Jacob Oller

Though its bold genre gamble and strong lead turn from Maisy Stella keep My Old Ass from the YA slush pile, its feint towards being a more cerebral movie about hope and regret, two opposing forces separated only by time, infects the mediocrity of its more traditional story with disappointment.

Despite a furiously alpha-male James McAvoy raging through the movie—nearly making this new take into an enjoyable, scareless, hoot-and-holler romp—Blumhouse’s hollowed-out remake undermines its nasty source material with its Americanized sheen.

Throughout its examination of memory, identity, passion, and, of course, the movies themselves, Close Your Eyes is senescent cinema, defined by its maker’s age and by its preoccupation with how your priorities ebb and flow as you grow old.

The Deliverance is alternatingly dull and totally nuts. It is never scary, and only sometimes holds your attention.

The film can’t stop splitting the difference between dissonant remnants of Woo’s baroque sentimentality (Zee lighting a candle for each life she takes) and snarky Hollywood action idiocy.

At Borderlands’ best, we see some nice concept art, divorced from the movement or humanity of cinema. At its worst, we see some poor saps clearly wandering through unreality, stuck in a CG hackjob not quite as convincing as a Spy Kids sequel.

Mäkelä can capture something real about queer nightlife, shooting evocative moments at a drag king show, but that ability only makes you wish he’d abandon his main character—or at least let him mature a bit before subjecting us to him.

Writer/director Rich Peppiatt’s film has a harder time connecting its stylish music video silliness with drama that meanders and a political message that repeats like it’s stuck on a cheap turntable.

Precisely crafted and just odd enough to disarm you, allowing its evil to fully seep in, Longlegs is a riveting tale of influence and immersion.

The veteran-comes-home revenger Trigger Warning is thoroughly idiotic and deathly slow, filled with so much ugly camp that it could stand in as the first Lifetime Original action movie.

As Potrykus’ unromantic Midwestern losers mature, so too does his filmmaking. But Vulcanizadora still feels like a natural progression of his slime-slacker milieu: At the movie’s heart, there’s still a ridiculous and upsetting idea, thrust upon desperate members of the lower-middle class, seen through to its tragicomic conclusion.

Furiosa is a film well-planned and deeply dreamed.

When Power sticks to its experts, its case is compellingly assembled, its points lucidly made (backed up with archival images) and its unspoken importance undeniable.

While the youth are still game to rebel, the film’s calculated spontaneity leaves its travelers stranded in search of something real, an ironically contrived quest whose very undertaking undermines its goal

What initially feels like a budget presentation about the issues of being stuck in space and several proposed solutions (explored at various lengths) ends up feeling both too structured and, eventually, too scattered for its fascinating yet still speculative subject matter.

Thanks to Gosling—playing his role like his schmuck detective from The Nice Guys accidentally found himself in a Mission: Impossible—the film breezily flits between a savvy behind-the-scenes pastiche and a committed action rom-com.

Writer/director Chandler Levack finds uncommon honesty in this Canadian video store employee and those he chafes against, even if the coming-of-age story eventually falls into some of the more palatable pitfalls its strident star would rail against.

Writer/director Minhal Baig’s ‘90s coming-of-age drama is one of realistic warmth, rumbling hopes and roadblocks jutting up in front of children whose very existence is defiant.

A fresh take on how our hyper-connected world observes catastrophe would rightly pick at this scab. But Alex Garland approaches this modern hopelessness with impersonal detachment, dreaming up an empty war filmed for no one.

It’s a funky, janky, raw piece of autobiography, masquerading as the only thing the film industry makes anymore: A superhero movie. The riotous and weaponized result is everything the corporate use of the Joker isn’t, and everything it could be.

A return to form for writer/director Ivan Sen—an Indigenous Australian filmmaker whose 2013 movie Mystery Road, its sequel and its miniseries spin-off all deal with similar subject matter—this cold-case thriller hacks through its genre clichés and Christian symbolism early so we can appreciate its charming, somber core.

Thanks to its commitment to the ‘70s made-for-TV bit, ever-escalating stakes and nervously swaggering lead performance, the ratings ploy from Hell finds substance inside its shtick.

Monkey Man is the kind of action movie I want to see more of, and it gives Patel the chance to turn himself into the kind of action star he wants to see.

A multimedia extravaganza of frozen idiocy, Hundreds of Beavers is a slapstick tour de force—and its roster of ridiculous mascot-suited wildlife is only the tip of the iceberg.

