Jake Kring-Schreifels

It’s inspiring to watch. Isseks provided the tools and the idea, but the students took the cause to new heights, a symptom of their strong feelings about the governmental negligence occurring in their backyards.

The younger Day-Lewis has crafted something haunting and exquisite, a slow-burning, two-handed meditation about grief, regret, and the kind of absence that irreparably fractures a family. Mostly, though, it supplies the elder Day-Lewis a chance to flex his dormant muscles, most prominently with a couple of monologues—one humorous and scatological in nature, the other reflective, darker, and more vulnerable—that sneak up on you in overwhelming ways.

In a satire like this, the laughs start heavy, but Early’s best trick is ending this journey in an earnest, emotionally authentic place. He’s not playing a punchline so much as a humorous, painful truth.

Murphy keeps Steve on the tracks. Among his great gifts is an ability to convey feelings while internally processing information.

Greengrass doesn’t have you squirming in your seat because he’s manufacturing drama but because he knows when to cut, when to slow down, when to fire on all cylinders. This sounds like a science, but it’s actually an art.

It runs pretty thin pretty quickly, a monotonous circle of arguing, indecision, concerned looks, and anxiety that stalls out the whimsy and momentum and all unique aesthetic possibilities of Freyne’s under-explored setting.

Quiet and heartbreaking, if not slightly conventional, Omaha unfolds like a slow-burning mystery.

As the movie’s romantic arc unfolds, everything just feels a little too goofy and distracted, considering the earnest monologue that Fayruz gives near the end that questions why so many young men and women are dying for causes they don’t understand.

Sweeney––who, in addition to acting and directing, wrote the script––has no trouble with lubrication, layering genres atop each other in a way that’s plausible and cohesive. He’s got an acute feel for how to deploy humor and grief into the same space, especially as more backstory unwinds and the movie’s heightened stakes infiltrate the perception of his characters.

These people and places read more like figments of imagination, part of a borough Holder wants it to be. As such, the movie is a rough, painterly sketch, a first draft that’s easy to read, provokes warm feelings, and deserves just a little more detail.

Suburban Fury is a reminder that even the most candid historical figures are never fully transparent.

While The Damned sometimes resembles a reenactment, Minervini makes a valid attempt to highlight war’s aimless priorities on its marginalized and unheralded members.

Much like the previous movie, Inside Out 2 has a predictably fun time journeying throughout the different corners of Riley’s brain. It also plays it pretty safe, careful not to disrupt too much about what its predecessor established, filtering in Michael Giacchino’s whimsical and soulful score to piano key stroke more of its connective tissue.

There are similar beautiful moments checkered across this five-borough endeavor.

To her screenplay’s credit, Pankiw manages to avoid a full-on mystery. The worry in these kinds of movies is that the effort to obfuscate and hint at the heart of the problem doesn’t pay off. But the reveal here is thoughtfully constructed.

A Different Man is a loaded story––filled with plenty of passed detours and dark alleys––and it can start to feel a bit punishing by the end, where Schimberg struggles finding a natural resolution. But maybe that’s the point. This movie feels itchy because these are messy, undefined, unresolved topics.

The characters here are half-baked, archetypes meant to fit into this semi-supernatural mystery box without the cathartic release that defeating various hate-groups should have.

It’s fair to say there’s too much going on at once. The movie can feel like it’s a bit on steroids, too. But it’s so self-assured, so confident with the characters it’s tethered to, the genre lines it blurs, and the love story that waffles with each dead body rolled up into a carpet or dragged down a stairwell.

It feels like a short that’s been stretched to breaking point.

McBain and Moss capture all this with an unobtrusive eye. They have a real grasp of how to capture and frame candid interactions, how to pace this kind of near-reality television drama. It doesn’t hit its ambitious stride, though, until the end.

A loveable, low-stakes joyride.

Like its main character, this movie seems hesitant to say anything. It sacrifices exhilaration and settles for emptiness.

Lee has crafted strong, sensible character studies, filled with long pauses and reflective beats. It’s just trapped in the wrong vehicle.

Even in its overwhelming melancholic power, Haigh has made something therapeutic—about longing and holding on and learning to let go.

In many ways, AIR embodies the last decade of sports movies that have pivoted from showing action on the field or court, instead peeking into corner offices and classrooms to examine the power players and dealmakers pulling the strings.

This is a sure-handed debut with a reliable group of actors.

The beauty is that Torres never forces these messages down your throat. The movie is too looney, too specific to be so obvious.

It’s exciting to see a debut so self-assured and comfortable in its own sun-baked skin.

Down Low doesn’t know where to end and what to center. It’s eager for a happy ending and forgets the necessary work to produce one.

The risk for these kinds of stories––the best ranging from 12 Angry Men to One Night in Miami––is that they lose momentum after the initial setup. You need strong, convincing characters to make persuasive arguments and unearth deep-seated secrets. Brooklyn 45 supplies such.

