Jeannette Catsoulis

Existential ennui is not exactly fun to watch (or, one assumes, easy to perform), yet a meaningless life has rarely looked this beautiful.

Softer and gentler than either of its forbears, "Alpha" hums with a dreamlike unease, a movie less concerned with sensation than with genuine feeling.

Infused with the D.N.A. of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Heel is an uneasy study of subjugation and transformation. Rock-solid performances from Boon and Graham maintain its precarious balance between anxiety and absurdity.

With immense sensitivity, the screenwriter and director Harry Lighton, making his feature debut, stages sequences that deepen the characters and expand our understanding of their lives.

Send Help may not be peak Raimi (that, to my mind, would be A Simple Plan), but it’s Raimi at peak pulp. I’ll happily take it.

This dazzling first feature from the Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke uses the frame of a sad-sweet sex comedy to weave together political allegory, supernatural mystery and more than one tender love story. And he does this with such skill and bravado that you never see the seams.

The couple’s earnestness sounds mockable, but it’s not: They are too sincere, too joyful and too grateful to be doing the only thing that either of them ever wanted to do. And right now all I want to do is dust off my vinyl copy of “Hot August Night.”

If “Is This Thing On?” is sometimes too careful for its own good, it is also deeply trusting of its leads, whose faces, under the scrutiny of Matthew Libatique’s merciless close-ups, reveal the hurt the couple is unable to verbalize.

Imogen Poots’s fantastically expressive performance as the adult Lidia transforms this movie (the feature directing debut of Kristen Stewart) from punishing to mesmerizing.

A movie that’s at once disappointingly superficial and utterly charming.

If some of the cabin’s lore is on the silly side, Maslany sells Liz’s terror so convincingly that the urge to giggle is dampened. Her lock on the film’s tone is absolute.

The result is a charming experiment that should delight those who like their pleasures both nostalgic and voyeuristic.

Wrenching and at times suffocating, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a howl of maternal desperation spiked with jagged humor.

The Ice Tower is ultimately too glacial and secretive to fully satisfy. The real magic here lies in Jonathan Ricquebourg’s dazzlingly chilly images, and two leads as compelling as the fantasy that set them in motion.

The director, Simon Curtis, deftly choreographs what feels like a series’ worth of brief interactions into a mostly satisfying whole.

Preparation for the Next Life is all the more potent for choosing naturalism over melodrama and sensitivity over sentiment.

Sally, a welcome but unadventurous documentary about the astronaut Sally Ride (who died in 2012), wraps a risk-taking personality inside a risk-averse package.

I’m beginning to think that the Philippous don’t just want to shatter our nerves: They want to break our hearts.

The story’s conventional beats (the get-back-in-shape montage, the bad news delivered at a critical moment) cohere into a wholesome journey of long-delayed healing. The inclusion of the wonderful Mykelti Williamson, as Joe’s longtime friend and rodeo partner, injects a buddy-movie vibe that anchors the action in riding bouts that are smoothly thrilling without being punishing.

The Damned is shaped as a wistful and laconic study of the minutiae of survival. Though billed as his first fiction film, it wobbles tantalizingly on a permeable line between narrative and documentary.

The result is a movie so sweet and soothing you’ll be forced to admit that sometimes the universe — or, in this case, Netflix — gives you exactly what you need.

Spasmodically funny, though hardly a comedy, Vulcanizadora is raw, moving and, briefly, horrifying.

The movie, adapted by the Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt from the Cinderella story, is the opposite of didactic: Slyly funny and visually captivating (the luscious cinematography is by Marcel Zyskind), its scenes move with ease from gross to gorgeous, and from grotesque to magical.

Johnson and Stephen Cooney have shaped an unsettling, sorrowful journey from damage to a kind of deliverance.

The film’s satire is barn-door broad, its humor sidelong and sharp enough to take the edge off the gore.

Gracey paints a fabulously entertaining and touching picture of an insecure, complicated man hauling himself from a quicksand of grasping fans, greedy impresarios, unresolved addictions and father-son dysfunction.

