Luke Hicks

Ford’s witty crime caper employs a nonstop pace that grooves slyly along to Emile Mosseri’s quick, bass-heavy, snare-driven score, which hangs ever-present in the backing soundscape. It has, for better and worse, the feeling of a montage that never ends.

This silly, simplistic sci-fi journey means to be thought-provoking, but the irony of its banality is more recoiling than provocative.

Diaz makes a mockery of Magellan in his depiction of the revered globetrotter, his take on the Age Of Discovery damning to say the least.

The screenplay is overflowing with memorable meditations, blunt-but-heartfelt exchanges, and piercing affection for its people, all rooted in the natural world around them.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is a slog, confused about the artist at its heart and stuck on unconvincing ideas about his art.

Whether it’s a new chapter for Aronofsky or a tangential dip into different territory, Caught Stealing proves the auteur hasn’t lost his touch.

Splitsville is overflowing with one-liners and gut-busters that make it ripe for subsequent viewings.

The characters are so fleshed-out, the diction so lived-in, the backstories and present stories so engaging. Their conversations seem less like scripted scenes than real moments lucky to have been captured. In creating a relatively small and recognizable film that can feel revelatory, Trier shows sleight of hand that could only belong to a young veteran at the height of his career.

I don’t know if The History of Sound is worth revisiting for its devastating romance, the likes of which deepen this story’s emotion but make it a much heavier haul, but I’m counting down the days until I can revisit its songs, sonically and visually; the hearing speaks for itself.

The duo is responsible for one of cinema’s greatest cinematic achievements, Malcolm X, while the other three would have a fighting chance at most directors’ best. If Highest 2 Lowest falls on the lower end of their partnership, the sparks of brilliance they’ve found in the past will flare up multiple times.

One film too late for a sophomore slump, Alpha feeds on its own potential, turning a possibly brilliant collection of ideas into one so muddy it’s hard to say exactly what any of them connote. But the feeling of having to trudge through is there all the same, and over two hours is a long trudge.

It’s textbook Petzold, which I mean as a major compliment. Don’t expect all of the mysteries to be uncovered. There is no big explainer moment or narratively satisfying closure, the likes of which Petzold rejects, but the enigmas that do reveal themselves yield rare treasures.

It’s often pleasant, pretty, impressive, and well-scored (and we’ll note the spectacle of design shortly), but that isn’t enough for someone of his caliber. Where is the emotion? The feeling? The Owen Wilson perspective of his storytelling soul?

At worst it’s preachy and, I fear, will feel “old” to younger audiences. At best, Nouvelle Vague is the kind of movie that emboldens people to make films themselves, and even more so, to adopt filmmaking as a way of life.

The movie looks amazing, it’s often intriguing, the style is evocative, and it should be distinct from Kaufman’s work. But in the ways that it’s similar, there’s less to be discovered––the ghost of revelation where it feels revelation could be.

It’s a fine return for Whannell after being off the scene these last few years.

Goswami gives a subtly powerful performance grounded in perpetual shock, patience to act, and measured wisdom. And the enigmatic screenplay devises a grey area so hazy you’ll be going over it in your head for weeks, if not months, asking yourself what you would’ve done in Santosh’s impossible situation.

It relegates its thematic strengths to the corner of ironically thoughtless family fun entertainment that seeks to please and assuage where other projects might investigate the theme and leave you with a sense of concern over the real-world parallels without sacrificing entertainment

Loktev seems to be everywhere at once. She risks her life with the camera as journalists do with their pens, programs, and presence, holding on as long as they can in the week after the war begins.

With Costa’s nearly unfettered access to the main characters of modern Brazilian politics, the events of Apocalypse in the Tropics practically unfold in real time––a thrilling, profound documentary horror.

Minh Quý’s slow-cinema sensibilities are nothing short of spellbinding, the trance of rumination within reason enough to seek it out. And if that’s not enough, go for the best final shot of the year: a breath-stealing beauty that will leave you frozen in your seat even after the credits are over.

