Jordan Raup

While not fully engaging on a narrative level, the project at least demonstrates Kogonada hasn’t lost his filmmaking mojo, crafting a movie that may seem more personal to him than most viewers.

In Araújo’s vigorous directorial vision, a heightened sense of anxiety courses through, hinging on the precise ways a girl in mental free-fall, rightfully lacking the words or life experience to find a footing, will react to each daunting new situation.

Although just under 100 minutes isn’t enough time to capture every nuance of 10 years with multiple subjects, One in a Million is an ambitious, affecting declaration that a complete sense of freedom will only arrive when personal independence is fulfilled.

This Un Certain Regard jury prize winner is a darkly humorous, cautionary character study in letting one’s long-lost creative dreams drive every decision––one in which Soto, more often than not, finds empathy as his protagonist circles the drain.

Gornostai’s documentary is a powerful reminder that even under the worst of circumstances, humanity will always find a way to endure.

A surprising coda that leans into more genre-friendly jolts can feel at odds with what came before, yet A Useful Ghost marks an impressively ambitious, layered debut about a spirit’s ability to illuminate the ills and complications of modern life.

Seeing how Soderbergh and Koepp can expertly stack the deck to always be one step before the viewer is an exhilarating thrill to behold.

Joseph’s mesmerizing debut feels like a living, breathing dispatch from a time beyond ours, ushering in new possibilities for the form.

With its cohesive black-and-white cinematography from Pete Ohs, a dedicated performance from Birney, and a plethora of crafty homespun special effects, OBEX is an inherently likable journey that should appeal to more than just those whose childhood was similarly, inextricably linked to this early era of computing.

A directorial debut of unfiltered frankness in both its tragedy and comedy, Sorry, Baby is a singular feat of storytelling.

Finding new ways to draw humor out of the MeToo movement and carnal objectification, this is a limber, gratifying sex comedy that has more on its mind than successful innuendos and punchlines.

Never laboring too exhaustively on a single trope, yet feeling comprehensive in the breadth of what’s dissected, Shackleton has crafted an entertaining, even self-deprecating investigation into a global addiction.

Gandbhir isn’t here to provide those answers, but with her unembellished, formally compelling vision, she gives all the evidence needed for those in power to rethink the laws and systems in place.

While Blichfeldt might revel in the gruesomeness a touch too much, this is a well-crafted debut––commendable in the unexpected, gnarled ways it finds sympathy with the downcast and dismissed.

Nosferatu is a feast for the senses, so transportive in its world-building that one can almost sense the legion of rats scurrying below their feet and feel the chill in the air when Orlok glides through the moon-lit window to guzzle blood.

While Rebel Ridge hints at larger systemic issues that could be part of a million other small towns across the country, the film works best when solely anchored on Terry’s perspective. The experience is one of riveting twists, turns, and unnerving tension.

He escapes the confines of being just a hired gun, but in the case of A Quiet Place: Day One, Sarnoski’s tender, apocalyptic character drama keeps getting interrupted by a bunch of pesky aliens.

With a gentle yet rigorous vision, Eephus coalesces into a reflective study of nostalgia: both for a game that has evolved and for a certain kind of American social life that is dwindling as fast as the sun fades.

Due to its relatively simple base pleasures, there’s a sense this madcap comedy will be dismissed for choosing nimbleness over pathos, but it is Coen and Cooke’s clear love for both B-movie tropes and the wonderfully game ensemble they’ve assembled that makes Drive-Away Dolls go down so easy. Even if one doesn’t fully connect with the attempts at humor, to see the film’s MacGuffin revealed––and precisely how it pertains to a certain supporting character––is ultimately worth the price of admission alone.

In capturing the trans experience with language that only cinema can convey, Schoenbrun has crafted one of the most original, evocative, adventurous films of this decade.

The rigorous perspective solely on these mythical creatures is a daring decision––a more compelling experiment than the overdramatized recent entries into the Planet of the Apes franchise––but the end result is more commendable than dramatically captivating.

Good One is an acutely felt portrait of impending womanhood and a remarkable debut for India Donaldson.

Led by André Holland in an impressively anguished performance, the ensemble elevates a script that has its heart in the right place but feels lacking in layers of complexity that we see from the art on display.

