Katie Rife

Little Women is the best kind of Hollywood film: thoughtful yet escapist, sophisticated yet accessible, expertly crafted and deeply felt. The performances are all top notch—Ronan and Pugh, especially, breathe new life into their characters. Gerwig’s direction is also first rate.

Petite Maman is the work of an unusually sensitive filmmaker, and it speaks to Sciamma’s skill as a director that she’s able to express the nuances of this complicated dynamic through such simple actions and words.

Where Summer Of Soul really distinguishes itself is in Thompson’s inspired filmmaking. Making his directorial debut, the Roots drummer and frontman approaches this condensed narrative with a musician’s sense of timing, expertly assembling rhythmic montages with editor Joshua Pearson that transcend flashy music-video devices to relay a sense of conversation, of voices reaching across the decades to be heard.

If The Love Witch simply raised the profile of its director, Anna Biller — a true auteur who not only wrote, directed, produced, and edited this film but also designed and hand made its sets and costumes — then it would be a success.

It reinvents the zombie movie.

A pulpy, violent tale of revenge based on a comic serialized in a popular Playboy-esque men’s magazine, Lady Snowblood didn’t have to be art. But director Toshiya Fujita treated it as such, utilizing a complicated flashback structure and expressionistic cinematography to tell the story of Yuki Kashima, a highly skilled assassin trained from birth to find and kill the men (and woman) responsible for murdering her father and raping her mother before she was born.

Nyoni is clearly confident in her vision and the story she wants to tell, and in her capable hands, the result is spellbinding.

Burning actually justifies its running time by slowly building paranoid atmosphere before an explosive, hauntingly ambiguous finale.

What good high school movies do is take the basics of the teenage condition and refocus them for a specific generation’s point of view. That’s where Booksmart excels.

The Power Of The Dog divulges its secrets in deliberate, measured fashion, growing richer with each new reveal.

So it’s bit disconcerting, the unfamiliar sensation provoked by his new movie, The Favourite: Is this the first Yorgos Lanthimos film that can be called genuinely fun?

There are many moving scenes in City Of Ghosts, but towards the end of the film one especially powerful sequence shows a RBSS member shaking uncontrollably as he thumbs through a stack of pictures of his friends, dead and alive.

Nomadland is, in some ways, a condemnation of a system that rewards decades of corporate loyalty with poverty and insecurity. But it’s also remarkably clear-eyed and honest about the pleasures and benefits of life on the road, its blend of documentary and fiction allowing those on the margins to tell their stories on their own terms.

What sets I Am Not A Serial Killer apart from other takes on this “killers hunting killers” concept (Dexter, anyone?) is its naturalistic, character-based approach.

Abortion stories are real, and they take place every day, often so quietly that no one but those closest to the people involved even know they’re happening. The power of Hittman’s film lies in that combination of ordinary suffering and extraordinary strength.

The film gained an unfortunate reputation as a gross-out cannibal shocker on the festival circuit, and while that categorization is not entirely, technically incorrect — this is a piece of body horror, and an intensely visceral one — it detracts from the striking imagery and layered symbolism of Ducournau’s uncommonly assured debut feature.

Maintaining an audience’s sympathy for a character through their most fumbling, frustrating lows requires compassion and clarity of purpose, both of which McCarthy amply demonstrates here. It’s a career-best performance, the kind of nuanced turn we all suspected she could deliver, if only someone would give her a chance to do it.

Astonishingly beautiful and vulnerable, I Saw the TV Glow's surreal art-horror speaks to lonely teenagers, past and present.

The film comes directly from its writer-director’s own lived experiences with racism, which gives it a rawness and an urgency that’s hard to ignore. And given America's cognitive dissonance about the looming threat of white supremacy in this country, an unsparing take on the issue like this one is very much needed. If you feel sick watching this movie, that means it’s working.

It’s about perseverance and the power of working together toward a common goal. Those themes are universally relatable — as is the giddy thrill of watching racist forces of imperial oppression get exactly what’s coming to them.

Mistress Dispeller” isn’t really about Wang, or her methods...It’s about the mysteries of the human heart. Its exploration of these subtle depths is sensitive, as are its conclusions.

While Girl Picture isn’t necessarily breaking any new ground, this sensitively rendered dramedy invites viewers into the world of three young Finnish women on the cusp of adulthood with an affection and mellow sense of humor that makes it a more than agreeable cinematic companion.

Huesera doesn’t necessarily re-invent either of those subgenres. But it does present them in a vessel that’s so artfully crafted, and filled with details that bring the characters and their relationships to such vivid life, that it accomplishes a lofty goal for genre cinema: Taking a familiar formula and turning it into a personal statement.

Where Jude’s previous feature, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” could be didactic at times, “Do Not Expect…” slips its knife between the audience’s ribs with such skill that the severity of the injury isn’t obvious at first.

Joanna Arnow’s second feature is a symphony of ambient embarrassment, whose movements are structured around the various men with whom the protagonist, Ann (Arnow), has relationships of varying length and ambivalence. Within these movements, Arnow hits uncomfortable notes that range from cutting corporate indignities to the ritualized abjection of erotic humiliation.

This is one of those movies that shows rather than tells—always preferable, even in the moments when the big picture is still coming into focus.

Although the film ends up as a shallow rumination on revenge and single-minded dominance, it’s hard to beat as spectacle. In terms of making history exciting and engrossing, The Northman is about as titillating as gateway drugs get.

The squibs are juicy, the nudity is full-frontal, and the psychedelic orgy sequence is extended. But there’s a trenchant point to all the blood, sex, and urine.