David Ehrlich

Steve Jobs the movie is a lot like Steve Jobs the person: astonishingly brilliant whenever it’s not breaking your heart.

The vibes are immaculate from the start and only grow more so as the characters gradually start to become as detailed as the world that “The Holdovers” constructs around them.

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.

Great Absence isn’t quite as allergic to sentiment as this slow and steady film might seem on the surface, and it’s prone to metaphor in a way that a less honest story would never be able to survive, but Kei is committed to keeping things at the same even keel as Yamazaki Yutaka’s locked-off cinematography.

Talbot has a gift for making twee material feel true, but his grip weakens during the pivotal home stretch of his debut, and as a result the ending doesn’t land with the emotion it deserves.

The staggeringly well-crafted Isle of Dogs is nothing if not Anderson’s most imaginative film to date.

Even at this point in his career, Wang is skilled enough to find a strong emotional through-line amidst a mess of tattered threads.

Long on voiceovers, short on specificity, and so high on the generic-brand Scorsese of it all that it glosses right over the gray areas that make its characters so tragic, Yates’ film is more focused on being easy to swallow than it is on meaningfully addressing the source of the pain.

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.

Whatever their respective agendas, Navalny finds subject and filmmaker alike bound together by the shared belief that authoritarian governments are as scared of their people as their people are of them, and the documentary is galvanized by the spectacle of Putin shitting his pants.

In an overwhelmingly dense film that never feels as if it’s only ever doing one thing, Decker’s form never forces you to choose between the story and its very meta shadows.

While this is arguably Greengrass’ best film, it’s almost certainly his most urgent.

The film misses the core emotional charge of “A Separation” despite a similar eagerness to wade into the weeds of Iranian civil law, but what it lacks in brute force sentiment it makes up for in the Socratic purity of its structure and the childlike simplicity of its central question: What’s the difference between doing a good deed and not doing a bad one?

It’s not like this movie is a punishing chore; it’s not like Eggers doesn’t want multiplex audiences to like it. And they will. Because this is the kind of filmmaking that rips you out of your body so hard that you’re liable to forget what year it is.

Faraut is able to conflate the cinema’s quixotic obsession with reality with the athlete’s similarly impossible dream of perfection. In its own playful way, his film celebrates the beautiful folly of both pursuits.

At once both more forceful and more inscrutable than Filho’s previous work, Bacurau plunges deeper into midnight territory as its core ideas take hold, its ghosts become literal, and its heroes take up arms.

Kranz’s direction may not be flashy enough to earn him a spot on Marvel’s shortlist, but the careful balance that he strikes between the movie’s four lead performances reflects a natural confidence behind the camera.

A generic and diverting sequel that corrects some of the original’s biggest mistakes while also highlighting some of its more eccentric charms, “Uprising” drops us into a world that’s much richer than what the previous film left behind.

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.

There’s nowhere for the movie to go once it establishes that the safety love offers can also be the source of its undoing.

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.

Here is an orgiastic work of slaphappy genius that doesn’t operate like a narrative film so much as a particle accelerator — or maybe a cosmic washing machine — that two psychotic 12-year-olds designed in the hopes of reconciling the anxiety of what our lives could be with the beauty of what they are.

Beautiful as Dhont’s eye for detail can be, and vital as his willingness to explore the unbearably tender pockets of adolescence often proves here, Close still finds its sensitive — if sometimes borderline sadistic — young filmmaker defaulting to universal pain whenever he fears that more personal feelings may be too poignantly ethereal to see on camera.

Fresh and stale in equal measure, Coco represents the best of what Pixar can be, and the worst of what they’ve become.

If nothing else, this loving — borderline fetishistic — concert movie makes a compelling case for the musicianship, artistry, and sheer athleticism of pop music. Well, good pop music, anyway.

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.

In Beginning, the borders of the frame aren’t just the iron bars of a jail cell, they’re also the garden walls of Eden, the tempting hiss of the snake, and the angel of the lord who interrupted Abraham from killing his son.

Pulling harder and harder at the tension between complex socioeconomic forces and the simple human emotions they inspire, R.M.N. masterfully spins an all too familiar migration narrative into an atavistic passion play about the antagonistic effects of globalization on the European Union.

Revenge is a bit too thin to sustain its running time (despite its slickness and mesmeric rhythm), but Fargeat’s well-executed finale is worth the wait, particularly for how it cements Lutz as a final girl for the ages. A girl who’s stripped of her humanity, and then finds the strength to return the favor several times over.

What starts as the knotted stuff of violent coincidence soon unravels into something more bittersweet, as Mads Mikkelsen’s first movie after Oscar winner “Another Round” restitches itself into another giddy and unexpectedly poignant modern fable about the search for meaning in a world where everything happens by chance, but nothing is a coincidence.

At a time when movies are growing more plastic by the day, it’s always a thrill to experience something that’s so attuned to the tactile pleasures of the cinema; to see a movie that you can feel with your fingers even when it bypasses your heart or goes over your head.

This is horror filmmaking that's designed to work on you like a virus, slowly incapacitating your defenses so it can build up and do some real damage.

