Nick Schager

It boasts some of the nerve-wracking anxiety of Uncut Gems and the keenness of last year’s standout Playground, even if it doesn't eventually pull off its delicate tightrope act.

As highlighted by its pitch-perfect finale, South Mountain demonstrates a realistically complex conception of stock ideas like “vengeance,” “moving on” and “healing,” and Ethan Mass’s cinematography echoes the material’s dualities in its delicate interplay of light and dark. Guiding the material from start to finish, however, is Balsam.

Debut writer-director Shaka King dramatizes her characters' descent into disarray with disarming intimacy.

From one wild mood swing to the next, it keeps us interested with aplomb, with Mike Makowsky’s script never lingering too long on any one element, the better to keep the pace brisk, and unpredictable.

Blending archival footage and new interviews with Nilan, his family, journalists, and fellow combatants, Gibney celebrates hockey's fisticuff traditions while also recognizing how such brutality ultimately takes its greatest toll on those who perpetrate it.

Those with a craving for out-there mystery and dread, however, will get a heady buzz from its bizarro madness.

A midnight movie that recognizes that there’s no existence without sacrifice, and no birth without death.

Hoover’s style seems equally fit for a bleak documentary, suspenseful thriller, black comedy, dystopian sci-fi nightmare and grisly horror film.

Electrified by virtuoso filmmaking, its enraged message comes through loud and clear.

Full of the very thrills one might expect from a summer blockbuster.

This is a swift and searing attempt to pull back the curtain on Jobs and, in the process, investigate the relationship between the myth and the man.

Far from a stuffy history lesson, it’s a film that’s at once urgent, rousing, and alive.

Staging multiple sequences as extended Altman-esque tapestries in which overlapping voices uneasily harmonize with the soundtrack's swelling jazz, On the Rocks is like a blood pressure–raising anxiety attack extended to an hour and a half — except funny.

Energized by Ariella Mastroianni’s disoriented and frazzled lead performance, it begins unnervingly and ends, like all such sagas should, with haunting bleakness.

An assured directorial debut about media reliability that unnerves by embracing the unknown.

In virtually every closeup, Donald Cried practically seethes with barely suppressed emotion, though Avedisian cannily couches his characters’ very real, raw feelings amid a ridiculousness born of Donald’s wholesale weirdness.

It’s an ode to self-discovery and acceptance that’s as funny as it is sweet.

A gut-wrenching saga about illuminating the darkest corners of private lives, and about the difficulty—and perhaps unjustness—of genuine Christian forgiveness.

With leads Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller generating considerable sparks, and violent set pieces that up the supernatural ante one out-there revelation at a time, the director’s latest proves a bonkers B-movie on a big-studio budget.

Led by performances imbued with barely concealed sorrow, regret and longing to come to terms with that which has been lost, Kaili Blues affords a view of people, and a nation, caught in between a haunting yesterday and — as implied by the film’s conclusion — a hopeful tomorrow.

This trippy work maps the intersections of West and East, body and spirit, faith and terror with beguiling grace.

It’s Dynevor, though, who makes Fair Play sizzle. Balancing fiery sensuality and severe determination, the red-headed 27-year-old actress lights up the screen.

There’s no way to get a total read on what Qualley’s protagonist is up to, which turns out to be the primary thrill of this snapshot of personal, professional, and class warfare.

[A] winning film ... Genre fans won’t want to miss it.

A collision of agony and ecstasy that approaches the divine even as it reveals piousness to be an outgrowth of, and justification for, earthly suffering, it’s like nothing the genre has seen before.

As a hitman on an assignment in a far-flung locale, [McShane's] as good as he’s ever been, exuding a heft and danger that typifies this understated and affecting genre effort.

Barry Keoghan is arguably the most electric actor working today, and he absolutely ignites Bird.

Invigorates its well-worn formula through meticulous stewardship and an excellent performance from headliner Gustav Dyekjær Giese as a boxer who attempts to realize his dreams of glory in the most daringly illicit manner imaginable.

Even at its conclusion, Holmer’s film refuses to provide easy answers regarding its meaning, instead using poised formal techniques to impart that which is not spoken — and, in the process, portends impressive things to come from its confident, capable director.

Frank De Felitta's guilt over having aired the footage is moving, yet it's ultimately countered by this piercing film's stance - promoted by the subject's proud children and grandchildren - that Wright's statements, far from a slip of the tongue, were an intentional act of courageous defiance.

Stone is a mesmerizing riot in this bleak satire of our current state of disorder—as is her co-star Jesse Plemons, who matches her intensity and manages to outdo her craziness.

Like the finest noir, what springs forth from Saleh’s film is the dreary belief that the bad sleep well while the rest are left to suffer in the streets.

Celebrates feminist independence and rage, even as it embraces the conventions of its many cinematic and pop culture influences.