Baby Invasion’s feature watchability aside, Korine’s new chapter is a tectonic experimental development for the film industry, a step in the right direction towards uncharted territory by nature of exploration and originality alone.

It’s not that the film is so crazy that you have to see it (in fact, what’s crazy about it is that it isn’t); rather that few have ever had a platform like Philips and Joaquin Phoenix to fool with expectations of the masses so blatantly. How they did it is something worth seeing.

Where other filmmakers fall flat with the same material, Kurzel nails every emotional beat, wrenches your gut more than a few times, and immerses you in a primal modern history you likely don’t know this well. He weds the cinematic elements to a relatively memorable whole that envisions the past with clarity and hyper-relevance as only film can.

The movie doesn’t have much to offer by way of score, composition, camera movement, sound design, style, lighting, production design, etc. At least there will be some narrative to discover, and a pleasure in lead performers still harmoniously attuned to one another despite the script’s hobbles.

It’s so funny for the first hour and last 20 minutes that one can’t help wondering what the hell happened with the 40 in-between––a frustrating, unfunny slog of a middle section that’s so hard to sit through it will unfortunately keep many from reaching the brilliant, bizarro finale.

All We Imagine as Light may not transcend form or style the way Kapadia did in her first feature––perhaps the only thing they share is dreamy titles––but that doesn’t make it any less transcendent. If anything, this is a more universal transcendence, one predicated on the strength of being together, the innate spark in people, and the potential we all have to see everyone as someone.

The aspirations are admirable, but at 140 minutes it’s overlong, arriving at a pretty natural end before another act begins and we launch into what suggests an unwarranted second film. (Still, one that also ends up being good.)

Anora is a devastating, gut-busting beauty––regular cinematographer Drew Daniels lending his brilliance to yet another Baker triumph––the kind that hurts your heart and holds you tight to recover at the same time, tears of laughter streaming down your face.

The charges against him are lobbied on a cellular level, eventually turning The Apprentice into a deep-dive diss track on the souls of the ex-President and the country, its traditional values, and one man’s infatuation with them.

At its strongest, Emilia Perez is a blend of inspired cinematic technique and stereotypically cool music-video aesthetics. And even at that, it’s a flashy slog at two hours and ten minutes.

Lanthimos has put together another dark, well-crafted delight, if not a slightly more forgettable one.

At the end of the day, for better and for worse, in awe and in tired confusion, Megalopolis is a garish wonder to behold.

Hit Man is far from one of Linklater’s best, but in the context of his career it’s a welcomed addition, and on its own a damn good time.

At the end of the day, Priscilla’s multifaceted brilliance comes back around to Coppola’s immaculate sense of restraint in both screenwriting and direction.

Penélope Cruz steals the show as the pistol-wielding Laura. . . It’s a great performance founded on a sizzling bitterness that manifests the film’s only (darkly) comedic moments in bursts of scathing monologue.

There hasn’t been such a delightfully strange and thoroughly developed cast of characters in years.

Despite the cool, screeching, horror-like score and some memorable moments, Kidnapped plays more like a heavy sigh than an absorbing adaptation of history.

Asteroid City is an absolute delight, Anderson’s best since The Grand Budapest Hotel.

It would be very fair to expect a movie about a woman who raped a child and her future family’s reckoning with that to be dark, heavy, even overbearing. But May December is more funny than it is fervent, a bona fide spring suburban anthem, an American malady in chrysalis.

Martin Scorsese triumphs yet again.

Steve McQueen’s first documentary feels more like an unedited podcast with dizzying visual accompaniment than a feature film, despite ruminating on its subject, Amsterdam under Nazi occupation, for more than four hours.

What starts as a relatively clear story about sinister pyros, “pig-brained” kids, and abusive teachers transforms, through labyrinthine story mechanics, into a maze of limited perspectives crafted by loss, misinterpretation, and rejection.

There’s a version of the film that feels engaging and well-considered. It pops its head out every once in a while (most notably in an FBI impersonation sequence led by a gut-busting Kaitlin Olson). But it can’t even stay above water in a shallow script. Despite its name, Champions rides the bench.

