Marshall Shaffer

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

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

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.

By grounding her intellectual explorations in intimately observed human drama, Reichardt delivers another nuanced behavioral portrait as well as an incisive historical tome.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Pedro Almodóvar's Parallel Mothers may at first present like a run-of-the-mill effort from the face of Spanish cinema, but there's a deceptive amount of variation here. It's both a perfect distillation of his artistic fascinations and marked evolution in the depth of his thematic explorations.

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

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

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.

Within The Banshees of Inisherin, McDonagh manages to capture both the elemental resonance of folklore with the sophisticated weightiness of classic stage drama. This tragicomic tale nimbly balances both the personal and political dimensions of his richly developed characters and scenarios.

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

The film is a mesmeric but frequently muddled exploration of transgender self-actualization.

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.

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

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

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.

If the assignment was to rebuild the series largely from scratch essentially, perhaps the producers should have taken a risk by entrusting “Snake Eyes” with a director who could bring something specific or startling. This is still a derivative, paint-by-numbers effort that can’t decide if it wants to build a franchise or a character.

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 film is less a portrait of one martyred man than a mosaic of a resistant community.

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.

Deadpan has never crackled with such life as it does in this miraculous movie, a stunning synergy of story and style to which all films tackling sensitive social situations should aspire.

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

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

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).

While a full 140 minutes of this can get occasionally exhausting and tedious, Aïnouz makes it more than worthwhile in his stirring conclusion when the full impact of a life apart becomes wrenchingly apparent.

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.

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.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On locates a world of wonder inside our drawers, under our noses, within our grasp – and enables viewers with the tools to both access and appreciate it.

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

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.

The film is honest and poignant in its kaleidoscopic refractions of the frustration inherent in a process that’s only just beginning.

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

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.

This meditation on the emotions that bind and the economy that separates is a worthy representation of the risky business of holding onto humanity in contemporary society.

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

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.

There are not “funny” moments or “dramatic” moments for their characters; there are simply “human” moments. Whether people react to them with laughter, pity or some combination of them both may say more about themselves than the film.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Apples maintains the droll wit and entrancing abstraction of Lanthimos, but the film does not feel quite as drenched in irony. Nikou’s storytelling remains deliberately opaque while also leaving plenty of room for genuine emotional connection.

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

Don’t expect any inspiring schmaltz from The County, but for those looking to understand the global nature of the struggles faced by those who dare to resist all-encompassing economic organizations, this movie delivers the goods.

Kusijanović storms out of the gate with a confident coming-of-age tale full of relationships as rocky as the craggy Croatian coast in which the story unfolds.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Origin lacks both a center of gravity and a sense of scale.

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.

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

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.

The romance is a soaring spectacle to witness unfold, but it becomes a Trojan horse to explore notions of how and where people find validation. The film's embrace of two lovers does not close ranks around them, instead opening its arms to welcome anyone who has ever felt like a disowned outcast.

Audiences deserve to see the conclusion of an action film so immaculately crafted and patiently paced, one that's more focused on inspiring reverent amazement through the simplicity of durable storytelling structures rather than the complexity of cinematic universe building.

While it’s great to see an example of a filmmaker refusing to rest on his laurels or stay inside the nearly defined box of his cultural reputation, a film must be a film – not just a concept. Un Couple never quite manages to transcend its origins as a precious pandemic project.

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.

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

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

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

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

The film develops not in grand gestures but in an accumulation of small, gentle moments.

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.

Especially after the film’s stunning conclusion, Athena is destined to leave jaws on the floor and heart rates significantly elevated long after the credits roll. This is the painful, perilous present tense written in the flash of a smartphone camera and the blaze of a Molotov cocktail.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.