While there is a literal amount of truth running through the semi-autobiographical Suncoast, its glossy, uncertain cutesiness is as fake as Ron DeSantis’ height.

In making its characters physically confront their heartbreak, Handling the Undead becomes one of the saddest, most contemplative zombie movies ever made.

Between the Temples is covered in these sores, full of stories that are funny from the outside and will be funny when told with hindsight. And it is funny. But it’s the honesty, our understanding of the how and the why behind these truthfully conveyed pains, that lodges Silver’s film in your heart.

Once the documentary has made its easy point, it doesn’t have much else on its mind aside from making it again and again. For some, that’ll be eye-opening enough, but I don’t think they’re the people who’re watching documentaries about rap lyrics.

The documentary gives faces, names and histories to those affected by the residential schools—and looks, bracingly, towards a future where healing is possible.

If you love slashers, and love the language of slashers, it’s inevitable that the charms of In a Violent Nature will reach you. Eventually.

Love Machina may want to take a peek behind its own curtain every once in a while for a reality check.

A standard-issue horror barely making the move from short to feature (it’s only around 80 minutes before credits), The Moogai is a scare-free blunt instrument, imprecise and uninterested in its own genre beyond its potential for metaphor.

Crafted with such delightful suspense that you can’t help but smile as you squirm, Brief History of a Family pulls from plenty of genre influences (its have/have-not friction and affluent apartment confines will be familiar to Parasite fans) to construct a tight dramatic metaphor encompassing Chinese parenting values and the end of a sociopolitical era.

A counterpoint documentary to its festival companion Love Machina, Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s Eternal You observes the burgeoning industry around techno-spiritualism with wry skepticism.

Its devastation is familiar. But because filmmaker Shiori Itō is both survivor and journalist, and recorded her own investigation into her assault in real time, the documentary becomes a thrilling testament to her exceptional, tenacious agency in the face of a hostile world.

Porcelain War‘s questions around how we cope, and what’s worth fighting for, are as vital as ever with the world still full of ignored pandemics, government-sponsored genocide and ongoing invasions.

Like its absentminded hero, the film can sometimes get sidetracked right when things are getting good, wandering down schmaltzy or twee narrative paths. But when it lets Thelma (and Squibb) do her thing, the comedy is perfectly cute and a stellar showcase for what an actor’s late career can offer.

A documentary that can struggle to tie its young politicos to the outside world, but thrives when tying them to each other.

Sometimes her script devotes too much ink to reinforcing ideas already well-established by her images, and sometimes her dialogue can veer towards flowery YA conversations. But Talati’s made a gripping and beautiful debut, filled with reasons to watch her next movie.

Where Chicken Run once played off of the specific aesthetics of WWII POW films with dark humor, Dawn of the Nugget loses its identity in favor of a harmless playfulness interchangeable with a Madagascar or Ice Age sequel.

The wreck of Wonka stings because of the clarity with which we see King’s eye for visual comedy and lavish setpiece staging, squandered on a movie where branding was always going to eclipse beauty.

Through Ellis’ eyes, it’s impossible to stay uninvested. We watch, stomach bottoming out, as the law is repealed with a simple vote. We watch, sitting on our hands, as the new amendment is introduced.

American Symphony itself is at its most mundane when focused on the professional life of the rousing, youthful musical multihyphenate. And, because it builds its structure around the creation and premiere of his first symphony, much of the film bundles that mundanity into the kind of behind-the-scenes footage accompanying a concert doc.

Even when it’s not selling its past self, Good Burger 2 is selling something. It’s what makes it a hard movie to root for, even when it lucks into saying the right things: It tosses one money-grubbing trend in the trash while ordering all the others directly off the menu.

Monster’s mystery is one only in the ways that all of our experiences are inherently mysterious to others; its drama is devastating, a tragically inevitable snowball rolled by this existential loneliness; its warmth is gloriously defiant of this fate.

With its traditions captured in delicate, sweaty vignettes by filmmaker Anna Hints, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’s anecdotes fill your lungs and engulf you, until its women’s secrets drip down your body.

Bone-dry yet filled with yearning, Aki Kaurismäki’s Finnish rom-com is a charming tale of persistence amid chaos.

When its pet topics enter into conversation with one another, revealing a throughline underscoring the basic rights of everyone working on a film project, Subject cruises along. In the film’s most propulsive sections, passion is as paramount as self-awareness, with vigorously cut documentary snippets affectionately emphasizing its self-critical points.

