Manohla Dargis

Exit 8 is a pip and as fun to watch as it is to mull over.

Yes is an unsparing movie and can be hard to watch partly because Lapid’s raw fury and maximalist approach can border on off-putting excess. There are times in “Yes” when he seems to be veering out of control. At other times, he almost seems to bait you to look away, to turn off and tune out just like his revelers, even as he inexorably pulls you in, forcing you to bear witness alongside him.

It’s a sneak attack of a movie, one that invites your laughter, even as it jabs you in the ribs.

These cinematic allusions are catnip to film lovers, and while they’re pleasurable to consider they’re so delicately woven into the story that they never distract from the characters or the emotion, or edge into directorial cleverness.

Written by Masato Kato, Bushido holds you with its performances and a story that circles around questions of honor, loyalty, masculinity and the ties that bind and sometimes throttle.

A B-movie throwback with plentiful winks, it has few thrills, but it has a touch of science, a plausible-enough threat, suitably disgusting splatter, appealing actors and a fleet running time.

It’s a sincere, mesmerizing and admirably unorthodox film that, by turns, invites your love and tests your patience. It demands attention and generosity from you, including toward characters who can be tough to tolerate, much less care about. They and the movie can be maddening, even when it’s impossible to look away.

The intrigue is far-fetched and surprising — this is one movie you can’t write in your head — and delivered with increasing winks and charm.

The most arresting way that Diaz telegraphs, though, is through the sheer beauty of his images. The movie is often visually intoxicating, at moments gasp-out-loud ravishing, especially in its presentation of the natural world, which can have a soft visual quality that deepens the sense of otherworldliness.

No Other Choice is easy to admire from one perfectly balanced shot to the next; it is a pleasure to see how Park plays with visual space and deploys some of the more slapstick comedy with sharply timed, Rube Goldberg-style finesse. If only the movie’s tones and moods were as modulated as its two vibrant, often touching lead performances.

A hyper-charged take on a bildungsroman, Marty Supreme is one of the most thoroughly pleasurable American movies of the year and one of the most exciting. Part of what makes it electric is how organically its numerous parts — its themes, characters, camera movements and accelerated pacing — fit together in a whirring whole.

Cover-Up is a model of efficient, engaging documentary filmmaking; it looks good, for starters, and it moves energetically.

At times, it can seem that Fuller is about to lose himself in the movie’s filigreed details, its curlicue lines, lush flowers and confectionary rest. In truth, I think he’s is sharing his delight in the imaginative possibilities of storytelling and in the plasticity of the medium itself, which is as infectious as it is welcome.

Strange describes the world of “Resurrection,” as does entrancing, tender, surprising, mournful and, at times, mystifying; it too is a labyrinth of a kind, one that Bi has filled with abrupt turns, elusive figures and shattering moments.

It’s enjoyable to be back in Sorrentino’s richly detailed and stylized universe, with all its enchantments and individualized, warm-blooded characters.

In its intimacy and naked truth-telling, Sorry, Baby is the kind of independent movie that can seem like a gift.

I don’t think for a second that Joseph is interested in answering questions, one reason that “BLKNWS” can feel like an invitation. He wants to open your mind and maybe blow it (he succeeds on both counts) in a work that, among many other things, interrogates memory, history and the archive.

For his latest knockout, The Secret Agent, the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho embraces a freewheeling sensibility, and finds laughter amid the terror.

Despite its unsettling political resonance, “Wicked” is finally most convincing as a story of an intense, soulfully nurturing female friendship.

Watching it again, I recognized that Linklater’s film is itself an expression of a certain approach — a consciousness — toward cinema’s pleasures and possibilities, one that at once embraces the art’s past and insists on its future.

Trier’s lightness of touch makes a striking contrast to the film’s emotional weightiness. Death haunts this movie, as it does other of Trier’s features, and while “Sentimental Value” has bursts of pure comedy (it can be very funny), it’s steeped in melancholy.

In the end, what is most surprising about Predator: Badlands is also the most obvious, which is that filmmaking matters even to formulaic, apparently indestructible franchises.

Bonitzer evinces an appreciable warmth toward his creations that you feel even from the analytic distance he establishes.

The great surprise of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere — a solid, very likable, very affecting drama about an anguished period in the life of the young Bruce Springsteen — is that it doesn’t shy away from soul-deep pain.