Refusing to pander to restless derrières, they’ve given this big, bounding, beautifully cinematic swashbuckler almost three hours to breathe. Yet their pacing is so frisky — and Celia Lafitedupont’s editing so elegant — your derrière is unlikely to complain.

Less an epic poem than a showcase for two of cinema’s finest actors, The Return is visually bleak and emotionally gripping.

Small and strange, Meanwhile on Earth seduces with its soft, barren beauty (the chilled cinematography is by Robrecht Heyvaert) and Dan Levy’s surreal score.

A lean, mean revenge thriller that knows exactly what it’s about, Magpie has little originality but an invigorating clarity of purpose.

Sporadically ingenious, occasionally chilling and entirely bonkers, Rumours sees Maddin (writing and directing with his longtime collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson) abandoning his more familiar black-and-white, silent-film aesthetic for vibrant color.

The movie’s quiet star is Douglas himself. Whether gently asking a tense Rubin about his upbringing, or helping Ono with her “box of smiles,” Douglas’s kindness and intellectual curiosity are more compelling than any political argument.

Though at times squirmingly unpleasant, Hoard is never a drag. The insolence of the filmmaking and the artlessness of the leads energize a plot of stunning recklessness and unexpected humor.

What I did not expect was to emerge with not only a deeper understanding of this strange calling, but far greater empathy for those who seek out its practitioners.

Playing out in six, ingeniously scrambled chapters, this headlong thriller transforms a simple cat-and-mouse premise — and maybe even a toxic love story — into an impertinent rebuke to genre clichés and our own preprogrammed assumptions.

All this gives “Cuckoo” a strange, lusty vigor that’s hugely entertaining.

Coolly executed and seductively simple, Oddity, the second feature from Damian McCarthy (after the unsettling, underseen “Caveat” in 2021), is a fun, back-to-basics supernatural thriller that cares more about making us jump than making us cringe.

As chilling and stylish as it is, Longlegs is a frustrating pleasure.

Manipulative to the max (one upsetting murder is almost pornographically protracted), Kill is dizzyingly impressive and punishingly vicious.

Darker, moodier and altogether nastier than its predecessors — “X” (2022) and, later that same year, “Pearl” — this hyperconfident feature is also funny, occasionally wistful and deeply empathetic toward its damaged, driven heroine.

Surrender to its vintage vibe and its emotional kick may surprise you.

Without much to distract from the three central characters, Tuesday can feel overlong and a little claustrophobic. Yet this compassionate fairy tale works because the actors are so in sync and the imagery — as in one shot of the bird curled like an apostrophe in a dead woman’s tear duct — is often magical.

Surrender to its shaggy rhythms and you’ll find this sometimes tiresome portrait of a family of mythical beasts is not without intelligence and a strangely mesmeric intent.

In its cheerfully disordered way, “Housekeeping” tells us that families, like last-minute meals, must sometimes be created from whatever ingredients are at hand.

The strangest, possibly silliest movie of the veteran director’s idiosyncratic career. It is also borderline brilliant.

Knox Goes Away” is, like its antihero, smart, unconventional and almost obsessively careful. Its unhurried pacing and mood of quiet deliberation won’t be for everyone; but this low-key thriller resolves its shockingly high stakes with a twisty intelligence.

The director and animator Robert Morgan has crafted a narratively slender, visually sophisticated first feature.

Unfolding entirely in a fictional language (which the actors deliver with fluid conviction), and enriched by lovingly rendered practical effects, this first feature from Andrew Cumming pairs its minimalist narrative with the maximum of atmosphere.

The direction, by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, is sure and unfussy, spinning a warmly humane story of cross-generational connection.

Smoothly shaping familiar genre tropes into a brutal study of class warfare and the stifling of pity, the director, Um Tae-hwa (who wrote the script with Lee Shin-ji), makes human kindness the first casualty of social disorder.