The Eternal Daughter buries us in the apprehension and frustration of writing and self-discovery as if they were one act, inextricable necessities. It’s spectral; much of what’s going on or being said doesn’t actually connect, but feels like it should. In a world of ghosts, somehow it does—a phantom connection that hovers brilliantly over everything.

It’s hard to imagine mal intent from the mind behind The Father, a film laced with an intoxicating empathy, but it’s not hard to imagine a lesser work. If we’re giving Zeller benefit of the doubt, it just goes to show how difficult it is for a director to make back-to-back bangers.

Without his trademark vulgarity and narrative absurdity, McDonagh’s challenged himself to draw humor and meaning from the mundane. And he does.

Ultimately, Don’t Worry Darling is an elaborate game of house with little pay-off, the movie version of a fake tan: it gets the job done, but might sour your interest in the tan itself in the process.

The chemistry between Chalamet and Russell is off the charts. Their love is desperate, passionate, true, confused and confounded, perpetually crushing under the ethical crisis they face in killing innocent people to survive, not to mention the fact that they feel very differently about it.

When it’s all said and done—the technical marvels elucidated, the stylistic flare appreciated, the wide-eyed self-reflection given a fair shake in retaliation to the all-too-easy critique of self-indulgence—I can’t help but wince a little at the thought of a second watch. If it’ll be great to revisit certain sequences, the thought of stomaching all three hours again so soon is grueling.

Bodies Bodies Bodies feels like A24 trying to suck up to the cool kids––a vapid, perhaps successful attempt to reel in a contemporary influencer crowd. Enjoying it feels partially dependent on one’s familiarity with celebrity pop culture, the intricacies of tabloid news, and the ever-evolving landscape of political correctness.

The explosiveness and wavering intrigue and sleek blue-gray cinematography minted for a cop movie––the kind that reflects thematic consideration and well-crafted execution in matching the steeliness of its hard-nosed leads––can’t do enough to save it.

Broker marks a thematic continuation of career-length fascination with alternative families and the legal, social, and philosophical values that paint such complicated ethical portraits of them. The director still has plenty to say, and does so quite eloquently.

Among many films that tackle class, race, and privilege at Cannes this year ... War Pony is more subtle in its pursuit. The stories aren’t plotless but the emphasis isn’t on any one narrative conflict. Keough and Gammell make it more about witnessing the culturally and spiritually rich world of Pine Ridge.

Thirty minutes in—with all interesting ledes sufficiently buried or ignored, the charm of his husky southern drawl faded—you realize you’ve been conned into letting Coen take you on a YouTube train of his favorite Lewis performances and interviews. If you like Lewis’s sound, that’s fun for a short while. Then you realize he’s just playing the same songs on repeat and it starts to get annoying, as getting cornered at a party usually does.

It’s tough to watch a movie like Elvis and totally dismiss it, no matter how much of a trainwreck it might seem. Name a department that isn’t the Tom Hanks department and there’s plenty of creative work worth praising. It’s just utterly incoherent with the material—that’s even tougher to get past.

There’s never a moment of grand revelation; rather a subtle, perpetual sense of understanding what’s going on, a fact that takes some pressure off the film and will likely make for a richer rewatch.

Though struggling with some pacing issues, it’s mostly an engaging, well-performed drama that offers a fascinating peek into an institution matched in significance only by the Vatican itself.

At a lengthy 140 minutes, the film flashes by. The deeper you go the more you want to know, and the more there is to know.

Paris, 13th District wades in the strange, true interconnectedness of life and evokes the banality within, so much that it starts to become banal itself.

If The Year of the Everlasting Storm isn’t exempt from the typical disjointedness of portmanteau films, it yields more coherency than its kin. With so many disparate works included, the experience becomes an intriguing exercise in cinematographic range and creative perspectives on the most globally unifying trauma in human history.

It isn’t the most entertaining version of a Velvet Underground documentary, but it’s the truest to the group. Haynes hones in on character and new elements they brought to the table which, like elements of modern art, are best captured through philosophies and conceptual understanding, as they are here.