Gregory Nussen

She Dances seems almost scared of its own premise.

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.

Ultimately, Over Your Dead Body is too messy for its own good. It is unable to settle into any one choice. The repeated motif of flashbacks and plot twists is fun, but not always useful in keeping the ball up.

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.

The film boasts a twee quirkiness in style, but in its narrative, that promise never really comes to fruition. It is, in other words, a much more normal affair than what is promised. In spite of many genuine laughs, that just translates into a disappointing experience.

In between nonchalant murders, Beers, Bacon, and Sedgwick aim for grounded heart-to-heart conversations of a kind that don't exactly feel at home in the movie's otherwise topsy-turvy world. But being that this is a real family that has worked together for decades, their chemistry elevates the somewhat lackluster writing to deliver a pleasurable, if tame experience.

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.

If Ready or Not was a chess match, Here I Come is tic-tac-toe.

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

Perhaps it's fitting that a horror film set around a podcast flits in and out of being engaging, since that's more or less the experience of listening to one, but it doesn't exactly make for a cohesive viewing experience.

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.

To put it simply: it's just not very stimulating to watch two people who have a hard time talking... have a hard time talking. Stella and Gerry's love may be stuck in the wintry cold, but so is the film, utterly unable to be thawed.

It's rare that a film is this devoid of characterization, rarer still that a serial killer horror is this lacking in tension.

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.

Every life is a universe unto itself, and Ricciardi was clearly the kind of unique soul whose spirit enriched everyone around him, but its actually in the margins of this sometimes preening doc that Benna's film really hits its target. When the film rests, it destigmatizes a process that everyone will eventually go through (albeit in a range of ways).

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.

Scream 7 injects nostalgia and self-referentiality like a weak drug, a stash of weed purchased so long ago it has gone so stale it crumbles to the touch.

Despite a series of beautiful gowns worn by Chastain, the film doesn't offer much intrigue nor sociopolitical interest, instead reducing itself to the lowest common denominator by the time it reaches its exceedingly cruel ending.

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

Sykes brings what she can to the proceedings, but there's only so much she can do to make Undercard even slightly distinctive.

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

A surprisingly bland film that somehow manages to dampen even Glen Powell's usual brand of effortless charm, How to Make a Killing is sketched together with thin characterizations, limp commentary and a sluggish pace.

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 to the actors' credit that it works when it does, and what it ultimately posits about marriage is as grossly haunting as it is disturbingly poetic.

Lang really goes for it here, and he sells the material as best as he can, but suffice it to say that Hellfire is only as entertaining as your bandwidth for bog-standard action fare.

This is a purposefully languid movie that proves real, genuine tension can be built without crash landing right on your head. In an era of fast cuts and escalating explosions — the kind that Hemsworth, Ruffalo and Halle Berry all know intimately from their time in Marvel's universe — it is refreshing to watch something this confident in its own particular DNA.

What they cannot ignore is that the film is otherwise still lacking. For all the epithets one could throw out about Wuthering Heights, the most surprising may be that it is an abject snooze, and that its nonchalance about color-specific casting reveals a filmmaker completely insensitive to the implications of race in the late 18th century.

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

The only thing Harlin has done here is to remove the element of surprise. Without that, the film is nothing, nothing at all.

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.

If American Pachuco leaves you wanting more, perhaps that's not a bad thing; Valdez deserves the last word, anyway, and he's not finished.

Its approach is so diffuse that its uncertain and purposefully ambiguous ending is misguided at best.

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.

It's a standard-bearer film, a real fastball down the middle, which hits all of its assumed itinerant emotional beats right on target, without ever really challenging us in any major way.

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.

The Gallerist is a tepid satire. Even calling it such feels generous, as the film is almost entirely devoid of genuine humor.

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

Candy-colored and ebullient, I Want Your Sex is not a bad film, but its hard to think of it positively when we know just how much more effective Araki has been behind the camera. The film is just never sure of what it is.

Waugh knows how to build an action sequence with the best of them, and Shelter is, ultimately, an electric actioner, so long as it is sticking to the action.

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

The circumstances around Audrey and Eli's union (Moon Choi and Son Suk-ku, respectively) is tender, yet forceful, beautiful, yet pained; but the film is otherwise formless, uninspiring and moves like molasses.

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.