A screwball comedy that never forgets a dramatic weight, Silver’s latest feature is a hilarious, touching, and acerbic tale of picking one’s self back up and not being afraid to pursue what is truly desired.

Weaving in skillfully employed, grounded visual effects, it’s rather shocking just how much the ghost, sight unseen, feels like another character in the movie.

As the steady flow of alcohol removes the barriers and fast-forwards the many years of estrangement, Moodysson’s skill at zeroing-in on the naked sorrows of the human experience is as sharp as ever.

Beautifully showing the importance of healing through art, Sing Sing skirts the treacly traps of a feel-good crowd-pleaser by providing a detailed, authentic roadmap for restoring a life burdened by trauma.

For all its anger at the ways Black experience has been flattened, reduced, and commodified, American Fiction has a fleet-footed touch, distilling complicated systemic issues of race to a comedy that invites both a laugh and conversation.

Woman of the Hour likely won’t be the last re-telling of this shocking tale, but it’s hard to imagine a more perceptive take than the one Anna Kendrick provides.

While spare early passages are narratively opaque and formally ornate to a distancing fault, the riveting second half––including a chilling reckoning with others occupying the desolate land and a well-executed structural gamble––brings profound expansion to this chilling story of atrocity.

While Palm Trees and Power Lines functions as a harrowing lesson for the worst-case scenarios of grooming, there’s an emptiness to the experience that, while reflecting our protagonist’s journey, results in a film that doesn’t feel fully formed.

An effective concoction of cosmic mystery and earnest emotion to elevate its small-scale, homespun design, Colin West’s Linoleum evolves into a nifty, heartfelt sci-drama.

Cinema Sabaya attempts to capture the spectrum of the human experience with a simplified conceit. While its reach may exceed its grasp, Rotem’s debut shows the necessity of making space for a dialogue, and how filmmaking is the perfect tool to express ideas that words can’t capture.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance has an ample dose of humor, heart, and chiseled abs, but one wishes the trilogy capper felt more than perfunctory.

Ira Sachs’ radiantly sexual three-hander Passages couldn’t have assembled a finer trio of actors to explore modern love in all its splendor and messiness.

For relying on the barest narrative threads, watching All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is more an experience of transformative renewal than gleaning specific details of Mack’s story.

With a lovingly crude sense of humor and finding the perfect star in Hewson to radiate sincere liveliness every moment she’s onscreen, Carney has crafted a winning tale of motherhood and music.

Brimming with an inner life and an authenticity that shouldn’t be undervalued due to its tough subject matter, Leaf’s debut is a film without a single false note.

It’s a warm, patient film culminating in a quietly powerful, reflective finale, though its sum is greater than its parts when the first two sections register a touch underdeveloped.

Holofcener deftly juggles the emotions of every character, parsing exactly where each is coming from, lucidly and thoughtfully elaborating her script with their specific insecurities.

If laudable for the ways in which it can find comedy in the banal, and for showing a new side of Ridley, one wishes Sometimes I Think About Dying ultimately left more of a finite impression considering its weighty, universal subject matter.

Chloe Domont’s feature debut Fair Play cuts deep even as it comes dangerously close to careening off the cliff of plausibility with a screenplay that dips into sophomoric.

Babylon is a brash, bombastic, unwieldy comic opera conveyed with enough bad taste and directorial panache that it—refreshingly—registers as a refutation of the well-mannered prestige drama to which these kinds of nostalgic odes often conform. And while there’s a touch of wistfulness in regards to the communal power of big-screen cinema, the film is more defined by an acidic unsentimentality, both when it comes to its characters and the precarious world they inhabit.

Retrograde is a powerful reminder that conflict breeds conflict and enacting a plan trying to protect a certain group of people will always leave others neglected.

With remarkably immediate cinematography and an intimate understanding of its subjects, Descendant becomes an essential ideal of how to tell a community’s story: not through distant talking heads, but capturing moving bodies through land and history, giving a voice to those that can often feel powerless.

My Donkey, My Lover & I is a sun-kissed, transportive charmer that doesn’t bring much new to the table yet never hits a snag. In other words: the ideal summer watch.

It’s an ambitious undertaking for an 87-minute film, and while this lofty aim can result in a few passages striking a bit broad, one comes away admiring D’Ambrose’s meticulously committed approach to storytelling.

