Gregory Nussen

It would be an understatement to say that Dead Lover is unusual. It may be more accurate to call it entirely novel.

Sender is not the easiest watch. An anxiety-driven nightmare, Goldman's film doesn't just examine surveillance habits and the cycle of supply and demand, but our relationship to these things and the comfortable embrace of addiction. This is where Julia Day (Severance's Britt Lower) lives, and to help us understand what it's like to be inside her head, Goldman and editor Marco Rosas cut with dizzying alacrity, snapping space and time like a folded belt.

Wheatley is such a strong technician that the film easily rises above its, well, normalcy, to become something much more distinct.

Einbinder, who is about to enter into the last season of Hacks, for which she has won an Emmy award, turns in a magnificently dialed-in, heart-forward and honest performance. Theroux has rarely been this funny and he somehow makes what could be a cartoonish character feel believable and sympathetic. Reynolds and Gluck equally bring forth gravitas to two roles which are tricky for any actor in that neither character is particularly open with who they are, nor where they want to go. And yet their lives feel written all over their faces. It's one of the best ensemble performances of the SXSW festival.

From top to bottom, Brian just really works. It knows what game it's playing and does it with grounded honesty and the kind of blistering comedy that can only emanate from a truly genuine place.

This may well be Fanning's best performance to date, an intricately laced characterization of someone who is as filled with determination and dignity as she is by indecision. As Wendy, Fanning has a special way of presenting someone that can be both open and closed in equal measure: smiling through difficulty, forceful and righteous when angry, light and airy when experiencing joy.

Power Ballad continues Carney's long run of success with yet another charmer. Of course, it's easy to charm when you have Paul Rudd as your center.

It is, ultimately, a film completely uninterested in subtlety. That's both to its credit and to its detriment.

Lord & Miller's film is a remarkable achievement.

Despite its outward sullenness, The Projectionist is so well observed in its smaller moments that it contains within it an unusual kind of hope.

It's a deliriously perfect, laugh-a-second satire.

If Heated Rivalry could help with queer representation in sports, perhaps Youngblood could help crack the foundation of racism in hockey.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's second feature is an explosive representation of social disruption. A screaming cry of a film, The Bride! utilizes its literary and filmic influences - Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Bartleby, Bonnie & Clyde - to belt a clarion call against upper-crust hedonism, police complicity, violence against women, and the patriarchal system that binds them all.

Daniel Chong's film isn't perfect, but it reaches such a strange fever pitch of hilarity and political prescience that it demands respect.

The Napa Boys is best enjoyed like a California wine road trip: you can be vaguely aware of the territory, but it's more fun to just ride along its peaks and valleys. When the film hits, it really hits.

It's a beautiful film that entertains in as much measure as it deconstructs an often untouchable icon, making him seem more human, and thus, more impressive.

Ghost Elephants is an almost diaristic documentary, eschewing normal pathways for a more esoteric exploration of survival, science, intuition and mortality.

The Bluff is a rollicking throwback to the swashbuckling action of old. It is brutal and inventive enough to wash over its derivative narrative.

Sometimes the central metaphors of the film are so cleanly didactic they risk becoming preachy, but, more often than not, the film tilts in such inventive ways that recognition only breeds appreciation.

It's an underdog story — sorry, under-goat story — for a new generation that is ready for a new, more inclusive kind of game.

What's most fascinating about The Friend's House is Here is that it makes its protest heard through a story that remains adamantly vivacious for nearly its entire runtime.

Brought to life by yet another astounding performance by Olivia Colman and exquisitely shot and designed, Wicker's treasure is in its hopeless romanticism that insists that pure love and adamant individuality can create irrevocable progress through osmosis.

A soft and gentle hug of a film, one that reifies life's most sacred values while retaining the essential mystery behind our most pressing questions.

A clarion call from across space and time, like a message in a bottle, its very existence is a wild gift.

An essential doc that reveals the origins of her singular voice with exceeding warmth and vulnerability.

Carousel is a moving romance in all the ways it isn't romantic.

What makes The Invite ultimately so special is its unabashed honesty, even when it means doom.

The Incomer is a sweet and charming adult fairy tale whose primary characteristic, a twee and cheeky sense of humor, is both its appeal and its achilles' heel.

