn’t revisionist history — it’s a history of revisionism. One that fittingly creeps further into fiction with every claim it makes towards “the truth,” as Sarnoski’s ultra-austere effort to cut through a millennium of myths can’t help but create a hard-to-swallow fable of its own along the way.

Far-fetched as this popcorn movie gets, it crucially never loses sight of the notion that to look outward is to look within (and vice versa), a theory that only grows clearer over the span of a blockbuster whose 79-year-old director still peers back at his childhood for a better view of the stars.

The most compelling thing about Office Romance, which would be as formulaic as it gets if not for its admirably deep bench of deranged supporting characters, is that it gives Lopez the chance to publicly negotiate between the extremes of her own screen image — to explore the frustrations of being a self-possessed woman who has to shrink herself down in order to maintain her power.

For better or worse, Harari uses gender dysphoria as a conduit to his more immediate concern: The idea that who we are is ultimately a memory that we share with ourselves.

Bitter Christmas is neither the work of a filmmaker atoning for, nor justifying, their greatness so much as it’s the work of a filmmaker simply explaining how their greatness works.

“What does it mean to be a good neighbor?”, Fjord wonders in Mungiu’s usual tones, its probing handheld wide shots infused with the callous indifference of the gods. And why is that so rarely a question that people feel required to ask of themselves?

Sheep in the Box is less concerned with feelings than it is with our impulse to elide them.

Gray is no stranger to saga about fraternal strains, but never has he so forcefully tugged at the ties that bind, or more sensitively observed how they can suffocate an entire family when a certain force pulls on them hard enough.

In the context of such a terrible crime, Kreutzer is naturally less concerned with right and wrong than she is with the way that even the most sordid type of abuse is able to disguise itself in domesticity. If victims are our friends and neighbors, then it stands to reason that perpetrators are too.

All of a Sudden is so prescriptive with its ideas that its characters are liable to become vessels for them. It’s the one regard in which Hamaguchi’s impulse to mash everything together softens the power of his point rather than sharpening it, and the one regard in which this three-and-a-half hour sit threatens to seem too short.

It’s only once Butterfly Jam seems doomed to repeat the same dark fatalism of Balagov’s earlier work that it suddenly affirms itself as the bittersweet fable that it’s been all along.

If Nagi Notes is so watchful and unforced that it often seems as though it isn’t looking for answers — or for anything — as hard as it should be, Fukada’s elegant plotting gradually allows this quiet film to assume the forcefulness of a full-throated shout.

Though “Lorne” is prone to some overly relaxed pacing, the film is held tight enough by the grip that Michaels has maintained over his little fiefdom for more than half a century.

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.