With a strong sense of authenticity and purpose, The Northman is designed to unnerve and repel. In a wide release landscape of easy-to-please, vaporous entertainment, such feats should be celebrated.

While Bay’s frantic approach is a double-edged sword, delivering pure entertainment from the get-go while lacking in any particularly ingenious set piece, it’s a refreshing proposition to see him return to the basics of action filmmaking.

Once again Soderbergh has delivered a film that comes across as effortlessly constructed, which could only be achieved through immense consideration of every detail.

Emily the Criminal keeps up the pace to deliver an entertaining ride but misses the audacity to leave a genuine mark.

The documentary shows the Kraffts’ harmonious curiosity with nature––even its most cataclysmic forces––to make the world a safer place is a lesson anyone could benefit from.

While Speer Goes to Hollywood effectively shows the delusions of Speer’s mythologization, one wishes it didn’t skirt around more complicated questions of cordiality in the filmmaking process when dealing with such monstrous history.

Journalistic in the sense that it feels like Beshir has compiled stray quotes, fleeting snapshots, and loosely connected thoughts from a journal into a dreamy cinematic form, Faya Dayi becomes more breathtaking as these images and ideas coalesce.

Slalom ultimately becomes a story about seeing one’s passion in life corrupted through the twisted, pre-meditated manipulation of a mentor. It’s enraging and crushing in equal measure.

After the perpetual dormancy of our lives this past year, humanity is on the verge of reawakening, and Awaken is a worthy testament to just how much there is to explore.

Even if the last act doesn’t succeed as intended, On the Count of Three threads the difficult task of finding the humor in hopelessness while not exploiting the genuine pain of severe depression.

With an immersive vérité touch, Acasă, My Home vividly captures living on the margins of society––whether it’s actually off the grid or being thrown into a system not of your choosing.

With a grand score by Alan Silvestri that kicks up at every possible turn and extravagantly over-the-top Hathaway performance, this update on The Witches is a family-friendly Halloween treat that still boasts Zemeckis’ brand of the bizarre and a clear-eyed vision that seems all the more rare in today’s Hollywood.

These men have dedicated their entire lives to not only finding these exquisite white Alba truffles but also to the dogs that help them find their way, and to see their culture upturned for selfish reasons is an upsetting thing to witness. That they still have so much personality, joy, and life in them, however, makes The Truffle Hunters a delightful, charming watch.

It’s a depressing, disturbing journey to witness, but an essential one to see the machinations of evil that pervade and influence our daily life on the internet and beyond.

It’s the director’s most emotionally attuned and narrowly focused work, a film in which our attention is not pulled along by heavy dramatic shifts or distracted by a mountain of subplots, but rather how trauma can form a life of complacency and it’s only slivers of progress that hint at a more promising future.

Putting a modern, live-action spin on this fable-esque puppet tale, director Mirrah Foulkes crafts a vibrant, brutal directorial debut, even if the ultimate catharsis leaves something to be desired.

While a few too-prescient touches pull one out of the experience and its inevitable conclusion leaves a bit to be desired, The Vast of Night is a mightily admirable and entertaining tale that heralds the birth of a career to watch.

The narrative might get a touch too solemn, injecting a bit of reality when it comes to unanticipated hardships, but some welcome closure is offered without tying things up with a neat bow.

To the Stars is quaint in its aims, but this compact focus brings an enveloping level of intimacy.

Embracing the sci-fi genre, they take out the world-saving doom and frightful creature effects this breed of films is known for, and instead deliver a light, cuddly adventure that’s a step below its predecessor in shear (sorry!) inventiveness but still containing a wealth of delightful comedic gags.

What makes Boys State so compelling is it appeals both to the most cynical and hopeful of viewers.

One of the most subtly striking decisions in Minari is to not focus on the major moments in their path towards the American Dream, but rather memorable interactions within this tight-knit family, however minor they may be.

Providing levity and comfort to ideas of mortality, Kirsten Johnson has illuminated the sweet embrace of death.

The finishing of the narrative puzzle isn’t as graceful as the mindful setting of its pieces, but this is a rare director who has something compelling to convey with each choice he makes behind the camera.