Like the overall movie, the character opens up incrementally to quiet, meaningful effect.

It’s a cry from the heart, a comic howl in the dark and one of the year’s essential movies.

Bigelow’s work here is superb. She puts the many moving parts into coordinated place and keeps them coherently spinning even as she switches out some elements and introduces others; she doesn’t drop a single plate. The script occasionally gets in her way, which sometimes happens in her work.

Densely packed, the movie is a whirlwind of ideas and images, by turns heady, enlivening, disturbing and near-exhausting. It’s a work of visceral urgency from Peck, who’s best known for his 2017 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” about James Baldwin.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is an exciting, goofy and deadly serious big-screen no — a no to complacency, to oppression, to tyranny. It’s a carnivalesque epic about good and evil, violence and power, inalienable rights and the fight against injustice; it’s also a love story.

It’s almost always pleasant to hang out with old friends, particularly when no one overstays their welcome. The good news about “Spinal Tap II” is that everyone involved seems to have understood the assignment, which makes for a genial 83 minutes of soft jokes and jowls.

Veiel’s documentary is a welcome addition to the historically grounded rebukes to Riefenstahl and her apologists, including bad feminists.

Relay, a slick, sneaky thriller that’s elevated by both the actor and the director, David Mackenzie, makes it clear that Ahmed also has a silent-era performer’s gift for feverish stillness.

Like many sequels, this one ramps up everything, including the body count. The fight sequences here are well-staged, shot and cut, more elaborate than in the earlier movie and at times gleefully grisly, with skewered and barbecued flesh.

The most appealing character in Suspended Time is Assayas, a hovering offscreen presence who delivers the confessional, gracefully digressive narration.

Washington’s most successfully sustained sparring partner is Jeffrey Wright, who plays Paul, the family’s chauffeur. He comes into focus through his beliefs, his attire and salient details (including a banner for the Five Percenters, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam), though primarily through Wright’s discreet, moving performance.

Weapons may not be about anything much other than Cregger’s talent, but the guy knows how to slither under your skin — and stay there.

Taken individually, a lot of the jokes might not work, but when you’re in a blizzard you don’t notice each snowflake.

An enjoyably arranged collection of all the visual attractions and narrative clichés that money can buy, “F1” is very simply about the satisfactions of genre cinema and the pleasures of watching appealing characters navigate fast, exotic cars that whine like juiced-up mosquitoes. It’s also about the pleasures of that ultrasmooth performance machine, Brad Pitt.

These nods at a past that’s by turns historic and romantically mythic, feed an undercurrent of tension that Boyle builds on, one kill at a time.

Is heterosexual romance doomed, is the romantic comedy? Those questions swirl with light, teasing provocation in Celine Song’s “Materialists,” a seductive, smartly refreshed addition to an impossibly, perhaps irredeemably old-fashioned genre that was once a Hollywood staple.

"Final Reckoning” is flat-out ridiculous, but it’s a model example of blockbuster entertainment at its most highly polished, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, despite its clichés, extravagant violence and gung-ho militarism.

A tour de force that is at once an affecting portrait of a people in flux and a soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament from one of our greatest living filmmakers.

April is easy to admire, but Kulumbegashvili’s use of art-film conventions can be wearyingly familiar, especially when the leisurely pace turns to a crawl.

All that counts in The Accountant 2 is that it’s adroitly paced, unburdened by narrative logic (there are almost as many coincidences as corpses) and buoyed by its well-synced, charismatic leads.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies.

The highest praise I can offer Warfare, a tough, relentless movie about life and death in battle, is that it isn’t thrilling. It is, rather, a purposely sad, angry movie, and as much a lament as a warning.

A sleek, modestly scaled entertainment about families, secrets and obligations, it features fine performances and some picture-postcard Burgundian locations.

The low-key charms of the coming-of-age story Holy Cow emerge gradually but steadily.

Here, at least, the performers — who include Téa Leoni as Odell’s wife, the very funny Will Poulter as the Leopold son and Anthony Carrigan as a put-upon servant — have the kinds of ductile faces, rubber-band moves and vocal dexterity that can keep even sluggish material moving.

By the time Pierce Brosnan shows up, you may find yourself giggling at the whole meta deliciousness of this enterprise. You may also find yourself feverishly hoping that when it comes time to revive the Bond series, someone has the brains to call Koepp and Soderbergh.