A sly, sinister film about self-loathing, sacrifice, and the things people will do to survive—with a great tormented performance from Dakota Fanning at its center.

A successful experiment that’s highly attuned to the digital immediacy of our modern condition.

It's Gruber's own remembrances (and a wealth of accompanying archival photos and film footage) that best mark her life as a case study in pioneering feminist courage, ambition and individualism.

A film that captures the underlying essence of baseball at the beginning of the 21st century: both humbly wistful and progressively cutting-edge.

Jennifer Yuh Nelson's sequel delivers a bevy of superpowered set pieces that are dexterous and delirious, as well as tonally confident.

A hypnotic star child of out-there wonder and internal corruption and chaos.

Summer Wars surprisingly celebrates togetherness and bravery as much as binary-mathematics expertise, all helped along by a kick-ass synthesis of traditional hand-drawn scenes and fluid, rainbow-explosive CG artistry.

Resembling a bonkers marriage of “Young Tully” and “Teen Wolf,” and led by a ferociously naked and unafraid performance by its star, it’s an amusingly incisive howl of maternal pain, frustration, disappointment, resentment, and feral strength.

Snappy, sweet, and moving, this crowd-pleasing winner starring Miles Teller, Elizabeth Olsen, and Callum Turner continues the genre’s much-needed revitalization.

There may be no cinematic artist more deserving of a lionizing documentary than Williams, and that’s precisely what he receives from Music by John Williams.

[Its] genuine focus is the emotional turmoil that drives people to practice this profession as well as to patronize its “experts” in search of guidance and insights into the biggest questions of their lives.

The portrait it paints is sure to confound and infuriate in equal measure. Far from simply a snapshot of a discussion about race, Brownson’s documentary is a riveting account of self-sabotage, misplaced priorities, and obstinacy run amok.

Distinguishes itself by putting a distinctly 21st-century spin on its time-honored template, as well as via a black sense of humor.

A captivating character study about a young man trying to carve out a grown-up life despite having spent half of his years on Earth behind bars.

An endearing, infuriating, and despairing non-fiction portrait of a country’s final descent into oppressive authoritarianism, all of it shot covertly by one brave teacher, it’s a striking work of rebel cinema.

[Bayona's] finest film to date, and a fitting tribute to those who both perished and managed to escape their fateful mountain tomb.

Without narration or a conventional storyline, it’s a uniquely insightful memoir-cum-critical-treatise.

Handsomely mounted and deftly dramatized, it’s an agonized study of suffering and treachery, and no less valuable — or powerful — for being regrettably familiar.

With an aesthetic ingenuity to match its pooch’s impressively expressive performance, it’s a thriller that ably justifies its central gimmick.

Playfully mocking today’s always-online, virtual-signaling teen generation while simultaneously embracing its bevy of old-school tropes, it’s exactly the sort of crowd-pleaser designed to be seen in a theater, after dark, with a rowdy audience.

Taut and mournful, it’s a lament for the mistakes made in anger, the wounds that fail to heal, and the past that never truly seems to be past at all.

With Oscar-winner Sam Rockwell as its tempestuous engine, it’s a captivatingly silly saga about the pitfalls of our modern techno-obsessiveness.

A sober military thriller that excoriates Joe Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan in 2021 and, in the process, to strand the thousands of local interpreters who had risked their lives to aid the American cause.

An illuminating look at a superpower in the throes of a burgeoning cultural catastrophe—and of a few of its myriad desperate-for-love men.

A bewildering and gripping saga about reproduction, identity, and family that, at its finest, taps into a legitimately demented vein.

The film retains a measure of tempered hope, born not simply from the father's command-cum-wish to his slumbering offspring ("Don't become a miserable apple-polisher like me, boys"), but also from a final act of youthful compassion that binds Ozu's intensely human characters in glass-half-full solidarity.

Both a comprehensive primer and a nostalgic celebration, it successfully makes the case that few 20th-century funnymen were as daring, pioneering, or outright amusing.

This funny and charming slice-of-life tale has the spirit of a low-fi ’70s romantic comedy, complete with characters who resonate as authentic inhabitants of their particular time and place.

Cage makes a meal of it, attuning himself to director Lorcan Finnegan’s wacked-out frequency to deliver another tour-de-force of grief, regret, anguish, and seriously psychotic fury.

Mature and moving in its navigation of convoluted, conflicting desires, it’s an indie as assured in its silences as it is in its speeches.

A portrait of millennial estrangement and discontent that, despite suffering from sporadic redundancy, strikes a raw cringe-comedy nerve.

A look at Coppola’s creative process that proves significantly more illuminating and entertaining than the director’s finished product.

A cannier, and more effective, slice of shaky-cam insanity than most of its brethren, right down to a finale that’s akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey as processed through a meat grinder.