Where Decker’s film excels is in the innovative perspective brought to each moment and the talented ensemble that gets to grab ahold of the material. Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg are having so much scenery-chewing fun they practically end up swallowing the single location.

More abstract than her previous films–and therefore, I imagine, off-putting to many–the steady, surreal, and sweet flashes of brilliance in this one-of-a-kind story are enough to sustain interest during some of the more tedious passages.

Crip Camp is both an inspiring historical document of a grass-roots movement but also an urgent call to action for those on the sidelines of ongoing political and societal battles.

This collection of lost souls and inquiry into their perspective on life results in a tale of profound authenticity and devastating heartbreak.

Hittman has provided an essential, specific look at just one person’s struggle to have control over her own body. By doing so with such a delicate, considered perspective, she’s giving a voice to millions of women going through the same experience. And it’s time to listen.

Accompanied by Mica Levi’s score–which mixes fairytale-esque harps to introduce the story and Southern-fried beats and synths as the craziness progresses–Bravo elevates the material and provides a unified, eccentric vision.

A thematically rich and acutely moving update for both a new generation and certainly many more to follow.

It all culminates in a final scene that is as eloquent as it is wise.

One imagines how over-the-top zany this could have been made, had the adaptation been overtly faithful, yet Linklater is able to extract the heart of the story while injecting some of his own characteristic themes.

It may begin with a scattered, cartoonish approach, but Booksmart eventually blooms into something entirely and beautifully its own.

It’s his commitment to the physicality required that signifies a mythic status to both the henchman who have the honor of fighting him and those watching the spectacle on display.

Laika’s craft makes the sweet-natured, grand adventure worth going on, but the accompanying dialogue from those leading the journey is ultimately too simple-minded to make a memorable mark.

As the fun hits a brick wall, the film doesn’t quite have the pathos of other coming-of-age stories like The Edge of Seventeen, more focused on selling the amiable, Superbad-esque hang out vibe that is so attuned to Davidson’s brand of comedy, but when it is time for some comeuppance, it’s easy to feel for both Mo and Zeke.

Clemency is a thoroughly draining experience as if we’re placed in purgatory with no means of escape, but it’s ultimately powerful in the ways it shows how the death penalty has consequences for everyone involved.

Fighting with My Family doesn’t pull too many unexpected punches, but as someone who has never watched a split-second of wrestling in their life, the fact that I was engaged with this underdog story is a testament to the success of Merchant’s first solo directing effort.

Thoroughly engrossing ... The way the directors are able to provide a portrait of empathy on all sides is astounding.

Hogg’s earlier films are striking in their picturesque abstractness as we sit in on conversations from a distance, but the ambition and warmth on display in The Souvenir makes this her greatest achievement.

While Burns is certainly damning of the forces that let these tactics be utilized, the message of the film is ultimately more about coming clean as a nation for one’s mistakes and the oversight needed between branches to have a government of integrity.

Throughout Photograph, Batra shows a sensitive touch and a patient eye for the subtle rhythms of human connection

The viscerality will surely leave one shaken, though they may question if the unceasing sadistic acts on display are worth the experience.

Those going into Paul Harrill’s second feature looking for frights will be rewarded with something more substantial: an experience rich with atmosphere and humanity, and drama ultimately more enlightening than the cheap thrills that pervade the dime-a-dozen ghost stories we’ve seen before.

Whether intentionally intended or not, this earnest endeavor does wonders to enact sympathy and overturn any negative public perception of his outbursts, even if it can feel more like self-therapy than a fully-formed film.

Through his exquisite vision, Mascaro tells a curious tale of spiritual commitment, marital strife, and the blurred separation of church and state, leading to an ultimately surprising, powerful conclusion.

It may end up playing as a silly lark, but along with dismantling ideas of masculinity, Daniel Scheinert has also created a singularly entertaining crime comedy built on utter idiocy.

[A] thoroughly engrossing documentary.

As we hear the actual recordings of the astronauts communicating with the designated capsule communicator (aka CAPCOM), it gives Apollo 11 an underlying, powerful thread of humanity.

Farrelly is telling a heart-warming, comical buddy story first and foremost, and Green Book, for better or worse, feels more like a wholehearted familial embrace than a treatise on the state of race in America today.