[Nyoni] says all she needs to with each lapidary image, with every resonant silence and with the undaunted power of Shula’s gaze.

Bong keeps things zipping along, and with such nimbleness that the movie’s heavier ideas never weigh it down. He jabs rather than pounds as he takes on targets — authoritarianism, comic-book heroics, the vanity of power — while playfully mixing moods and acting styles.

Tregenza is the kind of authentic independent who’s always worth seeking out; when he is behind the camera, he holds you rapt from the get-go.

Presence is another ideal trap to trip for a filmmaker who enjoys challenges and changing it up artistically as much as Soderbergh does.

Modestly scaled and loosely plotted, it is an unusually tender movie and an ideal vehicle for Coppola’s gift for expressing the intangible and the ephemeral.

While I don’t remember seeing any fingerprints dotting their forms this time around, the tender care that went into fashioning each of Wallace’s toothy expressions and Gromit’s quizzically raised brow remains palpable. The love, well, that you feel, too.

For her part, Kidman takes “Babygirl” to its breaking point with a performance that risks your laughter and which — as she dismantles her character’s perfection piece by piece — exposes a raw vulnerability that can be shocking. It’s the rawest thing in this movie, and it’s bliss.

Chalamet proves an ideal conduit in A Complete Unknown because the music and its maker have such power. As with any great cover band, it’s the original material that carries you through the night.

Many movies offer up a slice of reality; true to the architectural aesthetic that its title invokes, this one offers a slab.

It’s a serious movie unburdened by self-seriousness, its own and that of the profession it explores with cool, analytic dispassion.

Part of what makes Nickel Boys striking is how Ross stays true to the novel but with his own voice, his own narrative and visual style, and how he uses moments in time and freighted images — faces, hands, flashing police lights, an alligator in a class, a mule in a hall — to build the story.

With deep feeling and lacerating and gentle words, Leigh creates a world that, like the vast, mysterious one hovering outside its frame, can seem agonizingly empty if you can’t see the people in it.

[Lee] may have been Guadagnino-ized, and much about what makes him tick, his past and his art, remains obscured. Yet in Craig’s ravaged charisma you do see someone who’s ready to blow open other doors of perception.

Like Scott’s filmmaking in this pleasurably immersive spectacle — with its foreign ancients and mentalities, exotic animals and equally unfamiliar calls to human nobility — Washington’s performance has skill, intensity and absolute confidence.

Despite its bumps, the movie is consistently amusing simply because it is “The Wizard of Oz” and it’s fun watching colorful, off-kilter characters singing, dancing and sometimes flying through the air (without a superhero suit).

One of the pleasures of Kapadia’s filmmaking is that she’s inviting you to discover her characters on their terms, which means embracing the inner and outer rhythms of their lives.

Eastwood has explored systemic injustice before, including in “Changeling” and “Richard Jewell.” This is a stronger movie than those two by far, and if this one proves, as rumors have it, that it’s his last as a director, he is going out with a bang.

From the start, the movie hooks you because of its abrupt turns, how it veers into places that, tonally, narratively and emotionally, you don’t expect. Yet while Audiard has productively combined classic genres and present-day sensibilities before, even the more personal, confessional numbers here add little more than novelty.

Grant is clearly having a lot of fun in Heretic, and it’s enjoyable watching him go hard here with cold, predatory eyes and a smile that turns from uneasily friendly to straight-up fiendish.

A Real Pain is a fluidly blended amalgam of pleasing, approachable subgenres, including an odd-couple buddy flick, a consciousness-raising road movie and a charged family melodrama.

With pomp and circumstance, miles of scarlet cloth and first-rate scene-stealers, the movie snakes through the marbled corridors of Vatican City, pauses in bedchambers as cold as mausoleums and tunnels into the deepest secrets of the human heart. It’s quite the journey, and as unpersuasive as it is entertaining.

The movie’s intimacy is appealing; on occasion, it can be claustrophobic. Black Box Diaries is, at heart, a first-person account, and while it’s successful on those terms, it’s finally more emotionally engaging than intellectually satisfying.

The only news here — and, really, the greatest surprise — is how thoroughly this ribald, at times predictably unflattering movie humanizes its protagonist, a classic American striver.

Intercepted is yet another crucial eyewitness document of the Russia-Ukraine war, one that makes the personal stakes painfully vivid. It’s a reminder that war isn’t waged by putative monsters but by monstrous human beings who sometimes need to hear the sounds of their mothers’ voices.

