Jake Cole

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller put a comedic spin on Andy Weir’s more straightforward 2021 novel Project Hail Mary, recasting the author’s hopeful vision of productive communication with extraterrestrials as an unlikely buddy comedy.

The film's legible direction and steady escalation of tension makes for an enjoyably retro diversion.

Young Mothers is a welcome return to form for the Dardenne brothers, balancing social observation with character study.

Little Amélie or the Character of Rain changes up its breezy account of a toddler’s growth with the occasional moment of slowed-down rumination.

The careful balance of “stupid and clever” that solidified the legend of the first film is less steady in its much-belated sequel.

This film finally admits that Superman has been a mainstay for nearly a century precisely because he stands for things outside of faddish trends.

F1 succeeds for many of the same reasons that Top Gun: Maverick does: for elevating familiar material with old-school filmmaking swagger.

The film is a showcase for preposterous (and mostly practical) action and an unabashed sentimentality that Ethan feels for the makeshift family of spies he’s assembled over the course of the series.

Its bizarre melding of moral-panic melodrama with the filmmaker’s signature wrong-man theme is fascinating.

Sinners is one of the most distinctive, confident mainstream films of the modern era, but it nonetheless leaves an audience with the tacit reminder of the limits of art to set one free in a system that profits as much off its exploitation as that of manual labor.

For all of its spiritedness, Freaky Tales wants for the sense of invention that defines the films that it references and whose moves it often falls back on borrowing.

The film’s open affection for the Looney Tunes franchise has a restorative quality.

Compensation deftly uses intimate methods of character identification to encourage the viewer to imbibe the larger history lived through those figures.

Huo Meng’s patient, nonjudgmental study of these people tacitly reveals the ways, healthy and otherwise, in which they’ve compartmentalized and continue to process the pain of everything from hard labor to political oppression.

The star of the show here is Collet-Serra. Nothing here reinvents the genre wheel, but the way that the stakes and scope of Carry-On keep escalating even as the focus remains resolutely intimate and paranoid showcases a refreshingly old-school grasp of thriller mechanics.

As the film progresses, it consistently escalates the stakes and scale of its action, which doesn’t devolve into incomprehensible CG murk as it hurtles toward the climax.

The second installment in Wang Bing’s trilogy of documentaries about garment workers similarly leans into durational extremes but eventually and sneakily reveals a broadened scope.

Red Rooms interrogates how the only thing preventing someone from being sucked down a moral whirlpool is to catch sight of their own zombified reflection on their computer screen.

Romulus ends up as the franchise’s strongest entry in three decades for its devotion to deploying lean genre mechanics.

Carson Lund treats the power of a shared interest with profound, elegiac empathy.

Erica Tremblay’s granular attention to place makes sure that you take note of the root causes of the defeat felt by the Native characters.

The film exemplifies Lois Patiño’s ongoing efforts to complicate docufiction approaches with otherworldly reveries meant to communicate states beyond our immediate reality.

If Ken Loach has always erred on making his political views impossible to misconstrue, he also knows how to keep his dramas from spiraling too far outside of plausibility.

Denis Villeneuve’s film, like its predecessor, offers an object lesson in the visual splendor made possible by meticulously storyboarded minimalist maximalism.

The characters’ generational angst humanizes the film’s view of a nation at a crossroads.

The film is a blistering laceration of the contradictions and hypocrisies of European racism.

In its own way, the film is as suitable a final work as a culminating magnum opus.

With The Creator, Gareth Edwards finally finds the balance between arresting images and grounded emotional stakes.

The film is a gentle evocation of contemporary Japanese life in its pleasures and frustrations.

In this rueful film about all things unseen, the importance of time is seemingly felt by everyone.

The protagonist may feel cut off from the world, but the film is deeply in harmony with it.

For better and worse, Nolan has often turned to practical and scientific means to demystify his films’ subjects, be it dreams, magic, or the impossible antics of one particularly traumatized billionaire orphan. His best work (The Prestige, Interstellar) ultimately resists the comedown that can accompany such explication as the material retains some fundamental sense of wonder.

