Marshall Shaffer

There’s plenty to like, and this starter kit for detective fiction ought to serve as more of a net positive for kids than another soulless reboot of existing IP. But it’s a shame to settle for merely good when something great was very clearly a plausible outcome.

As the film nears its conclusion, “Exit 8” becomes as emotionally enriching to feel through as it is enigmatically engrossing to play through. These minimalistic trappings help construct a shared space in which the redundancy of the setup can give way to meaningful reflection.

It proves entertaining and enlightening when exploring Jacobs’ contributions to the world of fashion. But more often, it’s just like listening in on an engaging chat between two artist friends who share a fan-like admiration of each other’s craft.

Thierry Frémaux’s tribute is at its best when it spotlights just how much can still be rediscovered in the Lumière brothers’ formidable filmography, over 130 years after they filmed workers leaving the factory.

Project Hail Mary cycles through many phases, including a survival thriller, a buddy comedy, and a sci-fi adventure. Lord and Miller build appropriately toward this more serious pivot, even if there’s some herky-jerky motion amidst the transition. But that scrappy spirit of perseverance through imperfection feels in line with their hero’s own default operating mode.

Amidst all the noise and nonsense, Hoppers makes a winning case for the enduring value of dignity and respect for all creation.

The film offers a joyous throwback to the optimistic feeling of the early internet creator era.

Beth de Araújo’s sophomore feature is a harrowing chronicle of a premature maturation.

As star-crossed lovers resolve to battle their demons rather than surrender, this at times intensely creepy horror tale reveals itself to also be a potent and poignant teen romance.

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York might not be anything revolutionary, but it sure is revelatory. Segan laments a bygone bustling past, speaks to an uncertain present, and points to New York’s eternal beacon of hope to tease the promise of future renewal.

Chasing Summer earns a lot of goodwill with a rowdy climax that plays into Shlesinger’s strengths as a humorist.

Comfort with loveable loserdom is the glue – or maybe the scotch tape – that holds together a rickety contraption careening constantly toward calamity.

Union County offers something better than the Hollywood ending. It’s honest. It’s helpful. Perhaps, it’s even hopeful for those willing to sit with the uncomfortable reality of the condition, as Meeks and Poulter have. A transient victory is a triumph all the same.

By the end of The Incomer, Paxton makes explicit that this is a story about making decisions from an outlook that favors hope over fear. And, at least for the duration of the film, he creates an imaginary universe where such a choice feels both logical and lovable.

Marty Supreme rapturously reprises a siren song that transcends any single American era, beckoning hustlers to heed its call.

There’s more to recommend than not here, thanks to Nathan’s keen visual eye and Jupe’s complex interpretation of a figure often flattened into a neat function.

By providing a voice to the voiceless, The Alabama Solution invites audiences into what they successfully argue is nothing less than a new frontier in the ongoing civil rights movement. Institutions may need more time to change, but any viewer of this film should only need two hours to be galvanized into action.

In a young girl’s face is all of Left-Handed Girl, as Nina Ye, like Shih-Ching Tsou behind the camera, translates the immensity of this sprawling saga into immediate, intimate detail.

To dismantle the mythologies of maternity, Lynne Ramsay's tool of choice is the sledgehammer rather than the scalpel.

It’s a bit of a bumpy ride in “Rose of Nevada” as the abstractions of his technique bristle against the demands of the storytelling to balance various story elements (not to mention an ensemble cast).

Its zippy stylings never feel derivative or overly familiar. Watching this adaptation is like getting caught up inside a storybook drama designed for adults, maintaining a mythic quality while harnessing the complexities of reality.

The film movingly conjures the feeling of music’s creation of a suspended present tense.

Guillermo del Toro reassembles a multitude of fragments, both lifted from the text and drawn from his own life, into a bloody and beautiful organ of empathy that will assuredly live on.

Gianfranco Rosi’s long, languorous, often hushed snapshots of the area between Vesuvius and the Gulf of Naples conjure a sense of life here being suspended in time.

Cover-Up is a sweeping, if tempered, tribute to investigative journalism, attesting to its enduring importance at a time when resources for it have substantially declined.

As Noah Baumbach sells the sappiness in Jay Kelly with the same sincerity of his convictions as in his more acerbic works, the film holds together as a lightweight delight.

It’s engaging to watch without requiring viewers to completely turn off their brains. Van Sant makes “Dead Man’s Wire” move like a well-oiled machine, even if he can only get so much mileage from an old vehicle. Simple, familiar pleasures are still pleasures.

Take out a thesaurus for any overused critical buzzword about political cinema – timely, urgent, necessary – and they all fail to capture the shattering impact of Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab.

Oppenheim’s script deepens that burgeoning pit of terror with its sequencing of events and information.