None of it works. I'll cut to the quick: The Moment is an unmitigated disaster.

The best parts of Mother of Flies are in the margins. At its most lucid, it tells us that life, death and healing are magic — both of the Western and witchy varieties.

No disrespect to Foy, who showed with The Crown just how capable she is of revealing entire histories through her open visage, but watching her go through the extremely repetitious (and, one supposes, accurate) steps of training a Eurasian Goshawk is exceptionally tiresome. H is for Hawk induces the same effect as taking a sedative.

The process of searching through all manner of cloud-based applications and information in a video-game-like manner is a tantalizing prospect, one just wishes it wasn't done for something so harebrained.

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.

In implicit ways, Deepfaking Sam Altman demonstrates just how out of touch from basic humanity these programs still are, which makes it all the more terrifying when we hear how they are being peddled as tools which can literally decide the fate of human lives.

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

ALL YOU NEED IS KILL is not a film that'll have you scratching your head for meaning. It wears its empathy and its plea for life on its sleeve like a badge of honor. Admirable though that is, that directness does translate into threadbare writing.

Shuffle is a solid primer for a massive subject, and Flaherty's approach is a maddening introduction to a world that needs massive reform.

After its more interesting first hour, the intimate access gets tiresome, and it's hard to say what is gained by being introduced to the personal lives of the members of a notorious hate group.

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.

Overall, the pulpier and the dumber it gets, Primate provides a pretty good reason to get to the theater in January. And, it gets pretty pulpy and dumb indeed.

When Ma focuses on the grounded journey of Sara's fish-out-of-water story and the genuine chemistry between her and Sam, the film sings.

Anaconda aims to be Bowfinger for a new generation but ends up feeling as insipid as the film it is loosely based on. Its target audience is people nostalgic for the salad days of studio blockbusters, who are righteously frustrated with executives for cashing in on material they don't understand.

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?

Silent Night, Deadly Night, is at its best when Nelson remembers how schlocky this material is, and he falters when he tries too hard to take it seriously.

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.

The film is woeful from top to bottom.

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

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Peas and Carrots is amateur on almost every front, and whatever it has to say about finding one's proper role in society is hidden inside some utterly confounding plot devices.

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.

Nearly everything Ritchson and James do in the name of comedy is forced and untethered from reality. Then again, so is the movie, so at least it's consistent.

Heretical or not, it's a captivating story, even when it seems predicated solely on vibes. It's a shame, then, that the film is not as accessible as Jupe is as an actor. The first two acts move like molasses, brimming with allegory that never quite translates off the page.

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.

Bull Run is so devoid of substance that much of it is taped together with ironic usage of stock photos and archival footage, as if to constantly point at the vapidity of its own enterprise.

Even when removed from the implications of his prolific career, there isn't a ton here that gives us an unbridled look into the man's inner life.

Ultimately, the film is far too placid and noncommittal to earn its more moving climax. It's hard to really care about these characters when their stream of decisions seems either improperly motivated or else frustratingly selfish.

Even more than its two predecessors, the film relies on being condescension to sell its so-called magic.

Comedically, the film also falters . . . Nor is there much that is distinctive about the animation style.

Younger children will delight in the film's atmospheric wonder, but older children may be bored by the simple yet nonspecific comedy.

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.

Dan Trachtenberg's third Predator entry is exciting, but also tonally askew in ways that prevent it from hitting its stride.

The revelations of the film, once they come, are admittedly disturbing. But the route to get there is paved with blandness and awkward acting.

With Nuremberg, James Vanderbilt is less interested in showing Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) as "normal," as he is in accentuating Hitler's right-hand man as a charming charlatan. But this intentionality is miscalculated, and the film, bloated as it is with jarring tonal changes and thickly laid-on sentimentality, tilts so far into humanizing Nazis that it seems, at times, to apologize for the behavior of the high command.

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.

The film would've been better served had it stuck to either satire or tense drama, but whatever the case, the climax of Saleh's film is aces and as taut as can be.

The chamber drama of a rich family in collapse is only successful as much as the context within which it exists, and, because that context is as slippery as it is, Anniversary just feels toothless.

The film's best attribute is the romance between Bruce and Faye. White and Young's chemistry is palpable, and Cooper solidly helps us understand why an artist on the verge of overwhelming fame might be interested in a working-class single mother, whose planted smile belies the pain of someone abandoned and bereft. There's a nuance here that the rest of the film sorely lacks and needs.

