Kyle Turner

The film is startlingly earnest in its affection for Ke Huy Quan and making him play both to and against type.

The film’s discernible brushstrokes serve as a reminder of the literal hands, the labor, it takes to raise someone, mold them into a survivor, and to carry love with you wherever you go.

This is a film of tremendous emotion, spirit, and paradoxically restraint and ambition.

Pulsating in the film’s veins is an eerie eroticism and a tactile awareness of the way the Church is controlling the bodies and minds of its women.

In the classic queer punk tradition of Bruce LaBruce, John Waters, and Gregg Araki, Ethan Coen’s film knows when to pay homage and when to move to its own rhythm.

Across the film, you can feel the push and pull between a master technician who built his career on the patient, delicate plucking at our heartstrings and his newfound desire to please a wide audience with the broadest of affective strokes.

This Thanksgiving is a slasher for today, slickly made, coolly mean, and with a satiric bite.

Flowing and keenly observant of its characters and setting, Punch swings above its weight class.

Kalderon and the cinematographer Ofer Inov make Adonises out of the film’s athletes, but the film goes beyond mere marble-body ogling in its equal attention to the physical, psychological and emotional toll that training takes on Erez and Nevo.

Heymann situates the notion of celebrity in the context of not just performance and gay culture but also familial intimacy, with striking detail.

Harwood’s portrayal of Jamie is not as an already birthed star crashing down to earth, but a sweet, excited, restless 16 year old, testing the limits of his aspirations in a space that can’t possibly accommodate them.

Hudlin transforms a film that would be, in lesser hands, a formulaic hardship-as-aesthetic drama, into an earnest examination of what community means on the field, in the classroom and in our society.

Freedia’s beguiling charisma carries the film, and it makes the case that her impressive power, in conjunction with collective action, could help carry a movement, too.

Even through its absurdist, bleakly satirical lens, Bong understands that social inequity is not just theatre, but lived experience.

The sweetness of the film finds an amusing complement in its strange eroticism, itself part of the queerness of its genre mixing.

Rather than being concerned with historical authenticity (Sandy Powell’s costumes are gorgeously anachronistic), Lanthimos gestures towards an emotional reality that posits the lover and the loved as soldiers, capable of being a casualty in what each party believes is a greater cause. What a blazing and burning feat of melodrama.

In its keen and sensitive and moving observations about the uncertainty in being Asian-American, it’s always drifting, and Wu’s incredible ability to convey all those ideas wordlessly is what makes the film more than just about a material China girl.

The difference between McQueen and the standard tortured genius documentary lies in the kind of artist McQueen was: Behind the (sometimes incendiary, sometimes infantile) provocations in his designs was a clear humanity, his garments the unfiltered expressions of his emotions and ideas.

The film confronts directly the contradictory feelings and impulses of a child who must assimilate into a new family, but Simón foregoes the bells and whistles of many other family melodramas, crafting instead an extraordinary and beautiful work of grief and memory.

There are a couple of impressive set pieces in Jigsaw, but the traps seem fairly rudimentary, and it’s up to the camera work to provide the needed jolts.

Mudbound’s is a large and cumbersome story not because of the complicated dynamics it presents, but because of the way they’re presented, with a lot of opportunity to explore the complexity between characters, but little of those opportunities are constructively used, perhaps because there is too much material on hand.

The Florida Project is spattered with profound sadness, with moments of externalized, violent frustration at presumed helplessness, at practically being born into all this. To what degree you believe Baker to be condescending or patronizing or exploitive is up to you, but the film’s bursts of light, its idea of what caregiving looks like when caregiving is a privilege, is handled with sensitivity.

Lady Bird is nothing short of tremendous, a wise film about how two people deal with ambivalence.