Oliver Jones

What is the meaning of life? When that question is posited in a deeply moving post-credits scene, the answer is like the film you just watched: incredibly funny and devastatingly true.

As a result, The Souvenir, Hogg’s fourth film, is an extraordinary rumination on memory and privilege while also being one of the most incisive movies ever to directly address — in moral, philosophical and personal terms — what it means to be a filmmaker.

Song has crafted a deliriously honest romantic drama that is utterly singular even while it calls to mind everything from Richard Linklater to Wong Kar-wai to David Lean’s Brief Encounter. This is a movie that flows over with patience, forgiveness, and tender wisdom — qualities all the more wondrous for their relative absence from modern society and its movies.

It also happens to be the best ending of a movie this year and the work of a filmmaker completely attuned to both her craft and the inner lives of her characters. Moreover, the shot is the final act of passion and precision in a film that is teeming with both, a work of art whose flame will continue to smolder in your mind and heart well after you have left the theater.

When it’s over, the chill it leaves in your spine is destined to last nearly as long as the smile on your face.

Admittedly, A Real Pain is an acquired taste; like a top-flight IPA, it is at once overly aggressive and serenely balanced.

The strength of Judas and the Black Messiah is that it moves well beyond rhetoric, or even historic reconstruction for that matter. Letting his talented cast lead the way, King has made a film centered on roiled emotions and relationships that are at once fractured and loving.

By centering on the start of the film and its conclusion, you realize Wang possesses not only a preternatural feel for the emotional jumble of boyhood, but also an astute understanding of both film structure and how to mine many layers of unforced truth from his troupe of talented actors.

Along with Dickey’s equally feral and vulnerable performance, what stands out most in Blaze is just how fully formed and realized Hawke’s vision is as a filmmaker.

Panahi has crafted a moral quandary fit for Plato; yet unlike his past works—including 2022’s No Bears and 2018’s 3 Faces (both of which, like this film, were filmed without permission in Iran)—there’s nothing theoretical or metaphoric on display here.

Remarkable film.

It’s a movie that is not only worth returning to again and again, but one you will be grateful to have walking alongside you for years to come.

For a movie that pulses with joyful expressiveness and brims with possibility, there is a tragic undertone to Ailey.

When violence does befall Clare and her family, it is far more devastating than anything she could possibly have imagined. It’s also as shocking and difficult to watch as any I have seen in a lifetime of watching violent movies.

Ostensibly a middling programmer meant to satiate our cinematic bloodlust during the lull between John Wick 4 and The Equalizer 3, this period neck-snapper from Finnish filmmaker Jalmari Helander may not only surpass both those films, it could end up taking the gore-splattered crown as the most satisfying, over-the-top violent action movie of the summer.

This bold new film not only shatters comedy’s cold streak, but also serves as a powerful reminder of the vitality of the genre as both social commentary and shared experience.

Not simply a worthy addition to David Fincher’s vastly under-appreciated "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" franchise (they’re calling it a “soft reboot,” but there’s nothing soft about it), The Girl in the Spider’s Web is also a top-shelf Batman movie. For good measure, it kicks the butt of the last few Bourne installments too.

It’s not for everybody, and it’s far from perfect, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more thrillingly necessary use of the filmmaking form this year.

Zhao keeps these far-reaching propositions grounded through the laser-like focus of her vision and the precision of the images dreamed up by her and veteran MCU lensman Ben Davis. For once in a movie like this, ocean waves and cloudscapes carry as much weight as the ultra-choreographed battles between intergalactic interlopers.

While the subject of her film used his flamboyant nature, church-rooted vocals, and percussive piano to invent something completely fresh, Cortés has stuck to the tried and true.

The ability of Kammerer and his young castmates to convey the bone-deep dread of artillery bombardments and tanks rolling overhead is matched only by Berger’s complete command of the machinery of war and propulsion of narrative.

The intimacy and honesty of the family rapport, the razor sharp dialogue and—most unexpectedly—its deeply grounded humor keep the film and its slight and compassionate story utterly engaging.

This is the rare sequel that packs constant surprises while still delivering on expectations.

The Safdies’ film is a cinematically expressive tightrope walk that seems designed to leave your blood pressure permanently spiked. It can be relentless and hard to take, but it is brimming with surprise and a vivacity that radiates off the screen.

An equally dreamlike and urgent act of radical archiving, Sierra Pettengill’s Riotsville, USA traces the origin of America’s militarized dismantling of social justice movements to a specific time and place.

More than anything, Daughters—along with Greg Kwedar’s remarkable current release Sing Sing—speaks to the absolute societal and spiritual imperative of investing in rehabilitation, within prisons and outside their walls.

What results is a messy, ambitious, deeply emotional film that sometimes falls victim to the tropes of the genres it attempts to remix but never loses its power to move us.

The manner in which Mikkelsen, the former Danish gymnast and dancer we chiefly know for his suave villains in 2006’s "Casino Royale" and the NBC series "Hannibal," plays off his largely mute charge is simply extraordinary.