Its dedication to Long’s point-of-view is admirable, but Lee’s filmmaking hits the brakes like a student driver, sacrificing what made the framing narrative enticing in the first place.

By applying our technocapitalist present to the kind of person that this reality inevitably creates, Fincher’s created a thoroughly entertaining look at a pathetic crook—all while delivering a self-deprecating blow to clockwork living.

By only brushing up against the factors that make its case fascinatingly, timelessly American, The Burial stays soft, a trial by pillow-fight—but that’s how you please a crowd.

The documentary—with the pretentious full title of And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine, after the British monarch whose coronation Georges Méliès staged and filmed—is a bad undergrad media studies paper, given shape and movement by directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck.

The resulting film from Eddie Alcazar is shallow and silly pseudo-experimental sci-fi, made by those assured that they were making something edgy and interesting. To err is human, to film it is Divinity.

Tragos and her brave, badass subjects spend almost all of Plan C zipping through explanations of a constantly evolving abortion landscape.

A few key performances and a filmmaker with a clear vision unite for a film that truly feels fantastical, like someone somehow snuck a camera as they were falling into a holy reverie.

This inept, unpleasant, cobbled-together debut only reveals its first-time helmer as a Dr. Frankenstein about to lose his license.

It Lives Inside shows that a generic, uncertain script isn’t improved with a single coat of paint, especially if the ugly original is bleeding through the patchy, translucent renovation.

People don’t always want Goldilocks movies, but amid the melodramas and rom-coms, the IP blockbusters and action movies, Fremont’s easy flow and small scope provide the same reassurance (and opportunity for projection) as a small, optimistic piece of paper.

Moss’ creation is more than a sentient pile of parts with a fresh coat of mortuary makeup: It’s a savvy, gross, black-hearted gem with a humanity all its own.

Miguel Wants to Fight is a flyweight comedy with the misfortune of coming out the same year as the similarly style-forward, action-spoofing teen reckoning Polite Society.

Heart of Stone is murky, drab and always going the wrong speed. It’s either motionless, allowing exposition scene after exposition scene to lay out the boring details of what might happen if the wrong folks get control of The Heart, or erratic, dicing its badly remixed action sequences like it was trying to avoid a copyright strike from the movies it steals from.

King Coal might not be an invigorating, fire-lighting work like Harlan County, USA, but it is still a startling piece of anthropology: An expression of a place and a people, and their local god, ruler and captor.

There is power in the inescapable, in the dreaded endpoint of becoming news after a lifetime spent fearing it—mourning it. But despite its length and artistic competence, Brother’s lack of affecting specificity displays rather than embodys grief.

A Compassionate Spy is not a thrilling recollection of treason. It has little to say about the actual espionage that Hall pulled off when he was an 18-year-old Harvard grad working on the Manhattan Project.

The First Slam Dunk, with familiar characters, an innovative art style, and a narrative that’s helped structure an entire subgenre of anime, plays both sides of the court as it finds a delicate balance between flash and fundamentals.

The careful control displayed throughout Afire allows its deep, elegant characterizations to persist through the narrative smog, long after the rest of the film burns away.

This exciting formal approach, with its diverse selection of striking nature photography and archival sources, moves swiftly and effectively. Its more traditional talking heads, which the film relies on more as its focus shifts to the present and future, still bring power to the doc—letting people tell their own stories is never a bad thing—but can move more haltingly, dictated by the speakers’ thoughts.

A vibrant and lovely character study, Mamacruz makes the most of its horny matriarch.

Besides announcing Song as a brilliant observer of dialogue, interaction, and tone, Past Lives is a strikingly romantic movie about what composes our lives.

Brilliant landscape photography and two pairs of poignant performances elevate the drama to an enjoyable distance above sea level.

The confused comedy waddles onto the court as confidently as a kid in an oversized hand-me-down jersey. But why would this derivative filmmaking aspire to anything else? It’s all just set dressing for Jack Harlow’s brick of a big-screen debut.

Other People’s Children doesn’t merely focus on a woman weighing her options when it comes to the prospect of motherhood; it also exemplifies the myriad ways that we can foster genuine, compassionate bonds with kids—particularly those acting outside the “parent” label.

If Sakra wanted to enter into the wuxia canon, its lucid, lovely excess shouldn’t have stopped with its ceasefires.

After half a decade focusing on high-concept silliness, like the giant-fly tragicomedy Mandibles and the leather-jacket thriller Deerskin, Dupieux follows his more ridiculous impulses by letting the midnight horror anthology stay up until Saturday morning, blending gore and guffaws in an amiable, breezy comedy.

