Jacob Oller

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.

A delightful new-school deconstruction of old-school Romantic adventure that never compromises on the lushness of setting, color and emotion inherent in the latter, The Sea Beast rises to the front of Netflix’s animated offerings like a high tide.

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

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.

It’d be disrespectful to those left behind if you gave your art anything but your best shot. The Fabelmans makes the bargain look painful, self-centered and utterly joyful—a genius embracing his regrets and in so doing, reminding us of how lucky we are that we all pay some version of this price, for ourselves and for one another.

Marrero delivers a wonderful performance culminating in a final twenty minutes that open her character’s eyes wide enough to acknowledge how much of D. has rubbed off on her.

Its fragmented literary structure and Victor’s captivating lead turn cohere theme, form, and content, melding the elliptical episodes into a canny representation of memory.

Little Amélie submerges itself in fantastical ecstasy and melancholy with a magic all its own.

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.

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.

Feels Good Man’s greatest strength is affirming that even the most lighthearted things are worth fighting for. Even when it means buying a suit and going to court to protect your frog-man.

Acid drips from every line and visual gags double as celebrity commentary while still delivering sublime slapstick. Even if it sometimes stops making sense, My Big Night never loses its sensibility.

Where What’s Love Got to Do with It was a midlife coming-of-age—a “Hello, here’s my story”—Tina is a redefining, empowering farewell that adds perspective as she tips her hat and has her happily ever after out of the limelight.

Architecton acknowledges that everything we do is fleeting. There’s meaning in that. But it also posits that putting thought and respect into our temporary, tiny changes to Earth—laying fertile foundations that can roll with the punches that will always come—has a higher virtue.

As the memory fades into history, My Father’s Shadow blurs into documentary footage, which then blurs with wishful thinking. It’s formally ambitious for such a contained film, but grants this small-scale story the well-considered gravity of something held close to the heart.

It might not fix videogame movies overnight, but Mortal Kombat might finally deliver their sweepingly bad reputation a devastating fatality.

In its quiet reflection on the limited choices of those backed into a corner, the drama elegantly conveys how a people’s continued persecution not only starves, shoots, and bombs individuals, but erodes the solidarity of their whole.

Weapons rudely disrupts the illusion of suburban safety with impish delight and a fully stocked horror arsenal. It also addresses some of the magical thinking that incomprehensible tragedy can inspire in people who would otherwise never engage in it.

City of Gold is simultaneously a vibrant, colorful love letter to the unsung parts of Los Angeles, a populist philosophy of food and culture, and a thesis on what criticism should be.

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.

Impotence and violence, two terrifying poles of threatened masculinity, rage throughout The Things You Kill, while its women more readily accept uncomfortable complexities.

To further dig into Rankin’s blending of the goofily left-field and the openly earnest, the message persisting through the dry punchlines is that to care for your neighbor, to care for all the oddities of home, is to care for yourself.

The oppression is coming from all angles, but the unifying factor of these methods is that they have all already been described by author George Orwell. In the cutting documentary Orwell: 2+2=5, director Raoul Peck adds all these attacks up, expressing his contemporary horror using Orwell as his voice.

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

Even Bahadur’s stupid voiceover writing becomes funnier over time as we realize the clichés and groaners only serve to show what an ultimately lame writer Bahadur was—that it was his bravery, stubbornness, hope, inquisitiveness and stupidity that made him great.

A splendid showcase for Tran, a lead duo of inventive and endearing original characters, and a big final swing make Disney’s tour through Kumandra one worth taking even if it’s shy of a tour de force. Raya and the Last Dragon is an admirably mature tale in a rich and vibrant world that parents and kids alike won’t mind trekking across over and over again.

While the kills, perpetrated by a being mostly just seen in mirrors, are sometimes a bit too obfuscated by their gimmick to be viscerally satisfying, they slot in perfectly with the film’s themes and aesthetic even when they’re not dumping cascades of blood.

Digging into the art world’s juicy guts and suturing it up as a compelling, ambitious sci-fi noir, Crimes of the Future thrills, even if it leaves a few stray narrative implements sewn into its scarred cavities.