Marshall Shaffer

The scattershot Mother Mary can never effectively find the connective tissue between different modes of storytelling. To put it in musical terms, this is less a mixtape and more of a playlist on a chaotic shuffle.

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.

For a film so fixated on provoking fear and dread through the medium of audio, it’s naturally strongest when it does not bother to stimulate the eyes at all.

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.

There’s a floor for entertainment with a cast this strong, especially two leads who can contort themselves bodily and emotionally with such dexterity. But “The Bride!” spends too long operating at that level because it cannot escape the mire of confusion about its own identity.

Once the basic parameters of Franco’s thought experiment in Dreams are grasped, what’s left is an obvious parable about immigration with little to offer beyond spitefulness and a smugly superior sense of self-loathing.

The material’s dualities trap Ford between continents, not to mention genres and tones.

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.

Frank & Louis slips into being a film that’s observed and admired from a distance, not experienced emotionally.

The film gets too caught up in concern trolling about the sexual timidity of today’s youth.

There’s a good movie about therapy and PTSD inside Jay Duplass’ See You When I See You. The trouble is, it’s buried in a so-so family ensemble film about shared grief and recovery.

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.

Even the most hair-brained of Wain’s films have some quality elements, and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is certainly no exception to that rule. But it’s nevertheless a slight disappointment to see a luminary operating at the lower end of his power and promise.

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.

Wilde toils feverishly to create the illusion of momentum and communicates to the audience that they must be feeling such a sensation. But for all the belabored artistry of this choppily cut enterprise, little in “The Invite” actually moves. It’s potential energy, unconvincingly trying to pass itself off as kinetic.

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.

Let this film with no bite serve as rock bottom for the IP era.

Call it “naïve-core,” perhaps, as the film so thoroughly loses touch with reality by avoiding conflict of any kind. His empty platitudes like “humans help humans” are rendered useless and risible inside a work that seems to lack even a basic understanding of humanity in 2008, 2025, or any time at all.

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.

If the people on screen only feel like characters, then no amount of creepy creature design or surprising twist can make a venture such as Perkins’ here register as anything other than an antiseptic experience.

The film ultimately feels like little more than hired hand work from Wright. What he lacks in compositional vision, he tries to make up for in clever casting (Colman Domingo, William H. Macy, and Lee Pace all deliver their best), as well as some simple gags. But like the people in Ben Richards’ fictional dystopia discover, amusing ourselves to death can only go so far. “The Running Man” settles for being good when, if the topline talent had leaned into their fortes, it could have been truly great.

Christy lulls us into complacency by deviating little from the standard inspirational sports-movie playbook.

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

With nothing but artful austerity to offer as a tether back to reality, The Ice Tower shatters.

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.

Its desire to resist easy storytelling paradigms around artists is admirable, but without punching up or down, the film feels like it’s pulling punches altogether.

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.

Law’s take on the Russian leader feels both real and mysterious — two features that the film otherwise struggles to corral across its unwieldy runtime.

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.

Ballerina is passable as a continuation of “John Wick” mythology. However, it’s not strong enough to organically generate comparable enthusiasm for continued storytelling with this character.

Mike Flanagan’s film doesn’t escape the mires of unpersuasive pop psychology.

Jonathan Millet’s film is unconvincing and unnaturally contorted into its shape.

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

When they can translate something into a tangible sensation, like the camera effects of focus that take viewers into Piper’s distorted field of vision, the film operates within a comfortable range for the directors. Where they struggle to locate resonance is in the emotional realm.

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.

Hardly a false note is sounded throughout The Friend, but it operates within such a limited emotional range that it drifts into monotonic plainsong.

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 film has no answers because Lin plays it more like a heist film—where the bounty is the purity of the unexposed North Sentinelese—than a sincere human drama about faith and identity. Lin entertains as a result but struggles to enlighten.

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.

The Return may render its mythological figures lifelike through flesh and blood, but nowhere inside that viscera lies a beating heart.

It’s unclear if Steffen & Flip believe in a hell for their characters. But their 85-minute torture device disguised as a movie proves they believe in one for their viewers. Not even cheese ‘n’ rice can save this dismal enterprise from doom.

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

Sora Neo struggles to balance the immediacy of adolescent angst with the long-range outlook of using the students’ experience as a canary in the coal mine for society at large.

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

The film’s lack of character development might not appear so evident were it not in such stark contrast with all the other elements of “Harvest.”

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.

Given the unhurried pacing and general underplaying of the situation’s gravity, the film feels like visiting a museum exhibit rather than living through a flashpoint of history. Here, the past’s horrors are but pictures nestled safely behind glass.

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.