David Ehrlich

With his unusually accomplished directorial debut Childhood of a Leader, Corbet delivers a strange and startling film that reflects the unique trajectory of his career, as well as the influence of the iconoclastic directors with whom he’s already worked.

As this unclassifiable wildfire burns itself out, all you can say for sure is that these little zombies are alive in ways that most adults have lost the ability to imagine. Whatever demented game its characters are playing, Nagahisa’s live-action Twitch-fest is delightful for how it lets us watch along.

The Hand of God doesn’t always find the clearest way of knotting these various stories together, and the film’s second half — replete with so many highs — also feels like it leaves a number of important characters dangling in the wind.

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.

This is a study of power, and what power will do to survive; a study of how morality is more historically significant as a condition, and not a cause. The rich won’t save us — that’s what makes them rich. The fascinating Citizen K will leave you to determine the value in one of them saving themselves.

In fact, the two stars are so sweet and searching together — their characters’ respective power and mutual solitude pulling them together with practical magic — that some of the film’s more spectacular detours seem flimsy by contrast.

Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy might have the scariest ending of any film ever made.

The Visitor might be a hot mess, the byproduct of tailspinning egos and the best drugs movie money could buy in the late 70s, but it certainly isn’t an accident.

The film is essentially a war of attrition between emotion and pragmatism, the rare thriller fueled by stress rather than speed.

A somber romance that’s as much about the cultural confluence of city life as it is about the unlikely couple who manage to find each other in it, Maxime Giroux’s Félix and Meira captures the dislocating loneliness of "Lost in Translation" without leaving its characters’ native Montreal.

Tsai’s work sees generational defiance as a symptom of the ennui felt by their young subjects as they drift into adulthood, and Rebels’ unusually sharp focus on that theme makes it an accessible primer for the elements that would inform the more oblique masterpieces to come.

Director Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration) has always enjoyed thumbing his nose at stuffy cinematic conventions, and while he’s obviously enchanted by Hardy’s text, his movie is fun because he’s keen not to give it too much respect.

Seymour unfolds like a Jewish Jiro Dreams of Sushi—Bernstein may look like your average NYC grandpa, but he lives like a monk and talks like a guru.

Stearns saddles himself with a touch more plot than he needs, and some of the film’s late-game twists are more satisfying than others, but Faults never loses sight of the one thing Ansel can’t see: Free will may come cheap, but most people still can’t afford it.

Like any good Western, Slow West percolates with the constant threat of violence, but debuting feature director John Maclean wrings the genre for its mythic value.

If Her is ultimately better at considering the future than it is at taking us there, it resonates as an insightful reminder that love isn’t obsolete quite yet.

Fashioning "The Great Dictator" and "Inglourious Basterds" into a cross joint and then lighting it from both ends, Goldberg and Rogen’s second directorial effort follows the hysterically violent misadventures of idiotic talk-show host Dave Skylark (James Franco, hamming it up) and his underachieving producer, Aaron (Rogen).

Delicately placed on a sonic bedrock of chirping birds and distant traffic, Cemetery of Splendour is a whisper of a film that can only cast its spell if you let your breathing slow and give yourself over to the urgency of its spectral dimension.

What begins as a spirited but safely familiar pastiche of John Hughes and Wes Anderson is compelled to become its own thing, Gomez-Rejon’s film embracing the most tired tropes of stereotypical YA weepies so that it can kiss them goodbye.

It’s obvious that Welcome to Me is about an unusual person, but Shira Piven’s dark comedy makes it perfectly clear that the “me” of the title is no mere eccentric. On the contrary, this tragicomic oddity is that rarest of birds: a genuinely funny movie about mental illness.

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.

A rare delight that’s laced with melancholy and a suffocating sense of menace from its first scene straight through its shocking finale, Man From Reno is made special by the collisions between its characters.

The ultimate value of the famed filmmaker’s latest documentary—a subject National Gallery turns into a reflexive concern—is not that Wiseman makes it possible for a broader audience to see these priceless works of art, but that the scope of his project invites all audiences to look at them through an illuminating new lens.

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

[An] enormously fun late-summer surprise.

If Abrahamson were as gifted with a camera as he was with his cast (he inspires subtlety even from the tiny Tremblay), Room could have been truly worthy of the astonishing performances that provide its foundation.

With a plot that plays like a string of incidental encounters, The Meddler could easily have felt like a glorified sitcom. But its heroine’s grief, her goodness and her complicated relationship with her daughter all feel so lived-in and true that the film stays grounded.

The stakes may seem low, but these high jinks resound with abstract generational import, the various episodes cohering into a moving portrait of a nation that couldn’t account for all it had lost in a war that it won.