Derek Smith

Ghost Elephants shows that Werner Herzog is fiercely determined to explore new frontiers while they still exist and capture the poetic phenomena of nature and the unshakeable dreams it continues to instill in mankind.

Hope and fear are inextricably bound in Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical film.

The documentary ultimately reveals itself as a paean to female strength and resistance.

If the film’s breathless pacing and rapid-fire jokes run out of steam just a tad as SpongeBob’s stay in the underworld extends, Search for SquarePants is still charming, spirited, and ludicrous enough to prove that it’s not quite time to tell this series to walk the plank.

Zootopia 2 provides plenty of food for thought for its young audience, making a more expansive statement on the dangers of intolerance than the first film, and without sacrificing any of its charm, humor, or visual ingenuity along the way.

The film meticulously yet concisely probes how, why, and when our understanding of the greenhouse effect went from a scientific certainty to it being up for debate.

A story of hazy memories that’s also a city symphony, Dreams elegantly captures the disorienting rush of first love and the frustrations and anguish that stem from romantic fantasies colliding with reality.

One small, shrewd decision after another allows Preparation for the Next Life to sustain its naturalism to the end.

The film is a bit too muddled to bring its main character fully into focus, despite Hélène Vincent’s best efforts to do so.

The Ballad of Wallis Island plays both its drama and comedy in decidedly minor keys, straining neither for grand emotional revelations nor big laughs.

The Quiet Ones is a reminder of the simple pleasures of a caper film with ice in its veins.

The interjections of quotidian reflection give a fullness and emotional resonance to a film that can, at times, be borderline oppressive in its depiction of war’s brutality.

Always exhibiting a deftness of touch and willingness to continue probing a cultural taboo that’s now, more than ever, a delicate and charged topic, Obit also challenges our preconceptions of a much-maligned group.

Alireza Khatami’s third feature is a subtly enigmatic examination of the nature of masculinity.

It’s as if by being confronted by new innovations that appear to have come straight out of a sci-fi film, Werner Herzog exercises his galaxy brain to see what we could be capable of a decade, even a century, from now.

The film paints a vivid portrait of what life was like for Black South Africans under apartheid.

The world of My Old Ass retains a lived-in quality, in large part due to the shrewd, sensitive way in which it treats the emotional struggles of its teenage characters.

The importance of touch between a parent and child—and, in the case of this film, specifically between a father and daughter—is rarely discussed openly in Daughters, but it looms large over nearly every scene.

The film speaks unflinchingly to the unique anxieties and frustrations of early teenhood.

Slow steadfastly remains a character-driven piece, homing in on the intricacies of its protagonists’ psychologies and engaging with their subtle emotional shifts as they become more intimate with one another.

The film is held together by the universal strength of its performances, particularly James and Smollett, and the elegance with which it veers between dreamy interludes and poetic flourishes stemming from Malik’s imagination and the more quotidian presentation of the small world he lives in, warts and all.

The film’s final act contains some of the most twisted, gory violence this particular subgenre of horror has seen in years, ultimately recalling nothing less than the films of the ultra-violent New French Extremity movement.

Much of Rich Peppiatt’s film isn’t about respectability, but rather debasement, and sugar-coating Kneecap’s widespread antics isn’t on the menu.

The film approaches a new tech frontier with an objective, responsibly apprehensive, eye.

Paul King again proves himself a masterful engineer of imaginary worlds, and it’s the meticulous attention to detail that makes Wonka so captivating.

Thanks to Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s unflappable performance, the theories that Isabel Wilkerson laid out in her book emerge with an emotional clarity that can be forceful, but the film’s often inelegant, choppy structure also works against that clarity.

The searing images of various gulags, public executions, and private beatings will not be easily forgotten.

A fascinating metacommentary courses beneath the film’s emotional storytelling surface.

