David Fear

Atlantics pulls you into an experience. The empathy machine runs at full speed here. Ada, c’est moi.

Push any guy long enough with alcohol and aggressive masculinity, the film suggests, and you'll find an XY-chromosomed predator lurking behind the mask.

Easily one of the best and most modestly brilliant piece of nonfiction filmmaking you’ll see this year.

This West Side Story proves someone can still leave their mark on the legend without building it from the ground up. It’s a classic Spielberg joint, a classic hat-tip to Hollywood, and a classic, period.

Part anthropological study, part rise-and-fall epic and all-out mesmerizing, this regional spin on the “family business” saga makes you rethink the notions behind why we watch crime flicks past the vicarious thrills. It’s both foreign and familiar.

Varda by Agnès goes out not with a bang but a graceful farewell, as the director sits on a beach, a sandstorm whipping around her as vows to “disappear in the blur” and slowly fades from the image.

You don’t have to know about Erice’s own backstory to appreciate this mournful, seeking work about life, art, loss, and the space where they all overlap.

Yes is easily the most controversial film to hit theaters this year so far. It’s also, for all of the intoxicating rush of Lapid’s excessive style and cup-spilleth-over storytelling, one of the more sobering and vital ones as well.

Not even the presence of Money Heist‘s Úrsula Corberó as a slinky villain known as the Baroness could stave off a sense of disappointment.

This is an actors’ film, one that proudly wears its women-run-the-world bona fides on its sleeve. They provide the sisterhood and the sense of boiling over. After a full-circle callback to its beginning, Support the Girls ends, pitch-perfectly, with a primal scream therapy session on the top of a strip-mall building, female voices being heard above highway noise.

As with other movies that capture the joys of cooking and the carnal thrill of eating, this French romantic drama is as much an ode to regional bonne bouches as it is an epic tale of two epicures.

Poetic is a word that goes thrown around easily and abundantly, especially when it comes to documentaries that forego any sort of standard interview-clip-context-rinse-repeat format. But it’s hard to think of a better adjective to describe the early sequences of Honeyland.

Anyone who’s ever wondered what a rom-com collab between Nora Ephron and Tom of Finland might look like now has a definitive answer to that question.

It’s a great espionage thriller, and an even better scenes-from-a-marriage drama. Ian Fleming would love this. So would Ingmar Bergman.

What eventually emerges is a peerless portrait of collective trauma — a devastating look at how this law not only sociologically gutted a country but made everyone complicit in the crime.

You can barely call it a movie. You can, however, recognize it as one of Wes Anderson‘s best attempts at transforming both his and his literary idol’s idiosyncrasies into something like art — and the most satisfying posthumous double act in ages.

We expect cinematic fireworks with a stylist like [Park]. It’s his sense of restraint and his substance, however, that makes what could have just been a clever check-out-these-moves exercise feel like a genuinely emotional showstopper.

Rather than telling you how young women are affected by this, Patton and Rae show you. And to watch one of the interviewees go for being a joyous, giddy, chatty child to being a slightly older, more distant and jaded tween is heartbreaking.

If the movie does adhere to his signature beats, and feature so many recognizable Spielbergisms, occasionally to its detriment, it’s still one of the most impressive, enlightening, vital things he’s ever done.

It’s a demonstration of directorial chops that somehow never devolves into a look-mamushka-no-hands display, and a textbook example of how to use handheld camerawork (courtesy of cinematographer Kseniya Sereda) and splashes of red, green, and goldenrod effectively without being garish or grandiloquent.

What’s remarkable is how [Torres] never overplays anything, or goes for easy histrionics and rending of garments even when the movie itself becomes heavy-handed in the back half.

It's not perfect, but it is a gift to Sam Elliott – and to us.

Savanah Leaf’s slice-of-life movie is full of these revelatory moments — sometimes lyrical, sometimes gritty, often swirling the two together — and the former Olympian-turned-filmmaker‘s feature debut pitches itself somewhere between the detail accumulation of cinéma vérité and the feeling you’ve stepped into someone’s dream.

Sweeney has finally got her serious-actor moment and delivered.

Sirāt...is not for everyone. But it is the sort of overwhelming cinematic experience and undeniable work of sound and vision that could be life-changing for those ready to receive it.

How sexism, toxic masculinity, complicity, and not-so-borderline criminal behavior is baked into the music business gets pecked at but never fully unpacked.

The doc is a capsule history lesson on an eons-old natural phenomenon. But it’s also the greatest lava-fueled love story ever told, and the fact that those two elements remain as inseparable as the spouses at the center of it all is a testament to how sublime this stranger-than-fiction masterpiece really is.

Hamnet has managed to make the lines “goodnight, sweet prince” somehow sting more than ever, but it leaves you in a state of emotional bliss.