Oliver Jones

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Awkwafina’s true skill as a remarkably sensitive collaborator has only recently been revealed—last year doing broad comedy in "Crazy Rich Asians" and now here, where every scene requires a deft shading of sadness and guilt.

Even when the larger world that surrounds them is fuzzily rendered, when Wilson, Wolfe, Davis, Boseman and all those fabulous actors past and present are serving as our guides, gaining entrance into such uneasy places feels like a true gift.

The experience is simultaneously intimate and stirring; the film brings its audience to a thrillingly colorful and utterly relevant world of its own at a time when the primary purpose of other superhero movies seems to be to tease future installments and fill corporate coffers.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is as feverishly inventive in its visual presentation as it is slapdash and anemic in its storytelling.

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

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.

Remarkable film.

EO is a successful attempt by 84-year-old Polish filmmaker and sometimes actor Jerzy Skolimowski to both update and add color to the cinematic conversation about despair, purpose, and braying that Bresson started more than a half century ago.

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.

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.

Is it all too cute? Almost, but not quite. Fire of Love is saved by the joy of film craft that pours forth both from the Kraffts and Dosa.

While the man in the title may have played a part in ushering us towards this unfortunate state, Mike Wallace Is Here is nonetheless a refreshing return to a more promising era when a swashbuckling, nicotine-huffing newsman made powerful people sweat for our collective edification.

While it is good that a director as versed on the subject of consent as Schwartzman is bringing her unwavering eye to the problem, it makes it all the more painful that we seem even further away from solving the issue then we were on that fateful August night in Ohio seven years ago.

While the film proudly remains a chamber piece very much in keeping with its roots in the theater, King opens it up in ways that show an innate knack for visual storytelling.

It’s a little long and leisurely. However, fueled by Rachel and Richard’s baby mania, it never drags.

We may never completely know the answers to all of Cavett’s questions, but Morgen’s film shows definitively that the sound and vision Bowie left behind, when writ large and loud on the silver screen, makes for an otherworldly journey of beauty, mystery, and transformation.

They have made a film absent of time that could not possibly be more of the moment.

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.

By shining the light on Stone, Agrelo’s movie rightfully makes a national hero out of a historical footnote.

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

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.

This time, Godzilla is a powerful symbol of the addictive pull of destruction, and how once unleashed, weapons of mass destruction can never again be contained.