Jordan Raup

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.

This is the kind of comedy one imagines will only earn a few chuckles when it eventually arrives on a streaming platform.

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.

With its whirlwind, surface-level observations of fascinatingly complex lives, The Thief Collector is the kind of scattershot true-crime documentary that grips in the moment but, with reflection, is more entertaining to discuss than revisit for additional clues.

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.

Initially intrigues with its lo-fi sci-fi ambition but has too much on its mind without saying anything interesting at all.

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.

Every so often the semblance of a promising adaptation peeks beyond the surface, but ultimately it all gets swallowed in a reductive muck of misguided choices that over-explains what the short story left up for discussion.

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.

William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth follow-up Eileen is lacking in a considered formal approach but strives to make up for this misgiving with a script that offers its talented ensemble an unexpected mix of sensual longing and perverse thrills. While this clash of tones doesn’t entirely gel, part of its appeal is the shock of such contrasts.

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.

A ruthlessly nihilistic beast of a movie, Elijah Bynum’s second feature Magazine Dreams provides a one-note powerhouse acting showcase for Majors, who ends up getting lost in the drawn-out second half as thematic points that initially sting get repeated ad nauseam and red herrings meant to shock become unnecessary side plots.

If The Pale Blue Eye dances around potentially intriguing ideas––the dehumanization of being in the military and who ultimately answers for the crimes carried out in the name of religion––it’s all window dressing for what is ultimately a murder mystery lacking momentum.

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.

While a murky, laborious affair, Pinocchio never feels wholly inept with the consummate craftsman at the helm, yet it’s certainly the director’s laziest time behind the camera.