Wilson showed with his television series just how life-affirming it can be to just observe, and, with his triumph of a feature doc, he shows us how merely looking around can reveal entire histories.

Shyne is less concerned with a unified story, instead dipping in and out of her subject’s lives and in the process giving us a much more involved experience of a fading subculture.

Underneath its story of the sudden animation of household products is a layered critique of late-stage capitalism, a plea for the humanity of queer folks, a rebuke of the erasure of history and of memory, and a challenge against traditionalism which holds back a people from necessarily breaking free, to the next stage of life.

Its bizarre blend of genre and tonality comes together in an altogether surprising way; a labyrinth of ceaseless pleasures.

The magic of DaCosta's film is that it tells us that, regardless of who you are, what we're all searching for is the same thing: community, and a place to call home.

Hersh and Poitras fit together like hand in glove. Exceptional warriors for absolute truth and justice, both have made careers out of exposing systemic abuses of power in ways that have often made them enemies of the state - and yet, both have been granted unusual access to the truth.

Through form and function, Abbas demonstrates the ironic and contradictory nature of his very enterprise, as the temporal fixity of the photograph clashes with the persistent movement of a migrant constantly pulled in multiple directions.

Despite this being a film billed as "samurai versus cannibals," it is actually at its best before the fighting begins.

Resurrection is both testament to the importance of storytelling, as well as the dangers of falling too far within its rabbit hole. But with stories as wrenching and images as evocative as these, why not jump in?

At turns heartbreaking in its acuteness, at others exhilarating in its access to the dangers of pleasure, Djukić's is a rare kind of coming-of-age film. It is langorous in delivery, yet fast like lightning when it lands.

In some ways, the film's hollowness allows it to circle back upon itself and become a pure expression of adrenaline.

This uncommon image of survival accentuates the devastation of loss. Fatma is just one victim; what other worlds have we lost with each new death?

We are never not an integral part of this couple's evolving understanding of mortality, art, and partnership.

In its gorgeous animation and stylization of motion blur, Arco pleads us to return to a time when we dreamt about the future as hidden through fluffy clouds and resplendent rainbows.

To put it in a kinder way, Little Amélie is a delicate testament to the power of solidarity and the ability of children to heal wounds across space and time.

Gulner, who has five other writing credits but directs here for the first time, is a sturdy filmmaker with a solid feel for pace and tone. With The Beldham, she has crafted a clever piece of writing whose ending recontextualizes the whole film in a magnetic flash.

With bi-erasure and transphobia both ballooning, I Wish You All The Best comes with a strong message of hope: that you, too, can be an awkward, flailing teen. That awkwardness is not exclusive to those who fit a traditional mold, and that we all deserve a chance to mess up.

The film feels unexpectedly mournful, bringing to life a time that does not exist anymore.

Palestine 36 is beautifully shot and researched, and peppered with historical touches.

Diaz's previous work is both longer, cheaper and mostly in black and white. Magellan is still long, but by comparison, a breeze; it is also clearly expensive and centers a massive global star in what is essentially a biopic. But Diaz's work is subversive by design, a bait-and-switch as a matter of course.

We all need a really good laugh, and Drymon and company deliver.

Director Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab is a shattering docu-film which utilizes a novel mix of real audio and footage with actors' reconstruction in a Herculean effort to make this profound loss even more immediate. Hers is a utilitarian mission: to embed the audience in the sensory experience of being in a war zone without letting them scroll past or swipe to the next video.

Yes is an astonishing protest film whose comedy belies a broken heart.

Miroirs No. 3 is a bucolic, poetic film of simple beauty with light, magical touches about the ability of a stranger’s love.

If cinema does go the way of the dinosaurs someday, it is at least good to know that the limits of its power are still being tested by the likes of Rajamouli, whose work reaches so far outside the frame it seems to magically reach out of the screen itself, into the audience's beating heart.

Left-Handed Girl is ultimately quite optimistic while never succumbing to the saccharine.

It's a breathtaking film from a new visionary of the queer indie scene.

Ultimately, the film is successful in having its cake and eating it too. It is both a tense political thriller and a crackling satire of drunken power. The comedy of the first two-thirds becomes the horror in the last, as these people’s willful ignorance of danger becomes terrifying in its potential repercussions.

