Jake Cole

Neil Jordan’s deft control of pace and tone elevates Greta past mere gimmickry, resulting in a comic thriller whose goofy humor only compounds its mastery of suspense.

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

Jonas Bak’s semi-autobiographical film is a gentle depiction of modern alienation.

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

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

Compared to your average Disney princesses, Moana is neither selfishly rebellious nor simplistically innocent.

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

The film shows how much Johnnie To still experiments with his form, especially as he continues to transition to digital cinema.

Russell’s wild style and shameless exhibitionism places it on a par with the contemporary work of Brian De Palma in terms of its vicious satire of ‘80s kitsch and repression.

One of the final triumphs of the New Hollywood era, Cutter’s Way belongs on the shelf of fans of both Cassavetian hyperreal melodrama and Pakula-esque political thrillers.

Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue is a prescient vision of a modern world defined by media oversaturation and social media validation.

Though Under Capricorn’s dark and twisty narrative eventually unearths everyone’s secrets, it’s the swooning camera that most fully taps into the class and sexual tensions that consume the characters.

A rape-revenge narrative so streamlined that even the gimmick of its achronological editing never muddies the progression of Yuki’s journey.

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.

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

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

A showcase for director Alfred Hitchcock’s intense study of the German Expressionist movement, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog boasts artfully animated intertitles, plunging shadows, and oppressive camera angles.

The film at one point offers the finest sustained act of emotional storytelling to grace a Marvel Studios production.

What makes the film so remarkable is the extent to which Ferrara, even at the outset of his career, exploits sex and violence for their popular appeal even as he reflects on the effect of such subjects on both his own art and the culture at large.

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

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.

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

Jane Campion upends staid genre convention with an impressionistic approach to character.

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.

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.

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.

For all its flaws, Widows is McQueen’s most fascinating, bracing feature to date, a demonstration of the filmmaker embracing his commercial instincts instead of trying to pass them off as weighty and important.

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.