Perhaps the lesson of the film is that regret is a waste of emotional bandwidth, but regret is easy to feel when the story is a fumbled as this.

The combination of crime film and romantic gothic horror never really gels. It is successful in its invocation of old Hollywood (including a very fun opening credits sequence), and its horror beats are effective, but it doesn't work in total.

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.

What results is an utter slog from start to finish.

The twist is sufficiently tragic, but it is also mawkish. The structure is misguided.

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.

At its best, Mr. K is like being immersed in Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. More often, however, it's like living inside a trash heap.

Petsch and Scipio are both extremely attractive and breezy performers, but, the film is as sputtery as an old car on the fritz, failing to update its cinematic lineage in any conceivably positive way.

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.

This is classic B-movie creature-feature stuff.

Bigelow's film, disconnected as it is from the very people this type of situation would actually harm, is a futile salute towards hope, which unfairly assumes powerful people's positive intentions, underscored here by largely cookie-cutter characters and a lack of complexity.

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.

Thompson and Greer really are extraordinary, however, and their tête-à-tête nearly saves Kirk's enterprise from the doldrums.

What the film does exceedingly well is make us see the inherent irony of moderating online violence to the exclusion of the real-life violence in front of our faces.

In the end, Waltzing with Brando will leave you with more questions about the man than you probably had going into it, which would be interesting enough if Fishman leaned harder into the murky waters of this particular celebrity's mythology. But, like the land upon which Judge tries to build an island escape, the film is in a constant state of drowning under its own ambition.

Unlike the comedy, Ungar does know how to shoot action decently well, and it's in those scenes when the film momentarily comes alive.

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.

Throughout, the filmmakers’ sympathies are lost in a confusing haze of cynicism.

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.

The film isn’t interested in anything that would detract from providing audiences with the sustained pleasure of watching a clock-ticking thriller.

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.

As an anguished cry against colonialism, Pepe works best when illustrating the micro ways in which culture is erased by capital interests.

The witty repartee between Clooney and Pitt feels like the only thing holding the film together.

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.

There’s an elegiac beauty to many of Night Swim’s pool scenes, but everything that surrounds them is leaden, from Wyatt Russell’s comatose performance to the baseball metaphors that have been unsubtly shoehorned into the impossibly routine narrative.

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.

In the end, any attempts that A Haunting in Venice makes at connecting post-war trauma to Halloween and the ability to commune with the dead are non-committal, and the script doesn’t do enough to communicate why any of that matters.

The film never really leans into the farcical possibilities of its premise nor its earnest appraisal of Augusto Pinochet’s legacy.

Thomas Salvador frustratingly never offers a concrete sense of what his character feels that he’s lost, and so we’re tasked with loading meaning onto the character’s journey of apparent self-reclamation.

The film handily invokes the campiness of the iconic Disneyland attraction, if not its kinetics.

As tantalizing as the film’s ambiguity can be in certain moments, there comes a point where it starts to feel at once half-baked and a transparent means of delaying the inevitable.

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

In the end, The Miracle Club is splintered at the seams between its desire to tell an uplifting story of forgiveness and a cheeky tale of patriarchal floundering, all the while doing both a tremendous disservice.

The Line isn’t without its moments of genuine beauty, but it’s difficult to shake that its distinct lack of a clear story hasn’t given enough space to the characters.

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.

Sweet but narratively thin and didactic, the latest from DreamWorks Animation always seems as if it’s trying to find its footing.

This Little Mermaid feels more or less like two-hour-plus cosplay with the texture and gravitas of a Disneyland sideshow.

Being as this is the first of a possibly three-part finale, Fast X’s sense of fun is constantly deflated by all the table-setting.

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 undermines its initial sense of intimacy and momentum with a stop-and-start story structure that by and large exists to make as much room as possible for its characters’ banter.

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

The film bangs the drum loudly on behalf of American exceptionalism.

The film doesn’t have a clear opinion on its main subject and the scourge of misogyny in media.

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.

It simply picks up the baton from the previous film, relying on a series of increasingly nasty, and at times exciting, kills to thrill audiences, while leaving everything in between to feel as fake as its vision of the Big Apple.

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.