The Testament of Ann Lee often proves difficult to pin down, providing enthrallment in fits and starts rather than inducing a consistent state of rapture. It’s a bit slippery in the way that chasing the divine presence in art or life can be: present and tangible, then eluding one’s grasp like smoke.

Director Park expertly fuses genres, navigating deftly between broad satire and taut thriller while always maintaining a grounding in the humanity of his characters. A hearty helping of gallows humor delivered with a marvelously mordant twist by the talented acting ensemble also cuts across both modes of filmmaking.

Bugonia might be as blissfully bonkers as the era of its release, yet don’t let that distract from what a masterclass in directorial control the film represents for Yorgos Lanthimos.

La Grazia embodies much of the Sorrentino appeal, even if it registers in more of a minor key for the Italian auteur. The film is playful when it wants to be and pensive when it needs to be.

The film patiently illustrates how places imprint themselves upon us and guide our actions.

With an eye for staging and composition as well as an ear for absurd dialogue, Schaffer brings boundless energy to bear that proves electric and infectious to watch unfold. The film never lets off the gas for a second, jolting a dormant franchise back to life—and, hopefully, the entire practice of theatrically-released studio comedies along with it.

In line with his protagonist’s ever-shifting whims, a spirit of restless reinvention characterizes director Giovanni Tortorici’s aesthetic approach.

The film is at its best when it’s keyed to its main character’s breakneck energy.

The raw emotion underlying The Phoenician Scheme peeks out at unexpected times.

Bloodlines finds frights and fun alike in a string of gory kills.

The film plays right into Tim Robinson’s sweet spot of surrealistic and satirical comedy.

Laura Casabé abstracts the typical emotions of tortured teens, only to then amplify them.

Drowning Dry offers something akin to a cinematic concussion as it begins warping the experience of time.

The rhythms and structure of Holy Cow embody the swirling confusion and contradictions of adolescence itself.

An empowering narrative of one woman who refuses to see age as a ceiling, the film serves as a potent warning for viewers about the marginalization of the elderly.

This hybridized essay film embodies the complications and contradictions inherent within Black history—complete with all its erasures and variances.

This lacks the zest and dynamism of Jude’s more subversive output, though even a minor work from a major filmmaker still manages to thrill and tantalize.

Emilie Blichfeldt knows the exact point of queasiness to which she can push an audience and gradually tests how much further she can move that mark with each successive scene.

The artist and audience member are coequal—and codependent—in this perceptive drama about a parasocial relationship that enters the realm of reality.

Right out of the gate, the filmmakers’ filtering of a James Bond-esque espionage tale through a grindhouse sensibility exists in such a state of emphatic stimulation that each shot feels punctuated with an exclamation point.

Blue Moon, like Lorenz Hart in his day, trusts that audiences want to engage with subjects that matter through deliberate dialogue.

Trying to clarify the fog of war is a patently paradoxical task, Gates successfully argues – and she can prove the assertion within the grand satirical framework of the script or in a wry comic detail derived from the immediacy of a scene.

A good film captures merely a life. A great film like Train Dreams encompasses an entire way of life. Bentley’s modest, moving epic of the common man is a thing of rare beauty.

It’s the rare film that can hit a nerve as well as an artery.

Condon’s conducting of the whole affair is technically competent … dazzling, even, in sections. But all that flashiness is not blinding enough to conceal the gap between the tune it sings and the routine it dances. That is to say: Kiss of the Spider Woman may be about movie magic, but the film itself isn’t always magic.

Everyone involved might not get the exact arrangement they imagined, but the outcome is still magical in its own way.

While this send-up might not pass the scrutiny for a rewatch or cult classic, it’s at least good for one fun and unexpected go-round.

It’s still a hilarious adventure, but Ulman loses some of her magic within a more diffuse narrative framework.

The humor lands as if it’s coming not from the writers but through the characters by its grounding in the details of their lives.

If there’s any sense of motion in the film, which is largely defined by its patient camerawork and editing, it’s in Dusty’s gradual recognition of and response to the emotions that accompany his corporal yearning to remain in place.

A simplicity of spirit guides writer-director Isaiah Saxon’s fable-like feature debut.

In Webley’s empathetic rendering of a family’s dire dilemma, no one is absolved or blamed – yet everyone pays.

April’s frames seek to embody a dizzying span of human experience, even if Dea Kulumbegashvili occasionally strains to corral it.

Brady Corbet builds on celluloid what Adrien Brody’s László Toth does with concrete: an unvarnished monument to the authentic American character.

Centering the impermanence of human existence in the euthanasia drama The Room Next Door doesn’t indicate resignation to a “late period” style so much as it suggests a natural outgrowth of Almodóvar’s formidable body of work.

It’s not a film about saying the right thing so much as it’s about people mutually arriving at the right place—no matter the untidiness involved in getting there.

There are meta-movies, and then there’s Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements.

Queer feels unsettled and inconsistent—but never anything less than fascinating to watch unfold.