The Out-Laws shines when it spotlights the committed performances of its cast.

The action consistently snaps the film into focus, but it also further illustrates how badly the decision to split this narrative into two parts throws off the delicate rhythm that’s made Mission: Impossible arguably the most consistently entertaining American action franchise of all time.

Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.

Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.

The film is a thorny exploration of how individuals’ personal ordeals can quickly merge into an impenetrable thicket of irreparable relationships.

The film takes its time delving into its characters' headspaces, to the point that it becomes less of a thriller than an unorthodox character study, especially as its expertly deployed use of flashback slowly forms the emotional core of the story.

The film has the courage of its convictions, suggesting that violence on behalf of an oppressed people isn’t only justifiable but even moral.

With expert visual precision, the film flows into each new, wild narrative wrinkle as if it were the most logical thing in the world.

Day Shift’s first half is an unexpectedly focused, consistent pleasure, while the second sags under the weight of recycled set pieces.

Marco Bellocchio uses his film, a delicate mix of biography and autobiography, as the catalyst for long-delayed therapy.

The period romance has been increasingly experimented with in recent years, yet both straight dramas and convention-spoofing comedies almost always end up upholding the strict boundaries of the genre as if to prove the limits of reimagining the past.

The film fully surrenders to the grandiose fun that’s marked the best of Tom Cruise’s recent star vehicles and reaffirms Joseph Kosinski as a blockbuster craftsman par excellence.

For all of its farcical overtones, the film contains many shrewd observations about the power games inherent in relationships.

At its finest, this psychedelic, horror-strewn romp’s artistry perfectly reflects the intensity of Strange navigating endless alternate realms.

The film stands apart for thoughtfully suggesting that Batman might actually one day make Gotham a better place, and not merely a safer one

The film proves that Hong Sang-soo has yet to exhaust his methods of deriving significance and beauty from the most quotidian of details.

To see the old-timers pass the torch to their acolytes cements the improbable importance of Jackass in American pop culture.

One Second is as much a tribute to the struggles of a man whose life has stolen from him as it is to a bygone way of looking at movies.

The film is marked by an empathetic understanding of the inkling of belief that can be exhumed from even the most rational of minds.

Ali & Ava once again showcases Clio Barnard’s uncanny ability to capture the insoluble complexities of life.

The film thrillingly captures the social, economic, political, and material character of Rwanda in the age of global communication.

These shorts capture everything from how fear of the unknown can rewire relationships to the natural world exerts its pull on us all.

Dash Shaw’s deceptively simple animation regularly descends into phantasmagoria that delivers on his story’s strange premise.

The film synthesizes the nihilistic tone of The End of Evangelion with the more hopeful terms of the anime’s original intended finale.

Throughout the film, James Gunn renders the half-grim, half-absurdist nature of the Suicide Squad with delightfully bloody abandon.

At its best, F9 delivers the most spatially coherent, dynamic car scenes in the series to date.

The film embodies the idiosyncratic, tongue-in-cheek sensibilities of Ron and Russell Mael’s long-running cult American pop band.

Throughout her directorial debut, Suzanne Lindon paints a concise and truthful portrait of her protagonist’s feelings of estrangement.

The film, lacking in conflict and danger, is guided by the poignant belief that there’s no end to the world.

The documentary’s aesthetics strikingly channel the euphoric feelings induced by Ethopia’s top cash crop.

Lois Patiño’s Red Moon Tide is a work of unmistakable horror, one predicated on such ineffable dread that the impact of climate change becomes a sort of Lovecraftian force.

Ben Hozie’s wry, observational film positions a young man’s repressed sexual paranoia as a reflection of a more general social malaise.

It operates in an ambiguous register, suggesting that a woman is working in unison with nature to dole out revenge for their exploitation.

The structure of Wildfire’s narrative doesn’t emerge out of a simplistic progression from strife to reconciliation, as writer-director Cathy Brady has her characters follow a realistically erratic trajectory.

