Jake Kring-Schreifels

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Newton’s dynamic performance keeps you hooked.

A loveable, low-stakes joyride.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

“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.

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.

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.