What would a high school movie look like if its queer characters ended up as jock-slamming, hierarchy-upending heroes? Bottoms is this year’s righteously indignant, big-swing answer.

Rockwell has plenty time to develop into a more distinguished storyteller, though her directorial instincts have a staggering specificity. This is a movie that gets gentrification right––she thrives in showing the way brief observations out a window paint a larger picture––and connects little dots from childhood to adulthood.

It’s hard to find sensitive little movies like this.

The narrative manipulation is the only thing clouding an otherwise crystal-clear dip into sublime terror.

The abstracted, bright-colored flourishes and chamber-thriller structure––not to mention its punctuated moments of extreme carnage––provide a crimson foundation for the writer-director’s third and latest feature, Infinity Pool, a blistering big swing that matches its unique premise and privileged-class takedown with his very specific violent, pornographic palette.

As Guggenheim shows, Fox has reclaimed what it means to be afflicted by a neurological impediment, allowing himself to be vulnerable and letting people see his real self.

“Can I quote you?” As it did throughout Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey’s intrepid investigative journalism for the New York Times, that question reverberates in Maria Schrader’s She Said, an understated, polished procedural that chronicles the way two reporters exposed Hollywood mega-producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual abuse and assault.

Saint Omer isn’t a movie concerned specifically with a verdict. It asks you to listen, to observe and consider a tragedy and its ripples within a community.

That you can’t always tell—the movie arbitrarily pivots from serious conspiracy to buddy comedy throug every scene—only highlights the chaotic tonal friction at its core. There’s enough heat to call this a lukewarm mess.

Sans some overarching Avengers narrative providing these standalone epics their thrust, Thor: Love and Thunder plays adrift and uneven, once again resistant to use its untethered narrative and leading hunk in any meaningful—meaningfully sexy—way. By film’s end, when one character tells another to “choose love,” I could hear a handful in my theater beginning to sniffle and cry. It’s hard to understand why. The only thing my eyes could do was roll.

In an era of superhero gluttony, in which these familiar stories, characters, and visuals tend to bleed together, The Batman holds the rare distinction of creating and embracing its own identity.

As Bahrani goes to great depths to verify his subject’s contradictory tales and the circumstances behind his company’s termination, 2nd Chance turns into a familiar American portrait of mythmaking and cognitive dissonance.

Newton’s dynamic performance keeps you hooked.

A romantic comedy that functions best as a fable of friendship and self-reflection, Am I OK? is the kind of lightweight, amiable movie that just barely earns the emotional beats at the heart of its story.

[Okuno’s] made a smart, controlled movie of pricks and gestures and tones that accumulate into a satisfying catharsis. And perhaps validated the urge to follow your gut.

It’s hard to find movies—no matter their scope—that grasp and depict the human experience with the kind of honesty and dexterity Raiff has committed to the screen so far.

Call Jane is a competently made, well-acted historical drama that doesn’t give its charged subject matter the stakes or urgency it needs.

Despite highlighting some chaotic encounters, Williams isn’t interested in explosions and one-dimensional, hell-bent villains. His focus remains on the way years of criminalization can impact decision-making and friendships, and, as his last shot suggests, how distinct sounds can traumatize even as they’re meant to help.

This is a movie engineered to resemble a thrill ride, a greatest-hits carousel powered by fan service and corporate recycling. It practically embraces Marty’s designation—and that’s OK. Despite their noted limitations, theme parks like this still offer plenty of fun.

Smith has found a character whose egocentricity and dynamic range matches his own itchy movie star persona.

This movie’s power comes in the slow-burning revelations found through the straightaway desert roads and rolling lush hills, which amount to an emotionally wrenching crescendo.

It’s riveting stuff, to the point you almost want Coen to keep pushing the scope just to see where he’ll go.

Is it possible to stand out and disappear at the same time? Matt Damon makes a convincing case study in Stillwater.

You can sense Bautista making the best of Snyder’s father-daughter formula, but pacing feels off. And the script, which Snyder wrote with Joby Harold and Shay Hatten, settles into mechanical plotting that undercuts all the zany, pop energy that began its trajectory.

The Wanting Mare is a soft and silent seduction, an alluring yet unfulfilling poetic fable that leaves you wanting more.

The ingredients look enticing enough, but director Nicole Beckwith isn’t cooking with real spice. Her insular drama operates at a consistent slow burn—it has just enough steam to keep you interested without ever bubbling over into interesting.

The loose spiritual ends don’t stitch together to produce the kind of scares that stick with you after their initial jolt.

Much like the blur of quarantine, in which days and weeks bleed into months, the movie seamlessly skips through time, following its protagonist through a collection of moments that—as portrayed in rich black and white—often feel like memories. They have just enough story to be considered vignettes, distinguished by changing facial hair and locations, and held loosely together by its restless energy.

You need some urgency and momentum to carry a movie like this. The incoming armageddon, occasionally seen as a small CGI blip in the blue sky, doesn’t have it. But as the day ends, Lister-Jones and Spaeny have enough chemistry to supply the real drama.