Eric Kohn

Butt Boy dares you to give it a shot, and operates on the assumption that most people will write it off from the start. It’s hard to believe this movie even exists, but equally worth recognizing that it’s not entirely full of shit.

Yang infuses his earnest, semi-fictionalized story (inspired by his own father’s experiences) with the evocative narrative traditions of modern Asian cinema, from Wong Kar Wai to Edward Yang, resulting in a rich and intimate atmosphere at every turn. While the movie doesn’t achieve the narrative mastery of its influences, Yang’s first feature has a touching emotional through line grounded in authenticity.

If nothing else, the movie makes a strong case for Cox’s astounding resilience, an ability to take even the most routine gig and deepen its potential. It helps that The Etruscan Smile sputters along more than it belly-flops, and stabilizes by the poignant finale.

It’s a stupid movie with deep ambitions, energized by that trippy neon palette, and the occasional hot beat.

The movie provokes the wonder and terror of what it means to live in a world where every resolution brings new questions, and the prospects that a happy ending might carry the greatest risk of all.

While The Salt of Tears threatens to devolve into a sympathetic male gaze with each new turn, Garrel actually manages to burrow within those boundaries and deconstruct their flaws from the inside out.

Petzold remains a master of capturing frantic characters doomed by dark obsessions, and while Undine is certainly a minor work, it still shows evidence of a master’s hand.

The movie has a loose, almost amateurish quality to its production that suggests another rush job from a filmmaker unwilling or unable to slow down. But the movie reveals its deeper layers with time, congealing into a perceptive and often charming bite-sized study of smart women contending with a series of annoying men.

Here and there, Minamata tells a bracing story of corporate malfeasance and bracing advocacy for the underclass, but even the occasional poignant observation can’t salvage a movie trying this hard to tug every heartstring at its disposal.

Guided by Jóhannsson’s ethereal score, this dazzling apocalyptic immersion blends cosmic 16mm black-and-white images of Yugoslavian architecture with a deadpan Tilda Swinton voiceover, resulting in a profound lyrical rumination on the end of days.

While the rules of her conundrum never quite coalesce and some of the twists feel shoehorned, The Intruder generates so much intrigue to maintain a breathless pace and unsettling atmosphere at every turn, with Rives’ layered performance fusing the strange trip together.

DAU. Natasha is haunting and effective, but not always the sum of its parts, and sometimes has a tendency to drag. Even so, the spell lingers long after the credits roll, and the opportunity to consider the many sides of DAU. Natasha is a unique intellectual exercise.

My Salinger Year often trips on the self-serious nature of its premise, and struggles with an antiquated quality out of sync with its timeline, as if trapped between the character’s genuine experiences and her idealized vision of a literary world that doesn’t really exist.

Onward doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but spins it so well that it conjures a spell of its own as a new decade dawns with the Pixar touch intact.

The 2020 Call of the Wild isn’t all-out atrocity so much as a question mark, a formulaic adventure story spruced up with cutting-edge technology in search of a purpose.

There’s certainly enough here to provoke meaningful questions that transcend the boundaries of the frame, and Nine Days hits a commendable note about the value of embracing life’s unpredictable turns. But no matter its celestial implications, the movie can’t shake the impression of a brilliant concept that never takes flight.

At times a bit too enamored of these loose conceits, The Nowhere Inn sometimes registers as a cheap fuck-with-the-audience provocation that might have been better suited for a viral short (or several), but at its finest moments the movie conjures a singular vision steeped in zaniness, but not devoid of purpose.

Guided by Angel Manuel Soto’s slick direction and a breakthrough performance from Jahi Di’Allo Winston, the movie works overtime to energize real-world struggles with the thrill of street life.

The filmmakers illustrate that governmental power is a fickle thing, prone to exploitation and good will alike, depending on who decides to pursue its offices.

If The Nest amounts to an elaborate exercise in style, at least it matches the material. Rory’s obsessions are all surface and no depth. For better or worse, the movie follows him into that void.

It’s a smart and sturdy behind-the-scenes look at a high-profile #MeToo drama, and succeeds at scrutinizing the conundrum facing countless women still afraid of speaking out.

July’s style is at once cerebral and irreverent, but “Kajillionaire” doesn’t always find the most satisfying way to juggle those dueling tones. However, its spell lingers as July’s biggest concepts take root, and the movie turns from tragic to hopeful at an unlikely moment in tune with the artist’s previous works.