Narrative unevenness notwithstanding, those hang-ups are given delicious life by a superb Rush, Davis, and Rampling (the latter often confined to a bed and encased in elderly makeup), who prove a regally dysfunctional trio par excellence.

As tender and somber as it is thrilling, The Return proves a sword-and-sandals saga rooted in life’s biggest issues, all of them written on the unforgettable countenance of its illustrious star.

Destined—depending on one’s perspective on this matter—to inspire either heartfelt sympathy or blood-boiling outrage.

Comedy and shifting-allegiances intrigue more than compensate for the dearth of rousing action in this 1920s-set film.

The acclaimed star delivers a masterclass in silent expressiveness, and he proves the riveting axis around which Tim Mielants’ precise and deft feature revolves.

Unavoidably, this sequel is, for all its majestic beauty, somewhat less awe-inspiring than its revelatory predecessor. Once again boasting narration from Morgan Freeman, the doc has a gracefulness and understated profundity that’ll naturally appeal to those who loved the first film.

In “Feast of the Epiphany,” a narrative-documentary hybrid, the line between fiction and reality is demarcated quite clearly, even as those two modes remain in constant dialogue — and the conceit is entrancing precisely because of its elusiveness.

The film proves a piercing character study whose narrow view frustrates complete empathy.

An affectionate portrait of Chelly as a one-of-a-kind trailblazer who lived life to the fullest, and always on her own iconoclastic terms, all while also providing a vivid snapshot of New York City during its daring and dangerous pre-sanitized era.

A high-octane action extravaganza sure to satiate genre fans’ delirious bloodlust.

A biographical portrait that doubles as an origin story for today’s amoral political landscape, its marriage of incisiveness and timeliness should make it an indie hit this fall.

Canny and funny in equal measure, it’s a film that embraces technology — just like it does its protagonist — on its own perfectly imperfect terms.

As a literal origin story about how we live today, it’s a captivating history lesson with global appeal.

A steamy, sad, and amusing snapshot of desire and identity.

A reimagining that’s thrillingly, monstrously alive.

Wiseman's generally static camera spends prolonged periods of time in the classroom, at student gatherings, and in the halls of educational power, training a multifaceted gaze on opinions regarding an economic shift affecting faculty salaries, subsidized programs, student tuition, and the university's fundamental "public" character.

Gracefully balancing its lighter and darker concerns, it’s a witty ride whose poignancy—like adulthood itself—sneaks up on you.

Alternating between time periods and geographic locations, all of it connected by McElwee's narrated thoughts, the film proves a bracing and sometimes uncomfortable peek into private fears and regrets about mortality and missed opportunities. It's also, in its portrait of wayward Adrian, further proof that there's nothing more difficult, frustrating, messy, and insufferable than teenagerdom.

Proof that Sandler still has the capacity to spearhead (as opposed to just for-hire headline) a competent movie—including one featuring those closest to him.

[Geoghegan] allows his film’s message about intolerance and oppression to emanate naturally from the action, thereby letting the proceedings gradually transform into a revisionist fantasy of defiance, expulsion and vengeance.

Favoring long, unbroken takes that allow the rhythmic, full-bodied songs to breathe as they ebb and flow from beginning to end, Anderson’s aesthetics unobtrusively capture the magic of Greenwood and company’s global partnership

The Saint of Second Chances is a testament to prioritizing goofy, compassionate family entertainment over winning and profit, as so many associated with the Saints readily attest.

Newcomer Russell, at once tough and vulnerable, canny and damaged, delivers a performance of nuanced naturalism that starkly conveys the sorrow and sacrifice that sometimes come with learning to achieve self-sufficiency.

Its anger is matched by its empathy, both of which abound in its tale of woe set in the nightmarish region between Belarus and Poland.

If Defa's aesthetics are mundane, his leads' performances are not, especially in the case of Audley, whose darting eyes and hushed, stuttering speech express confused longing with transfixing train-wreck magnetism.

Writer-director Freida Lee Mock’s concise and potent chronicle uses a wealth of archival video and numerous new interviews with its subject to properly contextualize Hill’s testimony as a landmark moment in the fight for gender equality.

In a finale rife with twisted feelings of resentment, fury, and self-loathing, the film transforms into a grave meditation on the corrosive shadow cast by the decisions, and crimes, of yesterday.

Thanksgiving is less a cheap rollercoaster ride than a faithfully grisly throwback, complete with more than a few subtle (and not-so-subtle) shout-outs to Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th.

Sinister even when it’s slyly winking at its audience, it’s a satisfying meal of tasty horror cheese.

A delightful film about the dim-witted and the disreputable. And though its humor ultimately wanes, it compensates with a surprising measure of tenderness.

Consistently funny and erotic, if ultimately a bit too straightlaced for the incendiary subject matter at hand.

Proves that forty-five years after the xenomorph first terrified audiences, there’s still plenty of acid-bloody life left in the franchise’s monstrous bones.