Pondering the downside of notoriety and our willingness to exchange safety for fame, Dream Scenario is often funny and frequently surreal.

This gently humorous movie operates so smoothly you may not notice its subversiveness.

Intellectually rich and cinematically disciplined (brief movie clips, another perfectly aligned Philip Glass score), The Pigeon Tunnel is a cautious, playful portrait of an expert manipulator.

Inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary about two Finnish backpackers, “Hotel Coolgardie,” The Royal Hotel is after something more subtle than pure horror.

Screwy and strange, Perpetrator is gleefully unsubtle, but its ensanguinated excess is part of the fun.

Its experimental style, marked by long, dialogue-free stretches, color flares and pristine sound effects, can seem calculated and off-putting, the narrative slight and dramatically slack. Yet the film’s provocations have a playfulness and generosity that are enormously appealing.

Wrapped in drab locations and jaundiced lighting (Chananun Chotrungroj’s photography is brilliantly bleak), this grisly gynecological horror movie is not for the squeamish.

At a time when too many movies feel cautious and constrained, Medusa Deluxe is gloriously uninhibited and gaudily diverting.

The general impression given by this warm, low-key film is that the spying was a simple act of pacifism. Countervailing voices are faint and few; anyone seeking more vigorous pushback will have to look elsewhere.

By choosing simplicity over specifics, the filmmakers free themselves from the weight of words and open up space for a mood of intense disquiet and unusual sensitivity.

Unfolding with a tonic intelligence and a slow accretion of menace, Alex MacKeith’s screenplay is smoothly in sync with the specific skills of each performer.

A trashy treat coated in a high-art gloss, The Attachment Diaries gleefully kneads melodrama, noir, horror and sexual perversion into a pathological romance between two deeply damaged women.

The writing (by Micah Bloomberg, a creator of the 2018-20 TV series “Homecoming”) is so sharp, the acting so agile and the cinematography (by Ludovica Isidori) so inventive that what could have been a stuffy experiment in lockdown filmmaking is instead a vividly involving battle of wills.

A wonky workplace comedy that slowly shades into tragedy.

Like its namesake, Jon S. Baird’s Tetris is clever, crafty and shockingly entertaining.

At times, Jenkin’s bold, experimental style can perplex; but his vision is so unwavering and beholden to local history that his message is clear: On Enys Men, the earth remembers what the sea has taken.

Though raising serious questions about the way history is written, and by whom, The Lost King isn’t a polemic, or even a biopic. It’s a quietly droll detective story, a warm portrait of a woman who lost her health and found her purpose, exhuming her self-respect along with Richard’s bones.

Just when we’re wondering where all this is going, West executes a final act as devilish as it is emotionally potent.

At once dryly funny and surprisingly poignant, Jethica uses the paranormal as a metaphor for abusive male behavior. The film’s deadpan perspective and unhurried pacing can diffuse its surprises, but Ohs has an offbeat style that’s fresh and fun.

More tingly than terrifying (and more than a smidge off-the-wall), “Dark” has a cheeky boldness. Rea, a prolific independent filmmaker, deploys the gore judiciously and his actors are above reproach.

Gently discursive and virtually plotless, The Civil Dead is a walking-and-talking movie that finds uncommon humor in Whit’s need to be seen and Clay’s extreme discomfort with that responsibility.

The Outwaters conjures a swoony, dreamlike atmosphere that heightens the shocks to come.

Surreal, sophisticated and sometimes sickening, Infinity Pool suggests that while the elder Cronenberg might be fixated on the disintegration of our bodies, his son is more concerned with the destruction of our souls.

Ingeniously evoking a child’s response to the inexplicable, Skinamarink sways on the border between dreaming and wakefulness, a movie as difficult to penetrate as it is to forget

In service to a gleefully malicious tone, Mark Mylod’s direction is cool, tight and clipped, the actors slotting neatly into characters so unsympathetic we become willing accessories to their suffering.

Coming in at a tight and talky 74 minutes, Incredible but True is a sweetly absurd time-travel comedy that coats its lunacy in a touching poignancy.