Oscillating from intimate father-daughter exchanges to surreal meta-fictional tangents, the movie lives within its riveting paradox, reflecting the queasy uncertainty surrounding its subject’s fate.

The 40-Year-Old Version doesn’t overcome all of its rough edges, but they’re so closely tied to the personality of the creator that it’s hard to shake the underlying appeal.

It makes up for a dry and sometimes stilted filmmaking approach through sheer clarity of purpose.

Crip Camp proves some success stories only grow more powerful with age, and their ability to inspire action is timeless.

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets may not be the straight-faced documentary it looks like, but it’s a sober-eyed document of our times nonetheless.

Director Janicza Bravo’s zany road trip comedy about a pair of strippers on a rambunctious 48-hour Florida adventure embodies its ludicrous source while jazzing it up with relentless cinematic beats.

Bad Hair has plenty to say — about the plight of black women in particular and blackness in popular culture in general — but his movie can’t settle on laughing off the conflict or regarding it with dread. Instead, it settles on lingering in the knotted chaos, hoping that the message still burns.

Perry’s self-produced soap opera scribble is the kind of hilarious so-bad-it’s-good romp in which the man behind the curtain invites his viewers to roll their eyes.

It takes some ambitious swings and works on its own terms in fits and starts, all while not really working at all. Like the T.S. Eliot poems that inspired it, Cats is an elaborate lark.

With emerging rebel leader Rey (Daisy Ridley) providing a sturdy emotional foundation, and billions of Disney dollars fueling an obviously stunning array of special effects, Rise of Skywalker doesn’t squander every opportunity to dial up the thrilling nature of the epic at hand, but all that razzle-dazzle can’t obscure a hollow core.

Bombshell is a lurid, cartoonish romp, marred by rough and sometimes overbearing flourishes, but not without a tragicomic soul. That alone makes it a genuine movie of the moment.

As a cinematic achievement, “Bikram” is fairly tame; as a mass-media call to action, it’s an essential movie of the moment.

Matsoukas’ fast and furious filmmaking doesn’t always click, but it always crackles with purpose, refashioning the lovers-on-the-lam trope into an emotional black-lives-matter lament, and it deserves to be met on those terms.

As a platform for Bilot’s efforts and why they deserve a national profile, the movie has a sincere sense of purpose. It’s a 20-year-old drama that extends into the present, and as environmental concerns continue to escalate, it couldn’t feel more contemporary.

Doctor Sleep shows considerable effort to ingratiate itself to discerning cinephiles, from the moody Newton Brothers score to cinematographer Michael Fimognari’s dark blue nighttime palette; as a whole, the movie conjures an eerie and wondrous atmosphere that blends abject terror with a somber, mournful quality unique to Flanagan’s oeuvre. But his pandering to dueling source material results in a jagged puzzle beneath both of their standards.

An overlong blend of kid-friendly “Game of Thrones” warfare and standard-issue metaphors of intolerance, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil finds plenty of ways to build on the original premise, but few that resonate any better than the last flamboyant ride.

The Irishman is alive with Scorsese’s trademark style.

On the surface, Last Blood may be a mess of B-movie contrivances, but like its world-weary namesake, it’s also a timely window into the vanity of violent solutions, and why brutality is only viable when fighting for a lost cause.

The Kingmaker clarifies the harrowing situation facing the future of the Philippines, but more than that, it’s a warning sign for the entire world.

[A] mesmerizing debut ... Sound of Metal injects visceral, edgy circumstances with remarkable sensitivity.

Harriet doesn’t reinvent the biopic formula, but Erivo’s performance injects a palpable urgency to the material that makes up for missed time.

The movie hovers in a curious paradox, coming across as both operatic tribute and horrific condemnation, but it’s never less than a nasty crime drama with plenty of grimy characters to keep the stakes compelling throughout.

It’s a frantic, unnerving window into Syria’s collapse, and a nerve-wracking thriller that alternates between acts of courage and utter despair; through that paradox, it captures the struggles on the ground in intimate detail.

As directed by Marjane Satrapi, this discursive biopic struggles whenever it cuts away from her drama to explore the bigger picture — with peculiar flash-forwards to a nuclear future — but Pike helps fuse it together.

There’s much to be appreciated about the movie’s energetic pace, and the casting never fails to convince. But Iannucci’s restless scene transitions — rising curtains reveal new scenes, projected images provide in-scene flashbacks, and so on — confuse empty gimmicks for innovative narrative trickery.

