Nick Schager

[Boasting] an ambitious and exhilarating story that matches its style, it’s the finest thing Villeneuve has helmed and the 2024 film to beat for outsized sci-fi showmanship.

[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.

A big, brash, laugh-out-loud crime spoof led by a great Liam Neeson performance.

One of the director’s finest, its thematic scope and emotional power growing with each new revelation.

Taut and entrancing, it’s a stark reminder that adolescence sucks.

The mood is generally melodramatic and ends as mushy, aided by the soft-focus cinematography that drenches it all in melancholic nostalgia.

Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its 3-D visuals but otherwise sinks like a stone.

The Witness functions as a project of not only confrontation but resurrection, as Bill’s sleuthing sheds new light on Kitty’s personality, romances and career, and thus finally re-emphasizes her as a flesh-and-blood person rather than just a famous victim.

Fine performances abound, including from Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow, but the film is ultimately at odds with itself, its handsome appearance and severe attitude clashing with its pulpy impulses.

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.

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

This winning non-fiction portrait proves equally adept at eliciting laughs and tears.

Hong Sang-soo once again corroborates auteurist theory at the same time that he reveals the potential shortcomings of its practice.

At once incisive and ambiguous, it’s proof that Jude is operating on a completely different level than most of his contemporaries.

Its poignancy and humor is amplified by its canny decision to let Fox tell his own tale.

A movie that’s about—and asks its lead to literally and figuratively wear—masks, A Different Man is a multifaceted meta mind-melter.

An uplifting portrait of the possibility of rebirth—even for the most famous person on Earth.

[A] portrait of one woman’s heroism and the means by which it’s motivated by guilt, regret, fury, and despair—the last of which, ultimately, proves inescapable.

Tom Six's threequel races to the bottom with abandon, all while indulging in tired wink-wink self-consciousness that includes Six himself showing up to witness his movie monster made real (and to be slandered by Laser as "a poop-infatuated toddler").

The film’s placid aesthetics help the directors strip away any artificial barriers between the audience and their subjects, thereby eliciting immense, compassionate engagement with Tori and Lokita’s plight.

It’s a feature debut that portends big things for the up-and-coming filmmaker.

No matter its title, it’s a full-bodied triumph bursting with humor, tenderness, and imagination.

Habitually shooting her characters through narrow doorways and windows, the better to convey their isolation as well as their squeezed-by-circumstance states, the director fashions a sinister atmosphere, aided by intermittent pregnancy and corpse imagery.

A superb coming-of-age saga that lives in the intersection of youthful euphoria, despair, insecurity, irresponsibility, and fearlessness.

A stinging political, social, and media critique made from digitally altered bits and pieces of entertainment favorites, at once hilarious, enraged, and as zonked out of its mind as many viewers will prefer to be while watching it.

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

With an insightfulness born from firsthand experience, Rocks in My Pockets posits depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia as conditions that, though potentially lethal, remain manageable, if only through persistent battle.