Derek Smith

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

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.

More times than not, the film’s bursts of humor clash awkwardly with the far more frequent attempts at gravitas that the filmmakers strive for when our protagonist is in battle or engaged in political discussions.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Like other gender-swapped films in recent years, The Hustle plays the identity politics game as an end in itself.

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.

This unfocused, awkwardly paced film never quite gets off the ground and, as a result, will do little to change perceptions of the Korean War as the “forgotten war.”

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

Edoardo de Angelis's coming-of-age portrait is poignant when fixated on the intricacies of a complicated sisterhood.

Song Sung Blue is content to pendulum-swing from triumph to tragedy and back again with all the self-control of a drunk driver.

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.

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.

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

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.

From its rigorous and deliberately distancing structural gambit to its restless stylistic experimentations, Thirty Two Short Films proves that biopics needn’t color within the lines to effectively portray their subjects.

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

In the gradual development and expansion of the Wickaverse, the filmmakers seem to have lost the thread of what makes the first and, at times, second film in the series work so well.

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

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

Endless Poetry eventually, like young Alejandro, opens itself up to the world in all of its beauty and complexities.

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.

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

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

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

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

The film’s threads of personal loss and cultural friction are all but lost amid the tawdry romantic entanglements.

There are only so many monster-centric jokes to be made before they become toothless, and only so many ways to preach tolerance before it sounds more like blunt moralizing.

Martin Campbell’s film never shakes off its familiarity, and as such seems destined to, well, be lost to public memory.

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

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 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.

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.

Rarely has a film used its foreknowledge of a happy ending as a reason to remain so uncritical and incurious of its central subject.

Pearl is ultimately an empty exercise in style masquerading as a character study, and for as fantastic as Mia Goth is, her performance mostly succeeds at making Ti West’s homages just a little bit easier to stomach.

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.

In Marlo, Diablo Cody has created her most complicated character to date. Would that her writing displayed similar richness and empathy in painting the film's supporting characters.

The film takes aim at myriad targets and bluntly satirizing them in disparate styles that never mesh into a cohesive whole.

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 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.

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

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.

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

Though Duke’s film lacks the warmth and humanism of Something Wild, it’s possessed of a similarly idiosyncratic edginess.

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

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

Aside from further vilifying the Nazis, the film's ideological endgame remains a bit too slippery.

Whenever its main characters are pulled apart, the movie magic, in every sense of the phrase, dissipates, leaving us with a bland, derivative action-comedy that’s never quite as funny or thrilling as it thinks it is.

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

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.

Gilbert exposes a wealth of unsuspected pain and tenderness beneath Gottfried's often thorny exterior.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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 seems far more interested in celebrating a short-lived era of artistic invention than interrogating it.

Peter Sollett’s coming-of-age comedy betrays rather than upholds the values of the very kids it wants to revere.

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

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

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.

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.