G. Allen Johnson

An exquisite achievement.

In watching Ava, a visually inviting and sharp portrait of teenage life in Iran, one must admire how writer-director Sadaf Foroughi was able to play her own tune in life.

The linchpin is Johnson, who turns in a vulnerable yet confident performance as an always chill woman who might be too willing to make a relationship work, a role she’s mastered since starring in the “Fifty Shades” trilogy.

The most passionate love affair in The Souvenir is with film. Hogg utilizes an almost cinema verite style, with a visual look of the grainy kind of 16mm film an ’80s film school student would work with. Her style is reminiscent of early Olivier Assayas or Éric Rohmer’s “The Green Ray” (1986), an acknowledged influence.

The absorbing rags-to-riches-to-rags story — a must for any classic film fan — is told in The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, directed by Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri.

When explored by writer-director Mike White’s expert, soulful script, Brad, against all odds, becomes a sympathetic figure, and the film itself achieves a sort of poetry.

The Boy and the Heron is unquestionably a personal vision, with its own internal logic. It has a direct conduit with the mind of its creator, who happens to be a genius and one of the best to ever do it. If this is it for Miyazaki, well, what a finish.

Aided by sumptuous cinematography (Eduard Grau), a haunting score (Alberto Iglesias) and eye-popping production design (Inbal Weinberg) – there’s always a font of interior decorating ideas in an Almodóvar film – Martha’s journey toward the great unknown has everything but a light at the end of the tunnel.

This movie has everything but Humphrey Bogart, and I'm sure he's sorry he was unavailable.

Leigh has a gift for demonstrating character from the outside in.

There isn't a whole lot of fancy subplotting, just a potpourri of funny and engaging characters.

Classic in feel and loaded with sumptuous performances.

A work at once detached and thrillingly intense, an experience where intellectualizing turns to a raw emotion so overwhelming, unexpected in its power, that you sit in your seat as the end credits roll, unable to move.

A warm-hearted valentine to old traditions in China that are being obliterated by modern - and admittedly more efficient - technology.

It's a more intelligent and dimensional epic than, say, "Anna and the King." Emperor is worth every single penny.

A guilty pleasure and one of the best films of the year.

A crowd pleaser that caters to our horror of totalitarianism, our love of personal freedom, our belief - justified or deluded - that knowledge is a powerful tool and that access to information is a God-given right.

The only film sequels in history that just keep getting better.

In a way, The Eel is very much like Black Rain, and nearly as great. Both deal with an emotionally shattering aftermath, and both question mankind's ability to overcome its many weaknesses.

The dialogue is hip, natural and observational.

A grand, old-fashioned movie of spies and Communist repression.

Happy Together is Wong's most fully realized work. It is a pleasure to watch an interesting mind feel his way, and the result is something more than just a passing fancy.

A weird, wonderful and funny work that stands as a true original. As if that weren't enough, director and co-writer Anderson has given Bill Murray his best role in years.

Salles' solid narrative is only deceptively simple; there is a lot of dimension and depth to this gentle, sometimes painful portrait of two wanderers.

I'm not sure all of this works out as convincingly as Anderson intends in the movie's somewhat unsatisfying ending, but getting there is a wickedly enjoyable journey.

The Coens haven't been this sharp, focused and fluid since their first film. This is "Blood Simple's" promise fulfilled.

Austin is funny, extremely funny, because he is so ridiculous, and because Myers is a brilliant mimic who, like Martin Short, knows how to do ridiculous.

May be the funniest movie about parental and spousal abuse ever made.

Sean Mullin’s documentary It Ain’t Over is literally inside baseball. The film is essentially a Berra family project, an attempt to rehabilitate the professional reputation of someone who often doesn’t get his due as a player.

Wenders structures the film episodically, so characters, such as a goofy co-worker, a homeless man and a suddenly appearing relative, come and go from Hirayama’s life. Thus the story relies on Yakusho to carry this movie, and that he does.

