Jose Solís

Amachoukeli knows there isn’t a version of life where pain doesn’t exist, and with Àma Gloria she offers an unadorned warning––a place of refuge for when we need it.

An expertly crafted but extremely reverential, biographical documentary that uses extracts from the artist’s diary as narration to suggest we’re listening to the story from the artist herself.

What’s most admirable about Veni Vidi Vici is that Hoesl and Niemann avoid being too obvious about satirical moments.

The filmmakers leave the gaucho community the same way they arrived, a tracking shot that turns the camera into a train that stopped briefly in a place we otherwise wouldn’t know existed, each viewer taking a custom souvenir. For some a lesson in courage and tenacity or curiosity about how this culture came to be; for others, it may be simply the snapshot from a trip they won’t regret taking.

It’s a film about the chaos of creation, about the violence that occurs in the creation of new worlds, deftly playing with genres to endlessly fascinating means.

That Silva achieves to both criticize the overuse of online personas (particularly in the white gay world) while becoming a piece meant to be meme-d and TikTok-ed into oblivion is truly remarkable.

Mánver takes on the part with ferociousness, creating a portrait of womanhood that challenges dogmatic ideas about the limits of desire. With her delicious Mamacruz, she makes us realize not much separates religious and sexual ecstasy, both of which can often connect us to our higher selves.

In Gods of Mexico, we are seeing the Aztec gods still hard at work, not correcting the imperfections of creation, but sitting with us and basking in its glory.

Whatever its pictorial beauty, often significant, this adaptation of Paolo Cognetti’s bestseller exemplifies my distaste for films that depict toxic masculinity without questioning it, or even suggesting there is nothing heroic or brave about refusing to leave behind damaging practices as long as they perpetuate some limited idea of what constitutes manhood.

Cassandro instead is a love letter to anyone who dares to be different by being themselves in a world that truly could do with more glitter and sequins.

To say director Emanuele Crialese’s camera falls in love with Cruz would be an understatement. She is lovingly shot and framed (even her Sophia Loren bob brings attention to her expressive eyes) and we don’t even need to hear her speak to know whoever’s gaze she’s under has completely fallen under her spell.

That they met in a place the Nazis had created with the purpose of eradicating life, and that they would go on to live in an extraordinary way in a world that didn’t understand them, is nothing short of a miracle. That they left behind this record of joy puts us in debt to them for as long as we shall live.

Framing Agnes is not a film about ultimates. It doesn’t pretend to have answers to all the insightful questions it poses; instead it just brims with the thrill of discovery.

Although Lemercier isn’t a Dion doppelgänger, in the scenes where she lip syncs and moves to Dion’s tunes, she embodies that divinely picaresque energy Dion radiates. And just like a TikTok rabbit hole of Dion challenges, it’s impossible to take your eyes off her.

By attempting to capture the universal instead of focusing on the specific, the film feels like a collection of ideas put forth in an amorphous collage.

Meneghetti might be a first-time director, but in his assured pace, his determination not to provide easy answers, and his ability to suggest without manipulating, his career can’t help but look promising.

The film is at its best when it lets Audrey be her own story. There is something quite beautiful in the unassuming way she carries herself walking in refugee camps, hugging orphaned children not because there’s a camera around, but because she couldn’t live in a world where a child had no one to hug them.

Free Time doesn’t perform the duties of a nostalgic travelogue. It lets itself find a journey by avoiding a destination, a wanderer without purpose who finds humanity because it’s impossible not to.

The film’s greatest achievement is the effortlessness with which Sandoval captures several microcosms simultaneously happening in New York City.

The wisdom of Stoll and Whiteside’s América is that it may not have answers but it dares to observe and listen.

If nothing else, Perfect Strangers is a film about how limited we are in the way in which we use technology. Rather than using it as a tool to advance our ways of storytelling and means of unique self-expression, we’re allowing its pettiest aspects to tell us who we are, becoming strangers to ourselves.

It fails as an insightful look at the class system in England because it sees every party with utmost contempt.

For all the times I applauded the film based on its sociological achievements, I found it deeply unsatisfying artistically.

In Dyrholm, Nicchiarelli found the ideal partner to bring to life such an iconic figure. The Danish actress channels Christa’s larger than life presence, her sardonic charm, and most surprising of all: her singing voice.

Unlike several nonfiction works that try to create defining portraits of the figures they chronicle, the filmmakers behind McQueen know that their subject is ultimately larger than life, so they bask in the creations he left behind and invite us to join if we’re willing to lose ourselves in them.

While Fifty Shades Freed, like its pair of predecessors, has many laughable elements, Anastasia’s reclaiming of her well-deserved pleasure is certainly not one of them.

Director Trish Sie knows better than to mess with the formula and the film plays out like a reunion with the characters you love.

With this, Cone also continues to be one of the few directors who has chosen to contextualize faith rather than demonize it. He shows greater interest in the places where we are like each other, all while celebrating what makes us different.

While her astonishing career and scientific breakthroughs are rightfully celebrated in Brett Morgen’s documentary Jane, more than being a standard biographical doc, the film serves as a cautionary tale against the perils of male chauvinism.

Who knew a documentary about the library could turn out to be the most thrilling political film of the year?

Joan’s peculiar kind of charm is mostly owed to Allen, who gives what might be the most complex, layered performance of her career.

We’re left with a muddled portrait of a young man unaware of the creativity within him, a charming artist in the making who invited us into his life a little too early.

Destin Daniel Cretton’s adaptation of Jeannette Walls’ memoir The Glass Castle is more affected than affecting.

In 4 Days in France, writer-director Jérôme Reybaud establishes that almost any connection between humans, whether physically or digitally, can never truly be meaningless.

Girls Trip feels like the first of its kind: a raunchy, endlessly entertaining comedy written by and starring black women.

Are there rules on how to make a space epic? If there are, Luc Besson has certainly never heard them because in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, he takes the genre upside down, gives it a shake and rattle, and delivers one of the most positively bonkers films of the year.

Béatrice is perhaps the polar opposite of what we think about when we think Deneuve, and yet, as with all the other eccentrics she’s played, the actress grounds her through an otherworldly grace and humanity.

Narration is juxtaposed with cleverly selected and edited shots from TV and film appearances...that give Escapes the shape of a collage or a Russian doll, depending on how Fancher is telling the story.

If the ultimate result isn’t precisely perfect, it should serve to announce Young as a voice we ought to get to listen to more often.

Morrison proves that there is no better way to tell the story of movies than with movies, and it seems almost spooky how the Dawson City reels supplied him with the material he needed.

It’s clear that Katz is more interested in the idea of playing with movie conventions than with crafting anything remotely resembling reality. It’s a joy to immerse oneself in his cool, neon-lit world, a place where movie characters speak like movie characters and the dream of justice is inescapable, even if the movies have taught us better.

Through focused, economic storytelling director J.D. Dillard turns Sleight into the rare kind of film that feels both familiar and unique.

It’s easy to forgive it for its shortcomings, for rarely does the idea of death elicit the warmth and utter charm as it does in this documentary.

While Lazer Team might not be the most original of sci-fi comedies, it possesses the kind of self awareness — and unabashed love of genre that other films try to pass off as “homage” or “ironic referencing” — that make it quite impossible not to root for it to succeed.