Derek Smith

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.

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.

Economic anxiety is rarely spoken about in the film, but the life-and-death importance of dollars and cents is felt in every frame.

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

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

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 creates a deeply rooted sense of realism that contrasts the austere, surreal illustrations.

Jarmusch playfully blurs the line between driver/passenger, servant/customer, and native/immigrant, presenting these divisions as virtually meaningless social constructs which merely breed unnecessary contempt.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Emmanuel Gras resists pitying or sentimentalizing his main subject, or exalting him merely for his resilience in the face of such a harsh, uncaring reality.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

With a surprisingly compassionate eye, the film susses out the comic and tragic elements borne from the daily struggle of living with autism.

For all of Buck and the Preacher’s serious attempts to function as a revisionist western by centering Blacks in the narrative and examining the critical role they played on the frontier, it’s also a wildly entertaining film.

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.

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

Hounds of Love builds to a crescendo that earns its emotional catharsis while staying true to its roots as a truly chilling and intense thriller.

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

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

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

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

It's unsettling and disconcerting in its complex examination of the gray area that lies between the morals we conceptually hold and the actions we’re willing to perform to affirm those beliefs in the world.

David Gordon Green zeroes in on the intricacies of Jeff Bauman and Erin Hurley's dysfunctional relationship, offering up an unassuming portrait of wounded love and solitude reminiscent in its sense of detail of the filmmaker's early work, like All the Real Girls.

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

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.

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

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.

This beautiful presentation of Vittorio De Sica’s fantastical portrait of poverty and human fortitude helps make the argument that the film is more than just a curio in neorealist history.

The film is a meticulous examination of how the dehumanization of Australia's native population bred an environment of cyclical violence and mistrust.

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

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

It captures the strength of Fred Rogers's convictions even as his gentleness and sincerity fell further out of favor.

Cinema has rarely mined the consequences of being a child of a Holocaust survivor and Big Sonia adeptly explores how, in many cases, losing much of one's family led many survivors to put undue pressures on their future children.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The film’s depiction of life impacted by urban transformation conjures a palpable aura of entrapment and helplessness.

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

Everything in I Wanna Hold Your Hand is pushed right up to the breaking point of absurdity. The lunacy of pop-culture infatuation is lent the undying fervor of a fever dream.

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

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

Joseph Kosinski's Only the Brave displays a kinship to Howard Hawks’s hard-nosed, old-fashioned pragmatism.

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

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

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

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

The Train makes unmistakably clear to us that heroism isn’t always black and white—that sometimes it’s simply about doing what’s right even if you don’t understand why.

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

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.

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

It casually lays out the domestic space where the story’s events takes place with acutely detailed cultural specificity.

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 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.

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

As Virginia grapples with her inner demons, as well as a memory loss that leaves her disoriented and unsure of who she can trust, The Snake Pit periodically transcends its archaic psychological trappings to become an empathic examination of a woman battling both the internal and external forces that seek to fully erase her sense of self.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Throughout, director Masaaki Yuasa’s imagination runs so wild that it becomes impossible to resist.

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

The film never quite pushes beyond the archetypal nature of its scenario to fully unearth its characters’ psychological turmoil.

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

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

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

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.

The Hunter’s Prayer packs its brisk 85 minutes with an impressive array of car chases, gun fights, hand-to-hand combat, and foot pursuits, all cut with a precision and an economy that heightens the impact of every hit.

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

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.

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

Walking Out is modest in scope, its concerns limited to man’s attempts to live both morally and harmoniously with nature.

It's anchored by a pair of dynamic, intuitive performances which mine the psychological complexities of an understandably troubled relationship.

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

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.

Upgrade is most effective when mining the comical and bizarre love-hate chemistry between Grey and Stem and pairing that singular conflict with batshit-crazy action, but the film’s follow-through is clunky and unfulfilling.

Lin Oeding’s action thriller thrives on both the beauty of its natural, snowbound surroundings and the brutal instincts of man.

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.