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.