Overlong and overwritten, “Dirt” nevertheless unfolds with an enjoyably comic quirkiness, a tale of two doofuses who sought meaning in symbols and found comfort in friendship.

A relentlessly somber, precision-tooled picture whose frights only reinforce the wit of its premise, Smile turns our most recognizable sign of pleasure into a terrifying rictus of pain.

Gliding inexorably from squirmy to sinister to full-on shocking, this icy satire of middle-class mores, confidently directed by Christian Tafdrup, is utterly fearless in its mission to unsettle.

Punctuated by Gregory Corandi’s gliding, God’s-eye shots of meringue-colored desert and placid shoreline, Saloum has the extravagance of fable and folklore. The plot is ludicrously jam-packed, but the pace is fleet and the dialogue has wit and a carefree bounce.

Jamie Foxx might have top billing, but right there beside him are the professional contortionists whose eye-popping moves are more commonly seen in Las Vegas showrooms than on movie screens.

While Resurrection harbors more than one theme — empty-nest anxieties, toxic men and the long tail of their manipulations — the movie feels more like an unhinged test of how far into the loonyverse the audience can be persuaded to venture.

Slow, sweet and subdued, A Love Song, Max Walker-Silverman’s lovely first feature, is about late-life longing and needs that never completely go away.

Blending sensuous imagery with jabs of feminist wit — at one point, a vibrator is weaponized against a male intruder — Colbert sends her heroine on a transformative journey of revenge and renewal.

The running time is too long, and the finale’s screaming too prolonged; but, unlike childbirth, this good-natured movie delivers a dry, funny and utterly painless experience.

In place of gouting gore and surging fright, this enjoyable adaptation of Joe Hill’s 2005 short story has an almost contemplative tone, one that drains its familiar horror tropes — a masked psychopath, communications from beyond the grave — of much of their chill. The movie’s low goose bump count, though, is far from ruinous.

Strange and squelchy and all kinds of sick, Mad God comes at you with nauseating energy, its flood of dystopian images both playful and repulsive.

At once polished and punky, Poser is about the maturing of a vampiric personality. Like its music, the movie feels exploratory and raw-edged, yet with a persistent pathos that clings to Lennon and isolates her.

Enigmatic and imperfect, but nonetheless absorbing and consistently unsettling, Cordelia offers a haunting visualization of a breaking-apart psyche.

Skillfully merging menace and sweetness (when Anna begins to speak, her parents’ delight is incredibly touching), The Innocents constructs a superbly eerie moral landscape, one that the children (all of whom are fantastic) must learn to navigate.

With Shepherd, the Welsh writer and director Russell Owen shows us how to accrue a great deal of atmosphere with very little fuss.

A sometimes uneasy merger of monster movie and psychological horror — with a dollop of social-media satire — this inventive first feature mines tween confusion (there are nods to both bulimia and menstruation) for grotesque fun.

You Won’t Be Alone, the ravishing, wildly original first feature from Goran Stolevski, moves so hypnotically between dream and nightmare, horror and fairy tale that, once bound by its spell, you won’t want to be freed.

The killings themselves may remain off-camera, but the movie is still an uncomfortable watch. In Jones’s smoldering performance, we see a man stretched beyond his limits, a rubber band just waiting to snap back.

Imaginative and spooky, You Are Not My Mother shows just how frightening — and stigmatizing — a parent’s mental illness can be to a child.

Dancing on the line between funny and menacing, the ingenious script (by Stourton and Tom Palmer) is a tonal tease, a limbo where every joke has a threatening edge and every “Just kidding!” only increases Pete’s unease.

Calzado uses more experimental techniques to expand his narrative, paralleling the flickering impermanence of filmed images with physical and psychological decay.

Sad and strange and deeply upsetting, “Side A” profits from Claudio Beiza’s velvety, gray-green images and a soundtrack pulsing with heartbeats and the distressing whine of Ulysses’s hearing aid.