Luke Hicks

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.