David Ehrlich

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.

It’s a difficult balancing act for a filmmaker as gifted and operatic as Scorsese, whose ability to tell any story rubs up against his ultimate admission that this might not be his story to tell. And so, for better or worse, Scorsese turns Killers of the Flower Moon into the kind of story that he can still tell better than anyone else: A story about greed, corruption, and the mottled soul of a country that was born from the belief that it belonged to anyone callous enough to take it.

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.

For all of the film’s janky pacing, thoroughly mediocre action setpieces, and the clumsiness with which it’s forced to double as backdoor pilot for Disney Plus’ “Ironheart” series, Coogler’s subthread of the MCU continues to operate at a significantly higher strata of thought, artistry, and feeling than the rest of Marvel’s assembly line.

The scarring power of Nyoni’s film ignites from Shula’s eventual realization that she would rather torch her family to the ground than let them forget what happened.

Universal Language is first and foremost a testament to the shared artifice of all filmic storytelling, and to the singular realities it’s able to bring alive in turn.

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.

Kill makes very, very good on its goofy title by the time all is said and done, but perhaps the most surprising thing about Bhat’s action extravaganza is that it inverts expectations without ever getting off-track.

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.

A broadly safe film like “Finch” might roll into its destination with an ease that belies the risks of getting there, but sometimes the real treasure is the friends we build along the way.

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.

Rossi’s scathing (yet seemingly fair) documentary doesn’t just illustrate the institutional ironies of modern education. It also strives to understand why tuition is at an all-time high when knowledge is practically free.

A film that’s dark and delightful and ripe for rediscovery.

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.”

A lucid crystallization of both Arulpragasam’s private life and her public mission, Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. offers an intimate profile of a righteously modern renegade without ever feeling like propaganda or a plea to stream her latest album on Spotify.

As Swift observes in the movie, powerful women are given the almost impossible task of being “strategic” but not “calculating,” and Wilson is so good at splitting the difference that some of her documentary’s most humanizing moments are beautiful for how they contradict Swift’s intention.

Director Michael Winterbottom hasn’t just delivered the funniest movie of the year, but also a comedy that casts its characters in a harsh new light.

A nuanced portrait of a city in flux (or decline) that uses the impressionableness of adolescence to shake our own understanding of gentrification and its residual effects, Little Men is that rarest of beasts: a truly hopeful heartbreaker.

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.

De Wilde doesn’t strain for relevance or reinvent the wheel, she just unapologetically serves dessert for dinner until you’re left with the satisfaction of eating a three-course meal.

While nothing in your life may come as easily to you as everything in Coldplay’s lives seems to have come to them, this delightful and unexpectedly inspiring documentary has a funny way of making your dreams seem closer than they might appear.

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.

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.

The coolheaded patience of Burns’ approach is precisely what makes “The Report” so powerful in the end, not only as a lucid crystallization of our country’s recent political history, but also as an urgent reminder of how a world that prioritizes emotions over ethics will eat itself alive.

Creating a lucid sense of reality only so that she can defile it with a wicked pivot towards madness, Asensio’s film creates a vision of immigrant life in America (and its value) that’s all the more urgent for how it uses genre elements to exaggerate the experience.

Few movies have ever so boldly explored how fraught the safety of unconditional love can be in such a cruel world, and even fewer — including Aster’s own “Hereditary” — have been so willing to sit with the irreconcilable horrors of trying to share that love with someone else.

Cold Pursuit resolves as a riotously fun example of a director remaking their own film for the right reasons.

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