The film is so well put together, constructed with such warmth, that it does paper over its own indulgence.

Through the period and genre trappings of a 1970s heist film, Reichardt explores the inherent isolation of staying neutral at a time of ballooning cultural and political unrest.

While the film may thematically point to real-world struggles in the United States, The Twits is mostly an accessible story about the power of empathy in the face of naked evil, all to the tune of about a thousand fart jokes.

Through the amazing array of talking heads Hanks assembles to share their relationship to Candy, we are left with the distinct impression that there just wasn't anyone else like John. A grand man indeed, in a grand documentary to suit him.

It is the type of film that asks for a deeper engagement than it is willing to offer, but Hadžihalilović may just be pulling us into her conception of image-making as a process of self-actualization. If that is the case, the film does well to break from Andersen's tragic tale for something a bit more existential.

That the film is so admirably sex-positive, especially as it is from the too-often silenced perspective of female pleasure, makes it all the more refreshing.

A battle cry of uncompromising political ideals, One Battle After Another is amongst Paul Thomas Anderson's most forceful work.

The film is comic yet vicious and cynically bleak in its portraiture of Japan’s silent plague.

The Amateur is a relaxed and pleasurable throwback to the spy pulp of the 1970s and ’80s, yet told with a (mostly) honest appraisal of the C.I.A.’s ethical failings.

It presents all the complex and seemingly contradictory emotions of a forced life on the road.

Juror #2 casts a morally inquiring side-eye at the American legal system, questioning whether it’s reasonable to convict anyone on the basis of something so fallible as memory.

There’s an alive-ness that emanates from the characters, in large part due to all those visible fingerprints and indentations on their skins—a tactile counterbalance to a story about humanity’s over-reliance on technology.

Rugano Nyoni’s critique of her native country’s gender-based discrimination is as acerbic as it is unforgiving.

Through her use of recreation, Asmae El Moudir suggests that the act of documentary filmmaking can turn historical truths into fiction, in which everyone becomes an active participant.

In its depiction of actors flourishing through artistic struggle, Sing Sing ultimately argues that the most effective liberation happens through the freeing of the body as well as the soul.

June Zero is a tender, if sometimes cynical, portrait of a new country on old land struggling through the growing pains of establishing its presence both to the international community and its own people.

Throughout Power, Yance Ford draws a startlingly clear line from the origins of modern policing as a slave patrol to its present-day iteration.

Though Egoist can sometimes feel overly tidy, there’s something refreshing about its straightforward approach. Consistent with its style, which is so free of ornament, it pursues its themes with a welcome directness.

The soft-pedaled approach to its narrative strands gives the film the feel of an extended TV pilot.

The film instinctively and lucidly shows how sometimes a coming of age can be thrust upon a person against their will.

The Breaking Ice is fixated on intense in-between states that work to separate people from each other and from themselves, as if to say self-acceptance and love aren’t destinations so much as journeys, at once formidable and worthwhile.

Anselm is ultimately an extension of Kiefer’s “protest against forgetting,” as it reminds us that art is an act of remembrance.

In this film of clammy anxiety, the potential of male violence is made to feel as scary as the actual article.

The film is at once a journey of self-actualization and a testament to female solidarity.

Despite Earth Mama’s bleak subject matter, it exudes a beatific warmth, in large part because Leaf takes remarkable pains to dramatize a web of solidarity between a group of Black women alongside her depiction of the very system that disenfranchises them.

This is a theatrical story told in a purposefully and self-consciously theatrical manner.

The film is devoid of serious conflict, yet it hits with unexpected feeling.

The film is a meditative, slow crescendo of wounded feelings and quiet epiphanies.

Air is shot through with an infectious energy, but it’s more poignant for the way that it rhymes the histories of its actors in the public eye with all that Nike’s creatives were struggling to reconcile when they were chasing after Jordan.

Tótem is a film of unexpected beauty, using its main character as a conduit for exploring the quandaries of a family navigating matters of love, heartbreak, class, innocence, and, perhaps most prominently, mortality.

The innocent, it turns out, isn’t a single character but the person inside us all, playing at the version of ourselves we’d rather be.