The King is so eager to be a mud-and-guts epic about inherited violence and the corruption of power that it loses sight of the rich coming-of-age story at its core.

At what point does a story about one failing democracy become a story about all failing democracies? Perhaps there’s no way of knowing until it’s already too late.

Such an internally combusting prequel might seem like a strange lead-in to a movie that spit fire in every direction, but don’t you worry: George Miller still has what it takes to make it epic.

Yes, life can only be understood backwards, but Memoir of a Snail makes a sweetly compelling case that we’ll see the beauty in it one day — such a sweetly compelling case, in fact, that you might just start looking for it now

While the storytelling grows frustratingly elliptical, Lelio so desperate to constrain the drama that he resorts to removing helpful pieces of it, the scenes that remain are succinct and evocative.

Like all of Shinkai’s films, the richness of the light coats everything it touches with such an evocative hue of nostalgia that the plot only puts a damper on things (and there’s a lot of plot here).

Devotion can be stiff and hackneyed at the best of times — it’s nothing if not a war movie that has seen too many other war movies — but it lifts a few inches off the ground whenever it locks in on the loneliness that Brown must have felt as he flew towards an aircraft carrier whose landing signal officer may have wanted him to crash, or soared in formation with people who might have been happy to shoot him down.

Anyone who’s willing to meet this movie on its own terms and roll with the dream logic it requires will be rewarded with a resonantly cathartic saga about the struggle to find beauty in a world that forces us to leave parts of ourselves behind.

Ridiculous from the start but also strangely fresh for yet another 21st century tentpole about a rogue A.I., “Dead Reckoning Part One” may not be the best movie in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise — there’s no topping the raw adrenaline rush of “Fallout,” and McQuarrie is smart enough not to try — but this extravagantly entertaining Dolby soap opera nails what the “Mission: Impossible” franchise does best: Weaponizing artifice and illusion in order to fight for a world that’s still worth believing in.

This is a film that trembles with a need for redemption that never comes, and the urgency of that search is palpable enough that you can feel it first-hand, even if Benediction is never particularly clear about the nature of the redemption it’s hoping to find.

The moral of this story is supposed to be shrugged off despite its overwhelming honesty, but Living downplays its drama to such an extent that it can feel as if Hermanus and Ishiguro lacked the nerve to attempt the same trick.

It’s not unusual for such high-concept films to indulge in a thorny and fascinating second act only to find itself grasping for a more defined conflict in the third, and that’s essentially what happens here, as the broad philosophical mysteries take Leyla down a rabbit-hole that might be too deep for her to ever climb out.

In the end, Jones’ performance is even more lifelike than I feared — a tortured and astonishingly nuanced rendering of a childlike creature whose id could only be tempered by love for so long before it chose violence instead. And it should go without saying that Kurzel’s fatalistic storytelling so pungently exhumes the pain that led up to that awful day in April 1996 that you can smell the death coming several hours in advance.

Erlingsson has created a winsome knickknack of a movie that manages to reframe the 21st century’s signature crisis in a way that makes room for real heroism.

The first half of Right Now, Wrong Then fits the usual mold, but the real joke begins when the movie abruptly starts over and our hero — seemingly aware of his Groundhog Day do-over — makes subtly different (and smarter) choices the second time around in a rich and playful revision.

However you slice it, this is the rare CGI movie that radiates its own kind of inventive beauty, slick without feeling plastic, and the artistry that made it possible deserves to be celebrated on its own merits.

The film, like Billingham’s photography, is all the more powerful for its refusal to tidy up, explain itself, or try to glom some kind of retroactive grace onto an impoverished existence that was defined by boredom and neglect.

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.

If the film’s story is steered by a hard-nosed focus on the large and small of what actually happened, the way Emmerich tells it feels more informed by WWII movies than it does by the war itself.

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.

[A] delightful and unusually spirited love letter ... Tempting as it can be to wish that Wright had slowed down, probed deeper, and leaned even harder into the Mael brothers’ love of movies, it’s so fun and thrilling to watch the movies finally love them back.

A legendary director’s unsullied cut of Dying Of The Light would almost certainly be more interesting than the version the studio is dumping into theaters, but it might have been a lot sadder, too.

The plot ends in a place that feels honest and true, but it gets lost in a kind of narrative no-man’s land on its way there.

A limp and lifeless historical melodrama that aspires to be the “Pearl Harbor” of the preamble to World War I and still falls well short of that ignoble goal, Joseph Ruben’s The Ottoman Lieutenant tries to snatch a love triangle from out beneath the Armenian Genocide but fails to get any of the angles right.

The raw and resonant Passages is the kind of fuck around and find out love triangle that rings true because we aspire to its sexier moments but see ourselves in its most selfish ones.

Once the menacing and mysterious Screenslaver is introduced, inciting a Spielberg-level monorail chase that reaffirms Bird’s lucid gift for kinetic and character-driven action filmmaking, the movie blasts off and never looks back.

An awe-inspiring film.

The only meaningful connection made over the course of the movie is the one between its actors, whose inability to salvage their material does more to braid them together than any of the machinations of Day’s script.

This intimate, unvarnished, and occasionally transcendent micro-portrait may seldom leave Dunning’s property, but it takes stock of the whole world.

A Hidden Life is a lucid and profoundly defiant portrait of faith in crisis.

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) isn’t the wittiest or most exciting movie that Noah Baumbach has ever made, but it might just be the most humane.

Last Men in Aleppo is less about finding meaning amidst a massacre than it is about people who are trying to survive without it.

"Making Waves” is smartly articulated and arranged, with Costin breaking the film down into the various disciplines of sound design in order to illustrate just how much thought goes into every decibel.

Union is all the more effective because it doesn’t see the need to argue its case. Instead, the film is free to focus its attention on how difficult and inspiring it was and remains for the Amazon Labor Union to press that case into action — and even just to exist in the first place.

Trusting that her subject matter is fertile enough to merit such a scholarly approach, and also bewitching enough to survive it, Janisse connects the dots between “The Wicker Man” and “La Llorona” in a way that allows this multi-chapter epic to function as both séance-like spectacle and streaming-era syllabus in equal measure.

Each scene is so quietly compelling because Haigh doesn’t focus on cruelty, but helplessness.

Bergman Island is a heart-stoppingly poignant stunner all the same — one beating inside a body of work that has always been seasick with the bittersweet vertigo that comes from looking at the past through the smudged lens of memory and imagination.

No matter how contrived or hackneyed things get, Buckley’s voice always breaks through the clouds like some kind of divine revelation. And that voice only gets more powerful when Wild Rose finally gives it something to say.

Where Hogg’s last two movies saw the filmmaker tracing a version of herself from memory, this one sees her tracing a memory from a version of herself.

The documentary lets its subject’s weathered charisma do most of the hard work here — Scorsese and Tedeschi love him too much to beg for your attention — and yet it weaves in enough context to convince even the biggest New York Dolls neophytes of the band’s legacy. Even longtime fans might be struck by the contrast between the breeziness of the film’s tone and the weight of its history.

The film’s true power stems from and speaks to our specifically present condition as people beset on all sides by the fears of our own imagination. By the trauma of something that already happened, or the terror of something that might.

Lynch’s directorial debut is a wisp of a movie, blowing across the screen like a tumbleweed, but it’s also the rare portrait of mortality that’s both fun and full of life.

7 Prisoners is mostly powered by the natural tension of its premise, which is simple and gripping and develops along a linear arc from bad to worse.

Valuable for its access yet limited by its lack of perspective, Desert One puts a human face on one of the late 20th century’s worst debacles while framing the whole thing in the passive voice, resulting in a film that boasts the immediacy of a testament but the resonance of a textbook.

It’s a sexy concept that will thrill Assayas neophytes, but the director’s longtime fans will find its pleasures virtually pornographic.

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.

A Still Small Voice — much like the residency program that it chronicles — is all the more valuable because it never pretends that being a palliative chaplain is an inherently selfless task.

Dano crafts an unsparing portrait that’s harsh and humane in equal measure.

It leans into the tonal chaos of life on earth, creating an impressively layered genre mishmash that reflects the complex reality of how women are seen in the world, and how they see themselves in return.

If this arresting documentary is too agog at its own story to intricately reckon with how 21st century geopolitics and technology have further perverted the relationship between art and commerce — if it stops short of a post-credits scene where Samuel L. Jackson shows up to threaten us with the imminent rise of NFTs — the film nevertheless makes a strong case that some art is truly timeless.

Mickey and the Bear only accomplishes so much in its modest 82 minutes (like most films of its kind, it builds to nothing more than a nudge in the right direction), but Attanasio makes you believe in the reality of these characters and the place that binds them together.

While this crisp and subdued Hitchcockian melodrama represents yet another unexpected pivot from a filmmaker who’s never liked putting one foot in front of the other (it’s Kurosawa’s first period piece), it’s also just a well-done slab of red meat from someone who hasn’t served up a satisfying meal in so long that it seemed as if he might’ve forgotten how.

This story, like the people in it, wouldn’t have held together on dry land, and there’s something wonderfully indulgent about surrendering to the undercurrents that swirl beneath Alice’s friendships. But the run-and-gun approach that makes this movie possible is also what ends up shooting it in the foot, as the clock is always ticking and Soderbergh never has time to get out of the shallows.

It’s a project that was made to restore a certain way of seeing; to punch a hole through the screen that separates people from the reality of what’s happening in their world. But in trying to get so close to the truth without touching it, Hassan almost fell into the same gap that he was trying to bridge.

However disappointing it might be that Bad Education is too delicate (and true) to really go wild and let Finley indulge in the flamboyance that made “Thoroughbreds” such a wicked treat, this is a young director who can see the whole chess game 20 moves in advance.

From a certain perspective, Sami Blood tells a very familiar story, but the hyper-specificity of its telling renders it a wholly new and quietly profound experience.

As usual, Strickland has made a sumptuous meal out of social impropriety — a strange cinematic delicacy about the discomforts that need to be shared so that others don’t have to be stomached.