Jacob Oller

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

By the time Zimmer helps connect past and present, memory and reality, the ensemble’s lived-in performances already gesture towards the logical outcome. We just hope it isn’t true.

Kapadia’s skill lies in her ability to interweave moments of hope into the anxiety. Her leads offer tenderness and pull back into self-protectiveness in equal measure.

The road trip always has to end, but the excellent Hit the Road introduces an exciting filmmaker whose journey is just beginning.

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

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.

Train Dreams, at just 95 minutes before credits, is as efficient, accessible, and poignant as a good short story.

More damningly prosaic than the overwhelming chaos of a war movie’s climactic assault, 2000 Meters To Andriivka marches through death by a thousand unknowns. There’s still heartstopping terror and momentary poetry in this toil.

As Chalfant preens, jokes, and carries on throughout her character’s evolving mental landscape, she threads recognition and persistence into a performance defined by confusion. This approach contributes to the idea that our lives are not a single fading picture, but formed from a long series of imperfect snapshots—like how single frames, quickly played in succession, form the illusory whole of a film.

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.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is more than Boseman’s performance, sure, with Davis and Domingo going on some delicious tears of their own and Wilson’s words continuing to sear and soar in equal measure. But Boseman’s ownership of the film, an Oscar-worthy snapshot of potential and desire, gives an otherwise lovely and broad tragedy something specific to sing about.

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

Though initially revolving around the attention to detail that takes center stage when creating a world of silent naturalism, the script from Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža sometimes overpowers the incredible showcase of light, color, and movement with out-of-place cartoonishness.

Divided yet compounding as the totality of Resurrection unfolds, our sharpened senses catch onto the details of Bi’s work, our awareness heightened around how many ways we can engage with the film in front of us, and movies in general.

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

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.

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.

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.

Assessing this move from the perspective of the pieces themselves—including an elaborate carved throne, a towering statue of King Ghézo, and metallic markers of death—as well as the recipients of these revenants, Diop takes a brisk yet thoughtful look at whether even antiquities can go home again.

Shoot it loud and there’s music playing; shoot it soft and it’s almost like praying: Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story pumps the classic for exactly that, classicism, by milking the musical’s dynamics for maximum expressiveness. Its romance? At its most tender. Its dance? At its most invigorating and desperate. Its songs? As if “Maria” or “Tonight” needed another reason to stick in your head, they’re catchier than ever.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The exciting electricity of a non-white blockbuster cast becoming superstars before your eyes, the maximalist style of a modern smash updating its influences, the intertwining of hyper-specific and broad themes—Chu’s strengths and his cast soar, bringing In the Heights as high as its ever been. It’s the best Hollywood musical in years.

A compelling piece of straightforward true-crime that makes the most of its throwback form.

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.

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.