The film’s unique blend of deadpan and absurdist humor, and its tendency to occasionally push the boundaries of good taste, shows that Emma Seligman is comfortable working on both ends of the comic spectrum.

If your hook is the promise of seeing Jason Statham go mano a mano with prehistoric sea behemoths, then leaning into the ludicrous is the only way to go.

It achieves the rarest of feats of any tentpole Hollywood release, animated or not: gleefully matching exhilarating stylistic experimentation with a multi-tiered narrative of equal ambition.

Christophe Honoré’s film tackles grief in a subtle, intriguingly indirect manner.

With Beau Is Afraid, his third and easily most ambitious feature to date, Ari Aster traces, to more cosmic and absurd ends, how tragedy is birthed by, well, birth itself.

The film brims with authenticity and the electrifying emotional intensity of the best melodramas.

The film comes down to a draw between its flashes of brilliance and its missed opportunities.

At its core, 20 Days in Mariupol is a testament to the citizens of Mariupol.

There’s enough sardonic humor to keep the proceedings edgy enough, but it’s hard not to wish that the filmmakers would’ve taken a cue from their eponymous villain and really pushed things past the boundaries of good taste.

Because of Chinonye Chukwu’s willingness to let small-scale, ancillary scenes play out unhurried and at length, Till taps into to a deeper well of emotions than most biopics.

Funny Pages eschews the platitudes and carefully scripted character arcs that often cause coming-of-age tales to feel not only predictable but coated in a sheen of nostalgia.

George Miller’s film is a passionate exploration of how image-making is inextricable from storytelling.

Dean Fleischer-Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On convincingly proves that bigger sometimes is better.

Emergency is uneven, but it’s grounded by dynamic performances and a vivid portrayal of the minutiae of friendship.

Rarely have Michael Bay’s frenzied stylistic tics been so effectively intertwined with the substance of one of his films.

The film works magic by embracing excess, finding a kind of harmony and possibility within it, and reminding us of the beauty and lunacy of the human experience along the way.

The film poignantly draws a straight line from the economic anxieties of the past straight to the present.

Throughout You Won’t Be Alone, writer-director Goran Stolevski rejects the slickness that defines so-called elevated horror.

Watcher gives a feminist twist to a throwback genre, but never does its topicality dilute its gripping suspense.

This period drama manages the difficult task of speaking to our current moment without being didactic or preachy.

For all of the film’s visually striking action and musical set pieces, it’s the generosity of spirit with which it approaches the modern teenage experience that’s its most impressive attribute.

Encanto doesn’t steer away from the inevitable happy ending one expects from most animated films geared toward children, but it subverts expectations by bringing humanity to even its most flawed characters.

The film persuasively sheds light on the grievances of the Palestinian people that have long fallen on deaf ears.

The film upends the clichés that practically define the ghost story in surprising and intriguing ways.

The film’s gore is just as likely to invoke fear as to serve as a killer punchline to one of Rodo Sayagues’s set pieces.

Arie and Chuko Esiri’s film is understated in its attunement to the challenges of trying to escape a stagnant existence.

Eytan Fox’s film is a low-key observance of two men finding the beauty in each other’s mysteries and contradictions.

Ed Helms and Patti Harrison’s wonderful rapport helps to keep the film grounded in the recognizably real.

While the film certainly lays out the dangers of technology run amok, it also sees its power to connect people.

Maria Sødahl’s considers the extreme emotions provoked by a medical emergency with an impressive force of clarity.

Art, commerce, and immigration are inextricably bound in Kaouther Ben Hania’s playful and gently moving, if uneven, film.

The film weaves together the stories of five mostly nonverbal autistic teens to present a rich tapestry of the autistic experience.

There are enough left turns here to allow us to shake the impression that we’ve been to this rodeo before.

The documentary may be the defining portrait of the dawning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The documentary dives down the rabbit hole to chillingly, comprehensively expose how algorithms can perpetuate bias in often unforeseen and unjust ways.