A movie that features rich Mexican American characters and an uncompromising story line is always timely.

It’s nothing groundbreaking, just good-humored bloody action directed at a frenetic pace, clocking in at about an hour and a half. Sometimes you need a little bit of fun, and Boss Level delivers.

Pigossi, star of the Brazilian Netflix series “Invisible City,” neatly avoids wallowing in Lourenço’s misery and instead finds a humanity one can root for. It’s a powerfully emotional performance that lifts all boats in this picturesque drama.

Especially terrific is Rieger, who is a 25-year-old rising star in Israel. She displays a fierce intensity and an appealing vulnerability, and here’s betting that if she chose to, she could follow Gal Gadot’s path from Israel to Hollywood stardom.

It lacks the more sublimely simple fun of another recent three-decades-plus comedy-horror sequel, “Hocus Pocus 2.” It’s just so much busier. But Burton does recapture a bit of his youthful verve. So do Keaton and Ryder, both experiencing recent career renaissances.

Even without containing a modern frame of film, “Apollo 13: Survival” seems current, even without the coincidence of Americans stranded in space.

While Pixar doesn’t exactly alter the chemistry here, Hoppers is energetic and fun.

Fortunately, director Thor Freudenthal (“Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters”) eventually finds some truth, thanks to an exceptional cast headlined by two rising dynamic young actors, Charlie Plummer and Taylor Russell.

But then, just when it appears the race is lost, Steve James' love for his character and art form kicks in and wins the day, and, though flawed, Prefontaine is an engrossing portrait of a complex figure.

The best part of the film is early on, when Innis Dagg’s story is enlivened by beautiful color 16mm footage she took in the 1950s and ’60s.

McKay doesn’t take sides in the immigration debate, although he is clearly sympathetic of these hard-working young men who experience great indignities to work jobs most of us would not want. His approach is more cinema verite than high-stakes drama. It is almost a gentle, sweet film.

Twilight’s Kiss is a fragile film of quiet moments and tender feelings, and although it runs out of gas near the end, it takes us on an engaging journey.

Phoenix is the perfect instrument for Aster’s bleak and self-destructive view of humanity. Consider “Eddington” a warning.

So there’s a lot going on here, and director Joel Crawford and his teams efficiently keep the story moving along. There’s a wonderful “Flintstones” versus “Jetsons” vibe, the characters are, as usual, appealing.

What makes the movie smart is its refusal to cast Troy, a difficult role well-played by Epino, as strictly a villain. Instead, Mendoza delves into the cycle of violence that can be passed down through generations.

How much of it is true? Well, all of it. It happened, at least in the inner life of an imaginative boy, whose boundless curiosity served as the launching pad for a unique and productive life.

It’s an action and suspense film, and, like Butler’s earlier 2023 flick “Plane,” a good one. Impressive set pieces include a car chase through a small-town bazaar, and a midnight shootout between Tom, outfitted with night-vision goggles, and a helicopter.

Perhaps a bit miscast, and with a penchant for too many double-takes, Perry nonetheless is game.

It is an important work, and a very good one.

It’s punctuated by the landscape of the demon slayers’ past, through their memories. Idyllic lakes and streams; gently falling snow; a small village. “Infinity Castle,” then, is a place of potential redemption and reclamation, of souls and reputations and a sense of one’s inner self.

The Nun II has some interesting ideas and some thrilling sequences.

Wright is perfect, and Edee is an interesting character for her to play, but it’s fair to say that when Bichir first appears he livens up the film considerably. They work well together, and there is an economy of words between the characters that tests both actors’ ability to communicate visually.

Nattiv, working from a sharp script from Nicholas Martin, expertly mixes in documentary footage to convey a sense of the times and the war.

At its heart, it’s a darkly comic drama about a man trained to be a killing machine who must rediscover his own humanity before his daughter loses hers. Along the way, a family of quirky characters is formed.