The Order illuminates the pipeline from economic insecurity and racial anxiety into outright white nationalism without casting a sympathetic eye toward the eponymous group’s tenets.

Leave it to a documentarian to find subjects who profess a similar faith in the power of ecstatic rather than merely objective truth.

It’s unmistakably a return to joy for a legendary director, and that goes a long way in making this film stand out in a sea of ill-conceived sequels.

This is a sturdily constructed horror film with a foundation sneakily built on shifting sands.

Directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson are extraordinarily perceptive in highlighting the instances where stagecraft informs everyday life.

It’s a perceptive film about the way men of a certain age act around each other. (Which, is to say, like boys.)

For In a Violent Nature, careful calibration of chills just feels like second nature.

The film’s overarching dramatic irony leaves one to ponder the deliberately discomfiting question of whether it’s possible to extricate the experience of disability from the way spectators define its essence.

For chafing against existing systems designed by and for men, the storytelling structure of the film befits the female experience in American politics.

The film captures the what of Kneecap but also the why, which makes all the difference.

Until the final shot, the Zellner Brothers leave unclear whether all of their oddball observations are building to a grand statement about humanity or a punchline. Sasquatch Sunset can accommodate readings of both.

As the film progresses, the decoding moves beyond just camera positioning and movement. Soderbergh understands that the real value in following a strict set of rules is breaking them to startling effect.

The rabble-rousing enthusiasm of the enterprise carries it throughout, allowing the raucous vibes to paper over some thin characterization. The script, which is often content to remain skin-deep, just does not pack the same muscle as the directorial verve.

The American Society of Magical Negroes is a gracious work that both shows and critiques the very nature of humility.

With scalpel-like precision, the film exposes the agonies of fathers, sons, and brothers.

The journeys that Jan and Julia undergo feature such obvious narrativization that they cannot help but feel a bit out of sync with the more observation segments featuring the refugees.

Andrew Haigh’s film always feels perched on the precipice of unlocking a deeper register.

Scrapper is just the kind of scrappy triumph its title indicates. It's not the newness of the materials that matters here — it's how they are assembled with such care and consideration.

Oppenheimer lands with nothing short of the mighty impact suggested by its legendary stature. But Nolan is less interested in reifying myths so much as he’s invested in rectifying them.

Gerwig amplifies this feeling of liberation through understanding one’s confinement to Messianic lengths by the end of “Barbie.” Yet her and Baumbach’s screenplay foregrounds countless other intimate choices, too. It’s here where characters can opt to see the complexities of their identity as both complementary and independent. This is existentialism for consideration and consumption alike.

Shannon’s first feature might begin to sag under the weight of this stilted dialogue and stunted duration, but there is still a lot to admire in Eric Larue. Those qualities are not necessarily all concentrated in Judy Greer, either. Even if the film moves in circles, at least it’s circling something honest and true about spirituality and society alike.

Hansen-Løve is undoubtedly aided by the soulful performances she draws from her two leading actors. Banerjee, in her first on-screen appearance, both dazzles and delights with an effortless charm. But it's Kolinka, making his third and most substantial collaboration with the director, who leaves the lasting impression.

Boston Strangler steps right up to the line of the hokiest girlboss tropes and narrowly avoids crossing into a cringeworthy injection of contemporary feminism into a historical narrative. Rather than blaring its priorities throughout, Ruskin’s film gradually reveals the biases suppressing the idea that women’s stories matter. It’s just enough of a twist on an otherwise imitative, iterative story to hold interest.

Molehills to the rich feel like mountains to the working class, and Gravel finds the stylistic tools that can translate such scale into riveting cinema — and confer the kind of importance that the Julies all over the world deserve.

The two creative engines of the series might seem like strange bedfellows — the brainy Soderbergh and the brawny Tatum — but the duo brings out the best in each other. The director appreciates the earnestness of his leading man and finds ways to deepen that charm through quick-witted humor.

M3GAN locates the horror and hilarity lurking barely beneath the surface of our screen-addled society.

The Pale Blue Eye works best when Cooper lets it be a two-hander between Landor and Poe. Iron sharpens iron as the two men push themselves down fruitful paths of deductive reasoning. The game of twisted allegiances, false partnerships, and premature resolutions makes for a wicked mystery that continues unfolding in riveting ways.

This is not just content you ingest. Avatar: The Way of Water is a movie you bodily inhabit for three stunning hours. We come to this place for magic, indeed.

With Descendant, filmmaker Margaret Brown finds poetry where most would see the opportunity for a polemic.

Even if Master Gardener can feel like a bit of a potboiler moral drama, the heat generated is proof that Schrader can still bring the fire. The filmmaker grapples thornily and thoughtfully with difficult issues and destructive people, finding new ways to approach the questions that still haunt him.

At its best, Pallaoro’s quiet film wields the paradoxical power of cinema to create pure illusion.