Despite some pacing troubles and myriad undeveloped characters, Motherless Brooklyn functions well enough as a throwback to the intelligent, atmospheric studio private investigator dramas to which it tips a velvety fedora, and shows evidence that this dormant genre still has legs.

Yes, Waititi’s sugary fantasy unearths an endearing quality in the most unlikely places. But in the process, it buries the awful truth.

While the movie runs too long and the message grows thin, it’s a sturdy window into the corruption of the judicial process that can send an innocent black man to death row.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood doesn’t reinvent the Rogers mythos, and even its innovative devices fall short of rescuing the material from some of the more obvious revelations. Fortunately, it’s not devoid of payoff.

Once again, Reichardt has crafted a wondrous little story about two friends roaming the natural splendors of the Pacific Northwest, searching for their place in the world. The appeal of this hypnotic, unpredictable movie comes from how they find that place through mutual failure, and the nature of that outcome in the context of an early, untamed America has rich implications that gradually seep into the frame.

A quiet work with major ambitions, The Assistant is a significant cultural statement in cinematic form.

There’s enough potential with the balloon’s feats to justify an entire feature-length experience set within its basket, but The Aeronauts constantly interrupts the journey to shoehorn random tangents on the ground, and busies up the drama with underdeveloped side characters.

The endearing chemistry between these characters and the movie’s breezy tone often clashes with the subject at hand. That creates a peculiar dissonance whenever the movie attempts to dig deep on matters of faith, or the bleaker controversies involving the Catholic Church today.

The Laundromat may be blunt, and the humor hit-or-miss — but it swings wildly at a worthy target, and eventually hits its mark.

Zellweger inhabits the role of the jaded, soul-searching musical icon reasonably well within a dreary and unremarkable saga that finds her grappling with her past, contending with pill-popping addictions and a broken family. It’s a familiar story that Judy struggles to freshen up, at least until Zellweger takes the mic.

If Uncut Gems leaves people rattled, disoriented, grasping for clarity in the chaos of one man’s hectic routine, that all speaks to the sheer precision of a visionary achievement in full control.

While the movie risks smothering the heart of its drama in all the movement and noise, the sheer sensory overload often leads to astonishing bursts of emotional sophistication.

As Vitalina Varela proves, Costa empowers his subjects by framing them as majestic storytellers and letting their stories take charge.

Damon and Bale are such magnetic onscreen figures that it doesn’t take much to inject their various arguments, smarmy asides, and high-stakes bets with plenty of intrigue.

The brilliance of the movie lies in how it starts from a familiar place, then sneaks into transcendence.

Adam may not be above reproach, but its good intentions are infectious.

It’s certainly proof that even dumb movies can endeavor to enlighten the masses, and gels nicely with the broader message: If Hobbs and Shaw can learn to get along, there may be hope for all of us.

As much as the suspense remains in play, its main threat has a certain robotic quality, and the humorless tone doesn’t help.

No matter what form it takes, The Great Hack exists as a giant contradiction sure to evoke strong responses from anyone impacted by its drama, which is basically everyone.

The new movie basically jams the archetypes of a John Hughes teen comedy into a minimalist haunted scenario. While that’s not enough to suppress the underlying gimmickry of the storytelling, Annabelle Comes Home at least manages to charm and frighten its way through the purest distillation of the “Conjuring” formula to date.

Child’s Play at once repudiates Mancini’s franchise by attempting to make it bigger and bolder while falling back on ingredients we’ve seen before, and seen better. While it sets out to skewer the algorithms that could destroy the world, the remake hews to a mechanical formula — and winds up a product of the same tendencies it’s trying to indict.

This is the kind of mad science filmmaking worth rooting for: Aster refashions “The Wicker Man” as a perverse breakup movie, douses Swedish mythology in Bergmanesque despair, and sets the epic collage ablaze. He may not land every big swing, but the underlying vision is hard to shake even when it falters.

Men in Black: International, which launches Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth into a bland variation on the same “MiB” routine, lacks the energy or ambition to make its intergalactic stakes into anything more than baffling cash grab. This misconceived attempt to inject a tired franchise with new life ends up as little more than an empty vessel.