When the film’s actors are given space to etch their characters’ feelings, they turn in strikingly naturalistic performances.

As much as the film seeks to understand how such major cultural figures navigated a political minefield, it nonetheless never takes its eyes off of its characters as people.

The film is a celebration of oral traditions as a means of giving purpose to even the most hopeless of lives.

It’s in its depiction of the communist party’s response to a peaceful demonstration that Andrei Konchalovsky’s latest is at its most effective.

The film is never more intense than when it’s finding parallels between its main character’s anomie and Korea’s dehumanizing expansion.

The film unites its seemingly disparate strands of somber drama and deadpan comedy into a surprisingly cohesive whole.

There’s a hint of Jane Campion’s own uncanny perversion of the banal throughout Lara Jean Gallagher’s film.

The most thrilling and haunting details here are actively undermined by the chief technical gimmick of the film.

For a spell, Melina Matsoukas’s film exudes the concision of an old B movie.

At a time when the nation continues to weigh the fate of its auto industry, James Mangold’s depiction of the Ford Motor Company facing its first major financial threat transparently plays to nostalgic reveries of the industry’s golden age.

In the film, a man's individual tragedy illuminates the emptiness of the systems that define him.

The film is a vivid depiction of how a confrontation with the unknown can so easily shatter the fragile bonds that hold us together.

In the film, the literal union of bodies is the only logical means of conveying the reestablishment of emotional bonds.

In Alma Har’el’s film, Shia LaBeouf’s plays an avatar of his father as an expressionistic act of self-therapy.

The actors’ hammy performances only compound the amusement of watching a dynasty propped up by largesse fall to pieces at the very thought of actually having to earn their way in life.

At last, Pedro Costa appears to be more interested in how people get on with life than how they keep the company of ghosts.

Kantemir Balagov depicts pain in blunt terms, but he traces the aftershocks of coping and collapse with delicate subtlety.

It’s at its best when showing how gangsters undermine their lofty notions of nobility with displays of narcissism.

Chromatically, The Load makes Saving Private Ryan look like The Band Wagon. Yet Glavonic still manages to convey the devastation and numbness that results from atrocity without resorting to exploitation. Trauma is approached obliquely, more a subliminal fact of life than a single psychological rupture to be confronted and mended.

The film’s action is the most extreme encapsulation yet of Dwayne Johnson’s bombastic blockbuster work.

Lesage pulls focus onto the aftershocks of trauma rather than the traumatic events themselves.

Jon Watts deftly weaves the epic and the mundane aspects of Spider-Man’s existence throughout the film.

The film is frustrating in the end for reaffirming the traditional blockbuster’s allegiance to human perseverance.

The film is at its strongest when depicting how Diamantino becomes a tool of politicians hoping to oust Portugal from the EU.

The film is a reminder of the potential of these films before they became weighed down by blockbuster-ready excesses.

Shazam! sees DC combining the golden-age optimism espoused by Wonder Woman and the jubilant, self-aware silliness of Aquaman into a satisfying whole.

If the film sometimes feels too small in comparison to its predecessors, it manages to make the most of its quietest moments.

Battle Angel is by some distance the most entertaining of the recent crop of would-be franchise starters, exciting on its own merits while leaving just enough of its world tantalizingly unexplored to actually fuel our interest in wanting to see where its characters go from here.

With its fine-tuned comic timing and feeling of constant action, Into the Spider-Verse is downright invigorating, and that’s evident even before it gets to its dazzling, dimensional-colliding climax.

The anti-P.C. scorn that establishes a white boy's nervous entry into rap gradually becomes a sincere, if hilarious, treatise on the impossibility of reducing art to value judgments.

Wang’s particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles, and here he manages to defend the importance of art, attack the neoliberal devastation of cultural liberalism, and argue for the renewed public commitment to the arts from a wryly comic perspective that eschews sentimentality.

Patrick Wang's particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles.