David Ehrlich

This isn’t just the definitive story of a perma-stoned frog who just likes to do what “feels good man,” it’s also an expansive forensic look at the life cycle of an idea, a warp-speed analysis of internet sociology, and a harrowingly modern fable about innocence lost. If the film can’t find a way to be all of those things at once, it’s still horrific and fascinating and maybe even a little bit hopeful to see how this strange world of ours has knotted them together.

La Llorona is a quiet movie that shudders with spiritual trauma.

No filmmaker is better equipped to capture the full sweep of this saga (which is why, despite being disappointed twice over, I still can’t help but look forward to “Dune: Messiah”), and — sometimes for better, but usually for worse — no filmmaker is so capable of reflecting how Paul might lose his perspective amid the power and the resources that have been placed at his disposal.

Henry Hobson’s zombie movie does for coping with terminal illness what "Dawn of the Dead" did for consumerism, the difference here being that Hobson isn’t interested in satire, only sadness. Oh, and he’s got Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This semi-autobiographical sketch isn’t really a story at all so much as a sweetly effervescent string of Kodachrome memories from the filmmaker’s own childhood — the childhood of someone who was born in a place without any sense of yesterday, and came of age at a time that was obsessed with tomorrow.

Entrancing from the start but slow to reveal the full scope of Wilson’s vision, Look Into My Eyes locks into that furtively cinematic essence by framing its psychic readings with a stiff naturalism that recalls the interview scenes in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life.”

Vivo grows increasingly generic and forgettable as the film goes on, and the closer its furry hero gets to finding a silver lining, the more viewers wish that he never went looking for one at all.

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.

A dense and looping melodrama that spirals towards its core idea with the centrifugal force of a Christopher Nolan movie, Monster is one of those movies that — from its title on down — invites the audience’s worst assumptions of its characters so that it can show us our blind spots when the story eventually circles back to fill in the blanks.

When lifetimes of latent drama come home to roost in the surprisingly eventful final scenes, Fourteen builds to an unsparingly lucid assessment of what two friends can take from — and carry for — each other.

No movie has so literally reduced basketball to “just a game,” and no movie this side of “Hoop Dreams” has so ecstatically conveyed why it’s also so much more than that.

Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex folds a nuanced look at the pressures and permissiveness of teenage friendships inside a frustratingly didactic story about the vagaries of consent.

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.

So deeply rooted in metaphor and allegory that it might as well be called “father!,” Alex and Andrew Smith’s Walking Out is a strong coming-of-age adventure that buries its vaguely biblical underpinnings beneath the heavy snows of a Jack London epic.

Splitting the difference between silent cinema slapstick and the cartoon roguishness of Benny Hill, this is still the kind of old-fashioned, all-ages entertainment that Hollywood doesn’t make anymore.

As slinky as the reflection of a neon sign trailing across the hood of a black sedan, this is a slight movie, shot on a whim just a few months before its world premiere, and it feels cobbled together in its search for some kind of meaning.

Washington, Henderson, Davis, and Hornsby are each “holy shit” great in their own ways, the four of them deepening the dynamics they forged together during their time on stage.

The sheer banality of Angela’s cat-and-mouse game against the corporate assassins on her trail is chilling enough to compensate for the movie’s limited scope, and Soderbergh creates such a vivid sense of plein air claustrophobia — of being caught in a net as wide as a wifi signal — that he can stage an intense action set piece in a public/private space as small as the back seat of a van.

No matter how muddled it gets by the end, One Second also boasts something that even Zhang’s best movies haven’t always been afforded: A delicious and deeply layered sense of irony.

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.

Conclave is far too entertaining to dismiss in a puff of white smoke, even if the film might be a bit too convinced of its own dramatic import.

Sing Street is a winsomely entertaining musical tribute to how passion can pave the way towards a better life.

Priscilla may not be one of the better movies that Coppola has ever made . . . but it stands apart from the rest of her work as the uniquely sensitive and self-honest portrait of a girl who starts to realize that she may have outgrown her greatest fantasy.

Intimate and involving as it can be, The Painter and the Thief increasingly leaves the impression that Kysilkova and Nordland are holding something back.

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.

For all of its self-insistent detours and high-minded indulgences, I’m Thinking of Ending Things rarely feels like a concept in search of a movie. There’s a fullness and vitality to it that shines through even when the film is chasing its own tail, which is basically all it wants to do.

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.

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.