The movie is nonetheless strongly written, with a game cast. Wu is especially a revelation, with a layered and often moving performance that shows off dramatic chops not seen by many of her fans.

What makes Chemical Hearts so good is it’s unafraid of its feelings. It tackles complicated emotional issues such as depression, suicide, sex and love with a straightforward honesty. For once, a film about young people is completely free of snark and irony.

Jerome and Lopez build an undeniable chemistry that powers the movie, and it wouldn’t work at all unless Jerome wasn’t excellent as well. He is.

I Am Greta does show why she is a powerful voice. The key to her appeal is her honesty and her “innocence,” or as some would say, naivete.

Using movie clips, animation and news footage, Ascher creates his own alternate universe in A Glitch in the Matrix and explores phenomena such as the Mandela Effect, a real-life wonder in which masses of unconnected people claim to “remember” something that is simply not true.

With a sense of eccentric macabre that recalls Roald Dahl and Charles Addams, The Willoughbys arrives on Netflix with a winning, eclectic energy that should have kids — like the animated moppets in the film — bouncing off the walls. In a good way, of course.

Even though the film is by the numbers, it offers younger generations who know nothing of Poitier’s life and groundbreaking work a look at this important actor and activist.

There are so many rich, colorful scenes that it’s a worthy watch just as an ethnographic record of our planet in a moment of time.

Gladstone (“Under the Bridge”), Oscar-nominated for Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is the heart and soul of “Fancy Dance,” which in other hands might have been a noirish thriller. But writer-director Erica Tremblay has something else in mind: a finely crafted drama about a woman and her niece who are unwilling to let the hopelessness of her situation define her.

Bolt tries mightily to make this weighty subject digestible to the average civilian, with some fancy, intricate animated sequences to show us how CRISPR and DNA manipulation work, and while I can’t say I came away from this film being able to coherently explain it, Human Nature works as a glimpse into possible futures and a moral dilemma that doesn’t have easy answers.

A demanding, rewarding (if overlong) and - yes - a personally felt experience.

Radical follows a predictable formula, and Derbez, a major star in Mexico whose last American projects were the Hulu film “The Valet” and the Apple TV+ series “Acapulco,” lifts the material with his typical vibrant energy.

Landscape With Invisible Hand is a bizarre, off-kilter experience that shows us how we are destroying ourselves, no aliens necessary.

While False Positive has lapses in logic and could have a quicker pace in the second half, it fully embraces a bizarre sense of the macabre that is irresistible.

Just to re-emphasize, Relic is not a documentary about dementia, or a medically accurate look at the disease in the way that films such as “Away from Her” with Julie Christie or “Still Alice” with Julianne Moore were. It is a film that springs from the id, from deep-seated fear of a disease we don’t fully understand.

It’s a probing, searching movie by one of the medium’s best American directors whose reach, like his protagonist’s, exceeds his grasp.

Truth be told, the latest Darren Aronofsky film, which Oakland native Charlie Huston adapted from his own novel, is well made and contains terrific performances. It is a true original. But it’s also depressingly soul-killing and nihilistic, with a plot twist that fairly deep-sixes it for this critic.

Decker proudly revels in Lennie’s scattered uniqueness, even as Lennie navigates the minefield of her choices and says some truly kooky things (“I wish my shadow could get up and walk beside me”). YA movies might not be your bag, but if they are, perhaps the NorCal vibe of “The Sky Is Everywhere” will strike a weepy chord.

Although much of the footage is unseen, perhaps the freshest part of Apocalypse ’45 is hearing the veterans debate whether the U.S. should have dropped the atomic bombs, and how America has progressed in the decades since.

An idiosyncratic, oddball movie that is funny and moody.

Naomi Kawase’s films don’t hammer toward arbitrary plot points but flow like water, so “True Mothers” doesn’t unfold like a Hollywood blockbuster, or indeed, even most arthouse films. It courses along softly and confidently, with unexpected ebbs and estuaries.

The cold, efficient and really British spy thriller stars a marvelous Michael Fassbender (“The Killer”), a sly Cate Blanchett (“Tár”) and an underused but most welcome Pierce Brosnan, who all help overcome a ridiculous premise.

The most lethal weapon is de Armas herself. She twirls through “Ballerina” with a bone-crunching tenacity. Her and the stunt team more than earned their pay with every kick, chop, punch and glass-smashing body hurl.

This is an irresistible throwback to not only old-school horror, but old-school television.

A good, strong movie, but never threatens to be great. One salivates at the adventurous directions the film could have explored.

Despite its outlandish conceits, it is grounded in sisterhood. As bloody as it is, the pain the girls dish out to each other is nothing compared to the trauma they’ve experienced.

Young Hearts is a film that doesn’t traffic in big plot twists or dramatic reveals. It’s a film that treasures fragile thoughts and feelings, rare in a film these days.

Visually, Bi is already a master. There are amazing shots that recall Tarkovsky (especially “Stalker,” an acknowledged influence), or early Wong Kar-Wai.

Misses some creative opportunities to really drive this story home, but it's a naturally haunting story nonetheless.

About as warm, pleasing and inviting as a film about divorce, infidelity and terminal cancer can be.

Still, I Am Woman, while it doesn’t roar, effectively tells Reddy’s story and speaks strongly about the women’s movement and the struggle that continues.

Midnight Traveler gets the bulk of its humanity from little Zahra and Nargis. The resilience of children is often amazing, and near the end of the film, when they play in the snow for the first time, you get a glimpse of hope for their futures.

The strength of Fauci is its underlying theme, which is really not about Fauci at all. Hoffman and Tobias jump back and forth in time, from the AIDS to Ebola to the COVID years, and surreptitiously a portrait emerges of the uneasy relationship between the scientific community, the general public and the political establishment.

If you know the Dracula legend, you know what comes next. “Nosferatu,” which also was remade by Werner Herzog in 1979, is therefore somewhat predictable. But the images and performances are so riveting that it doesn't matter.

After watching Spaceship Earth, which was completed before the coronavirus pandemic, one can’t help but think about the current experiment conducted by Biosphere 1. As smog clears across urban landscapes due to stay-at-home orders, the vision — and the warnings — laid out by Biosphere 2 remain relevant.

While “André Is an Idiot” serves as a great reminder to schedule some basic health screenings, it also explores how best to find the quality of a life when its quantity is clearly defined.

This is a funny and moving crowd-pleaser — a South by Southwest and Sundance selection, it won the audience award at the Napa Valley Film Festival and was an opening night film at S.F. IndieFest — and it goes down easy.

Directed by Everardo Gout, The Forever Purge is non-stop action, which is fine because the script by series creator James DeMonaco, who directed the first three films, never plumbs the depths of its clever concept. The intense, appealing performances by the lead actors get us through.

Polly Findlay’s adaptation of Bernard MacLaverty’s 2017 novel is a serious attempt to delve into a complex marriage, and fortunately for such heavy material it contains two winning performances from Manville (so delightful in “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris”) and Hinds (“Is This Thing On?”).

Bong has an original vision and a distinctive style that’s not to be dismissed. He’s our era’s Terry Gilliam, where hope pushes through the tragicomic nihilism.

They Cloned Tyrone can be heavy-handed times and runs a bit long, but the committed performances of its plucky triumvirate of stars go a long way toward the fun.

The weird thing about the films David Mamet has directed is that they have about as much emotion as a cyborg in a science fiction movie, yet by the end of the picture it isn't necessary; by then the audience has supplied their own.

The Space Race is an illuminating, absorbing film about an underreported storyline in our astronaut programs.

There is a point of view here, a rather strong one. It may sound like slight praise, but Love Jones is a movie that is exactly what it wants to be, and that's an achievement in a homogenized, test-marketed vanilla-movie landscape.