As the film moves further and further from its inciting secret, watching Inez and her son age, it fades beneath their countless tone-shifting hardships—revealing a film stronger when its close-shot realism is echoed in the script.

As soon as you unearth a place’s past, it lives on in you—changes you. This is the heart of folk horror that Enys Men speaks to, but its dull, repetitive, padded delivery of images makes its genre findings (in words British enough to befit the film) weak tea.

Is it a tragedy of genre saturation, both movie-haltingly flashy and deeply unimpressive. Everything is constantly moving and you don’t feel a thing.

While China’s propaganda department made sure the film was imbued with a definitive moral, there’s a subtle pleasure in a spy story otherwise intoxicated with its own smokescreen.

The Outwaters’ chthonic calling card showcases a jack-of-all-trades horror artist, even when it’s more upsetting than scary, but its labyrinth can quickly feel like a straight line, skillfully obscured.

Stuffed with motormouths and throwaway gags, the chunky animation can be a little off-putting, but its momentary ugliness feeds into its delightfully dark villains, its underdog heroes and the strange story tying them all together.

Passages is this close, painful, sexy twisting of the screws at its best, as Sachs and his frequent co-writer Mauricio Zacharias observe the havoc wreaked by a bisexual brat’s latest dalliance.

Directed by Jacqueline Castel in her feature debut, My Animal’s moody dreams are in a territorial brawl with its small-town realism, which in turn barks and snaps at its soapy plot. Its fable eventually hunts down more than a trite analogy for perceived deviance, but its blend of visual and narrative tones favors the laconic over the lycanthropic.

If you assent, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is endlessly rewarding, a tactile sense-memory tapestry of all the things that matter.

You Hurt My Feelings, which confronts middle-aged neuroses and creative anxieties with all the subtlety of a bestselling author with a new Twitter account, still finds warmth amid its middling dramedy.

If you’re down for a light comedy with a very specific audience, pitched somewhere between Wet Hot American Summer and John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch, AdirondACTS welcomes you (and your prepared monologue—you did prepare a monologue, right?) with open arms.

Rich with subtext and warring cultural iconography, it’s got body horror, religious doubt and enough delicious flesh to leave gorehounds completely sated. Colorful and bold, it’s a beautifully scary affair.

Hilarious, scary, tragic and sometimes flat-out jaw-dropping, Kokomo City is a gripping and accessible dissection of modern life, told through a brutally specific point of view.

Scrapper isn’t funny or sweet enough to overcome some of its more cutesy leanings, and it’s not inventive enough to stand out from its peers covering the same kind of burgeoning parent-child relationship. But it hangs together, as brief and unsatisfying as its narrative may be, which proves Regan capable of pulling off a feature, even if we’ll need to wait for a second film to fully see her more off-the-wall ideas flourish.

The intimacy of the narrative reveals how the script influences Tremblay’s direction rather than the other way around.

The voiceover-heavy storytelling is exhausting and weightless, despite Keshavarz’s clear affection for and closeness to these women.

Half high-concept enlightenment satire, half exhausting family dramedy, Bad Behaviour is as tedious as its leads’ search for inner peace.

Playing in the stylish, piss-taking space of Gurinder Chadha and Edgar Wright, Manzoor’s feature debut attacks adolescent fears—failing to achieve your dreams, settling for less, fading from loved ones—with spin-kicks, fake mustaches and evil plots so absurdly sinister that even the most jaded, monosyllabic teens will have to crack a smile.

Infinity Pool’s inspired critique of this crowd is fierce and funny, its hallucinations nimble and sticky, and its encompassing nightmare one you’ll remember without needing to break out the vacation slideshow.

Not just an incredible waste of a spectacular performance, but a film more caught up in ogling tragedy than dealing with it.

Domont’s compellingly drawn portrait of entitlement, impotence and the amplified conservative values of the bros casting the bones of capitalism is a violent delight, filled with tough scenes. Yet, its unpredictable ending is such a triumphantly visceral showdown that the impossible is achieved: The excruciating intensity is completely worth powering through.

If ever there was a case made that being on the right side of history, in the right place and with the right story isn’t enough to make satisfying non-fiction, Kim’s Video is it.

Throughout, Lears is all over the place. When To the End focuses on climate change deniers, it can be cathartically searing.

Even if it feels a bit too neat and tidy and predetermined a metaphor, one has to appreciate 2nd Chance’s ogling commitment to dissecting a perfectly American parasite.