This poignant, minor-key work from the only major filmmaker to carry the torch of silent comedy into the 21st century is rich with feeling, even as it enters a self-reflexive zone that sometimes distracts from the legitimate concerns at its core.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Ferrara movie without some jagged edges. “Tommaso” manages to feel rough and risky while somehow sensitive at the same time, like the best of them.

As a minor work, it provides an enjoyable snippet of rambunctious formalism that puts Noé in a category of his own.

Viewed on its own terms, Running With Beto consolidates the feel-good trajectory of O’Rourke’s run into an engaging package that showcases his galvanizing impact up close.

While the movie’s rough production values and meandering plot never quite gel, Family Romance, LLC is a fascinating convergence of filmmaker and subject, providing the rare opportunity for Herzog to bury his observations in the material at hand.

Tarantino’s desire to salute the creative thrill of storytelling is an inviting, welcome presence in American cinema, and his ninth feature suggests he really ought to work more often. But all the vivid callbacks to antiquated TV westerns and the forgotten characters in their orbit fall short of coalescing into much more than that.

The Whistlers goes down easy and dissipates soon after the credits roll, but with a murky plot in which the heist in question is often beside the point, the accomplishment of the movie lies within what it says about that agreeable flow.

The Dardennes have been the reigning kings of social realism for years, and tell these sort of morality fables on autopilot, but they’re such precise storytellers that even a minor work like “Young Ahmed” manages to deliver tense showdowns riddled with real-world connotations.

You couldn’t ask for a better match between filmmaker and subject.

This sharp two-hander veers from caustic to sweet with acrobatic filmmaking to spare.

It’s a stunning showcase for Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe to unleash their wildest extremes, by positioning them at the center of a two-hander about a descent into madness in the middle of nowhere. It’s the best movie about bad roommates ever made.

It’s not the most polished endeavor ... However, Bloom gives Wye such a dynamic screen presence that she often transcends the boundaries of the material.

The filmmaker’s best and most personal movie in years.

Sorry to Miss You doesn’t break new ground for the filmmaker, but it radiates a timeliness that suggests an old-fashioned Ken Loach lament matters more than ever.

Rather than revealing much about the man behind the music, Rocketman seems more content to hover inside of it, exploring his unique synthesis of blues, rock, and every other relevant genre as a natural extension of his personality.

Diop’s first feature doesn’t always fit together from a narrative perspective, but it musters such an absorbing vision of an alienated seaside life that not everything needs to add up for the atmosphere to take hold.

Director Annie Silverstein doesn’t elevate these conventions to new heights, but understands their potential well enough to craft an absorbing window into marginalized lives.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Dupieux’s outré premise would have worked better as a short, as the unusual narrative struggles to make the scenario palatable even at the bare minimum for a feature-length treatment.

For all these striking moments, Burning Cane can’t shake the feeling of a sketchbook loaded with ideas that could use more fleshing out.

No matter its oddball turns, Kiwi director Ant Timpson’s wild, unpredictable debut manages to deliver a gory hilarious father-son reunion saga with a surprising degree of confidence in the silly-strange nature of the material.

As Endgame sputters to the finish line, it leaves the impression of witnessing a Marvel Movie Marathon compressed to three hours — and 58 seconds, but trust me, they’re disposable — of unbridled fan service.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the 2019 version of Hellboy is busy to an exhausting degree, overloaded with apocalyptic fears, and seemingly endless in its pileup of twists. But it’s hard to read much into a movie less invested in shrewd observations than in stuffing as much lore as possible into 120 minutes.

The movie ... sometimes sags into a lethargic pace and unwieldy tangents. ... But there’s no doubting the presence of a focused, intelligent vision guiding the small-scale material along.

Piponnier dominates every frame, with a mesmerizing screen presence that pushes the drama well beyond its formulaic premise and visible microbudget constraints.

While the pace is spotty and not every joke lands, “Good Boys” manages to be adorable and twisted at the same time.

There was more to Bonnie and Clyde than 'Bonnie and Clyde,' but The Highwaymen falls short of making the case that the good guys had the better tale.

This time, Morris has less command over the edgy material, positioning his modern-day Keystone Cops in a series of smarmy vignettes that don’t cut quite as deep. But it still delivers a scathing and often very funny indictment of homeland insecurities.

The best comedy of its kind since "Superbad," Wilde’s slick, unpredictable romp can sometimes feel like several movies at once. This riotous, candy-colored celebration of sisterhood is so dense with anarchic developments it often threatens to collapse into itself, but avoids lingering on any gag long enough to let that happen.