Throughout, Remi Weekes forcefully, resonantly ties the film’s terror to the inner turmoil of his characters.

Darius Marder’s film captures, with urgency and tenderness, just how enticing the residue of the past can be.

The film is ultimately too tidy to embrace anything truly startling or unexpected, either stylistically or narratively.

Chaitanya Tamhane gives full dimension to the rich, complex, and sometimes contradictory nature of the relationship between disciple and guru.

That the democratization of the internet has opened a doorway for fascist ideologies to openly quash democratic ones is an irony that isn’t lost on the film.

A taut genre exercise that delivers enough surprises and cleverly timed bits of humor for its sometimes familiar, uneven narrative beats to play an original tune.

The film is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a world where emotions are accessed and revealed primarily through digital intermediaries.

The film’s devotion to the belief that kindness can be a balm for almost any hurt is deeply moving.

The film gives palpable expression to the sense of hopelessness felt by those who fall under the control of cults.

The film vibrantly articulates all that’s lost when people are held under the draconian decree of warlords.

The film speaks lyrically to a peoples’ determination to find a meaningful way to live in a rapidly changing modern world.

The film is suitably direct, clear-eyed, and exhaustive in documenting the massive impacts that gerrymandering has, particularly on communities of color.

It’s within the murky realm of self-doubt and spiritual anxiety that it’s at its most audacious and compelling.

The film is at its best when it’s focused on the euphoria and tribulations of its central couple's love affair.

Beginning with the reversed names in its title, the film announces itself as a distinctly feminine spin on the Grimm fairy tale.

The film is at its best when its focus remains on Ivins’s fierce commitment to her ideals and willingness to speak her mind.

Milko Lazarov seems driven to record the inner workings of a singular slice of Inuit culture before it goes the way of the reindeer.

The film more or less keeps things efficiently moving, wringing white-knuckle tension less through jump scares than from the darkness of a seemingly infinite void.

The film’s improvisational feel helps to ground a fable-esque narrative in a discernible reality.

Jay Maisel’s former home suggests a bastion of creativity in a neighborhood whose rough edges have been completely sanded down.

The film captures a man haunted by his past mistakes and nearly certain that he doesn’t have the time left to begin making up for them.

Tom Harper’s film empathetically probes the growing pains of self-improvement.

The film plays like a mixtape of various sensibilities, partly beholden to the self-contained form of the bildungsroman; surely it’s no coincidence that a James Joyce poster hangs in the background of one scene.

Keith Behrman’s film comprehends the malleable, often inscrutable nature of desire.

The film has a raw immediacy that can only be achieved when most cinematic excesses have been eliminated.

Joe Cornish’s film is vigilant in its positivity and hope for the future at nearly every turn.

Writer-director Joe Chappelle’s An Acceptable Loss is a B movie with a morally urgent message.

While the film’s perception of the politics of the jungle is often profound, the same cannot be said of its take on the human world.

The film's verité approach risks humanizing Abu Osama, but we eventually gain a complex understanding of the banality of his evil.

The film is less hagiographic than most documentaries of its kind, which isn't to say that Tom Volf's adoration of his subject is ever in doubt.

The film is most interested in homing in on the ways Nadia Murad's fragility and self-doubt arise as collateral damage from her fame and steadfast activism.

Sadie remains a clear-eyed portrait of maternal love, teenage turmoil, and the singular type of tight-knit bonds formed, out of necessity in many cases, in low-income communities.

The film begins as a cheeky retro chamber drama before morphing into an often expectation-busting blend of noir and pitch-black comedy.

The filmmakers’ ability to seamlessly explore rapidly shifting Chinese cultural norms within the context of the classic trope of a mother who’s hostile toward her son’s partner is the film’s most impressive feat.

As nimble as Aneesh Chaganty is in presenting his main character's multi-faceted interaction with technology in the first hour, the film suddenly morphs into a generic and manipulative missing-person thriller.