David Ehrlich

I’d say this playful yet nakedly personal coming-of-auteur epic was trying to split the difference between memoir and crowdpleaser, but it seems even more determined to reconcile the two: What else would Steven Spielberg’s ultimate divorce movie be about if not the hope for some kind of reconciliation?

But it’s the shadow of despair that “Wonka” traces most clearly; the cloud of disenchantment that can hover over every inch of our waking lives when the wrong people are allowed to monopolize our dreams. This may not be Paul King’s most satisfying film, but even at a scale — or at least a budget — several times larger than that of “Paddington 2,” the purity of its imagination remains unquestionable.

It’s hard to predict what value this documentary will retain in the future (or if it will just disappear into the content void, where history streams a mile wild and a millimeter deep), but it’s safe to assume that it will never be more urgent than it is right now, in a country exhausted by its overlapping tragedies, when so many people of all stripes could use a shot in the arm to remember what’s at stake.

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.

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.

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.

Denis, Andrew Litvack, and Léa Mysius’ dialogue is only strengthened by its occasional awkwardness, as it subsumes Trish and Daniel into the same disordered humidity that swamps the film around them. The frequent sex scenes become a dialogue of their own — the lovers feeling each other out in search of something they can actually trust.

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.

At heart, Inu-Oh is a film about storytelling’s power to keep the past alive, and while Yuasa’s carnivalesque extravaganza can be too slippery to hold onto at times, it always proves unforgettable in a way that serves that ultimate purpose.

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.

An enormously moving documentary made all the more effective by co-directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s steadfast refusal to settle for easy sentiment in the face of difficult outcomes, Daughters has as much ugly-cry potential as any film in recent memory.

Decker’s characteristically sawtoothed and delirious new film is set in the same latent space between fact and fantasy — a story and its telling — where she located all of her previous work.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a small movie, far too modest and knowing to surrender to melodrama and apply cosmetic fixes to deep wounds...but it beautifully articulates the need for young people to realize the validity of who they are, and even more beautifully crystalizes the moment when that starts to happen.

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.

Elizabeth Wood’s fire-breathing debut is an adrenalized shot of ecstasy and entitlement, a fully committed cautionary tale that’s able to follow through on its premise because — like the remarkable young actress who plays its heroine — the film is unafraid of being utterly loathsome.

The King of Staten Island may not be the most flavorful thing that Apatow has ever served up, and it could be high time for him to consider a new recipe, but this wry and tender five-course meal of a movie still makes you glad that he’s not afraid to be himself — even when he’s telling someone else’s story.

It’s a deliciously unsubtle testament to the power of words and their infinite capacity to inspire.

Dual adds a fresh sprinkle of doom to the already savage deadpan of Stearns’ previous work, and bitterly crystallizes the existential anxieties that have crushed down on so many of us with new weight since the pandemic started. That it also allows Karen Gillan to give two hilarious performances, both colder than death but at distinctly different temperatures, is just icing on the cake.

Arctic works because it’s so believable. The movie never cheats or takes shortcuts.

This is a beautiful film, and an ugly one, and the tension between those two sides doesn’t abate until the very last scene.

Casually cathartic at times, cathartically casual at others, this affecting little film about fathers and sons knows that some wounds never heal, but it’s never too late to stop the bleeding.

At its best, Haynes’ film is neither a dry accounting of who the Velvets were nor a heady evocation of their work; it’s a movie about the fires these people set inside each other and how they spread to anyone else who was burning and gave them the same permission to push back against expectations.

Frequently sublime ... a piece of work so feral and full of life that you’d never guess it was (at least) the 90th feature its director has made in the last 30 years.

“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?

At heart, King Cobra compellingly traces the palpable tension between the performative nature of gay porn and the privacy of queer shame.

Here, the Norwegian’s filmmaker’s signature brand of existential dread (always coupled with and complicated by a youthful sense of becoming), is expressed through style more than action. This isn’t a movie where all that much happens, but every decision ripples with darkness.

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

The result is a stilted and unnerving film that chips away at the petrified staginess of its origins with every sudden noise, as if Karam were sledge-hammering little cracks into the hull of his film’s WASPy modern family.