Jacobs’s women are at once clinging to the past and looking toward the future. It’s the present that proves so extraordinarily difficult for them, a truth that Jacobs beautifully conveys in a movie that is very much about agonizing loss yet is also, fundamentally, about what it simply takes to keep on living.

Sleek and ever more unsettling, Speak No Evil is closely based on a far colder, downright nasty 2022 movie of the same title from the Danish director Christian Tafdrup. For the most part, Watkins adheres to the original’s overall design and trajectory while adding some new details and scenes; he also pads the running time an unnecessary 15 or so minutes.

To a degree and certainly by studio-sequel design, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has a cozy familiarity. If the manic edginess of Keaton’s original performance suggested that his character had ingested way too much caffeine, though probably something a great deal stronger, he now seems more like a super-eccentric uncle — only, you know, dead.

The movie is consistently funny, but its humor tends to be fairly gentle because it’s rooted in human behavior rather than in condescending, judgmental ideas about such behavior.

The first time I saw War Game, it shook me up; the second time, my visceral response was tempered by a skepticism about power that the movie doesn’t invite.

Last Summer is complex, tricky, at times very uncomfortable and thoroughly engrossing.

The fury that radiates off Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border is so intense that you can almost feel it encasing you in its heat.

Not much happens, but the people are beautiful and so too are their bikes, rumbling beasts that tribe members ride and ride on that familiar closed loop known as Nowheresville, U.S.A.

Franchises often bank on nostalgia, so it’s easy to fall for “Inside Out 2,” which works largely because the first one does wonderfully well. The new movie conforms to the original’s ethos as well as inventive template, its conceit and visual design, so its pleasures are agreeably familiar.

As Sy continues obliquely gesturing at meaning, you remain engaged but also find yourself wishing that all these many desperate pieces fit together more coherently.

In the end, what matters is the movie, a brash, often beautiful, sometimes clotted, nakedly personal testament. It’s a little nuts, but our movies could use more craziness, more passion, feeling and nerve. They could use a lot more of the love that Coppola has for cinema, which he continues to pry from the industry’s death grip by insisting that film is art.

Miller is such a wildly inventive filmmaker that it’s been easy to forget that he keeps making movies about the end of life as we know it. It’s a blast watching his characters fight over oil, water and women, yet while I’ve long thought of him as a great filmmaker it’s only with “Furiosa” that I now understand he’s also one kick-ass prophet of doom.

It’s far rarer when a movie, as this one does, speaks to everyday life and to the beauty of a world that we neglect even in the face of its calamitous loss.

One of the other pleasures of Challengers is that despite some tears, tightened jaws and its fussy chronology, the movie isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief. It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.

Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor’s face that, like Dunst’s, expressed a nation’s soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray.

Rohrwacher’s digressive storytelling can make La Chimera seem unstructured, but she’s going where she wants to go and at her own pace. She likes detours, lived-in (nonplastic) faces and the kind of revelatory details that might go unnoticed, if she didn’t direct your gaze at them.

The movie is overflowing with ideas — about history, capitalism, cinema, representation — but it also tests your patience before amply rewarding it.

Immaculate doesn’t try to reinvent anything but instead cheerfully embraces the familiar, which is part of what makes the movie enjoyable.

This movie opens itself to you with its feeling for people, its grace notes and a few bravura moments that close the distance between characters beautifully.

Narrative ambiguity can be fruitful but also a cop-out, as too many would-be art films tediously demonstrate. Here, though, the movie’s vagueness dovetails with both François’s and especially Émile’s confusion, and importantly, it also serves as a counterpoint to their unshakable love for Lana.

In Love Lies Bleeding, Glass borrows liberally but not mindlessly. Instead, she takes familiar themes and more than a few clichés — romantic doom, family trauma — and playfully bends them to her purposes.

The art of cinematic spectacle is alive and rocking in Dune: Part Two, and it’s a blast.

Garrone doesn’t spare you much, but if the movie never turns into an exercise in art-house sadism, it’s because his focus remains unwaveringly fixed on his characters who, from the start, are fully rounded people, not props, symbols or object lessons.

One of the movie’s nice surprises is that Morricone turns out to be a total charmer, a low-key showman with a demure gaze that he works like a vamp and an impish smile that routinely punctuates one of his anecdotes.