Richard Whittaker

The final destination is a truly touching and very modern story of being an overlooked child, and you'll cross an ocean of wonder and amazement to get there.

Aftersun is lyrical without ever being obtuse, and it's a film that flourishes when attention is paid to details.

The longer you are immersed in this exchange of stories, of hope dying against darkness but proving its value just by its glimmers, the more it enthralls.

Something in the Dirt doesn't hide its answers, because there may not be any answers. It's the danger of obsessing over the mutability of facts that is its true and fascinating subject. In an era of post-reality politics, Something in the Dirt may be a quiet wake-up call.

There’s an element of synesthesia and a touch of religiosity to The Colors Within, but more importantly there’s Yamada’s welling compassion for the inner lives of young people.

At some levels, there is nothing new here: Everyone knows about the casting clashes, the abandoned score, and even Friedkin's take on it all. But it's the immediacy that comes from Alexandre O. Philippe's decision to leave everything to Friedkin that makes its so important.

It’s that rare film that truly tackles how people live within a bloody conflict.

The influence of the original Mad Max is undeniable – not the crazy biker bits, but the sense of a collapsing world, of the personal impacts and damage inflicted by the end of everything.

Visually stunning (as can now be expected from esteemed studio Production I.G.), what truly distinguishes The Deer King is in the narrative, and how it is laid out by the co-directors, Miyaji (Fusé: Memoirs of a Huntress) and directorial first timer Ando.

I will admit, the fact that Oklahoma oddball Mickey Reece had recently become the cinematic flavor of the month left me cold and baffled, especially with his breakout festival hit Climate of the Hunter. Yet the excellence of religious chiller Agnes finally means you can mark me as a true believer.

In its dour and often depressing depiction of environmental struggle, 1970s-set true-life pollution drama Minimata would pair well with Todd Haynes’ Dark Waters.

Never less than enchanting, constantly surprisingly exciting, and with a burning sense of optimism that maybe, sometimes, hard work and vision can really win the day, Pompo: The Cinéphile is a tribute to everyone who colors within the lines but make those colors all their own.

It's challenging not to see shades of Robin Williams, who was not just Belushi's equal in talent and predilection for pharmaceuticals but also his friend. Williams admitted more than once that it was Belushi's death that made him get sober, the ultimate wake-up call.

Through talking heads over archive materials, Pollard deftly explains why the tapes exist and how the inflated claims about national security were no excuse for them being recorded.

Ultimately, it’s an aspirational and inspirational tale of daring to reach for the stars even when authority figures tell you they don’t exist – and the value of having a friend who believes in you, even if they have an umbrella handle for a nose.

Gaunt, reserved, unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight having risked life and limb to avert nuclear war, he's a figure from a bygone time, a bygone culture, and that's what Dominic Cooke captures so perfectly.

It is beautiful, quiet, tender, and borne aloft by that rejection of the idea of hopelessness. You don't have to believe in one particular romance, it whispers, to still believe in romance.

It’s a bleak and introspective movie, interrupted by outbursts of bloody, senseless violence, made tragic by the interactions between Nathan and Polly.

As the energy-beam projecting, space-flying defender of the underdog, Brie Larson has captured the pugnacious, charming, steely Captain Marvel in the ways she deserves.

[Yuasa's] latest, magical and bloody historical musical drama Inu-Oh, is a rock & roll, stadium show, pyrotechnic extravaganza.

This is Cage trying to find himself in all those messy decisions he’s made, trying to make amends while accepting and celebrating who he is.

Witty, astute, perfectly absurd in a plausibly grounded way, and political without feeling like a polemic, Hutton' quiet satire is merciless about life in the daily hustle - and a lesson about the power of the worker.

This The Naked Gun never tries to lampoon or merely copy the original beloved films. Instead, director Akiva Schaffer and his co-writers, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, get to the heart of the humor in a non-ironic, non-revisionist fashion.

Gunn’s script grasps two major aspects of the Superman mythology. One, that journalism done right will save the day as much as punching bad guys will, and two, that immigrants will often subscribe to the principles that Americans claim are so self-evident more than most Americans will. Corenswet embodies both in a way that no one since Christopher Reeve has, willing to be the gosh-darning nerd if that means doing the right thing.

From the moment Shula first appears in On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, director Rungano Nyoni lets the quiet charisma of actress Susan Chardy subtly dominate the screen.

Sinister and hilarious, psychedelic yet grounded, absurdist while still gripping, In the Earth will take root in you.

Its answers are uneasy and disquieting, and the true root of its horror.

It seems that its depiction of institutional misogyny, police incompetence, and the continued strength of the caste system didn’t sit well with the censors. If nothing else, that’s a sign that it’s served its purpose by hitting the powerful uncomfortably close to the bone.

All too often, in life and in cinema, systems are shown as working simply to oppress: Thirteen Lives reminds us that communal acts can be what literally save us.

Monday asks, what happens when that thing you do with your life in lieu of a plan becomes the plan?

Down With the King the album was a response to a rap scene that was leaving the originators behind: Down With the King the film is about a musician abdicating his throne, an existential crisis laid out with delicacy and insight.

Gorgeously animated in 3D in Daxiong's signature, hyperdetailed/hyperstylized artwork, Eternal Spring is a chronicle of dissidence, and Daxiong's attempts to come to terms with how the movement got to this point of non-violent resistance - an act with which he disagreed because of the backlash.

Mann's decision to restrict this portrait to such a limited time period may leave audiences a little dissatisfied that important events are only recounted, not depicted. But then, if you're on the most thrilling corner of a track, you may not see the finish line.

In the subtle subtext of having a solitary creature like a cat find companionship in a boat full of animals who have lost their pack, their flock, or their herd, we will find a tender story about knowing where we are meant to be.

Perkins’ greatest and most stomach-churning achievement is in a slow shift of perspective, leading the audience from the bleak and eerie serial killer thriller of Harker’s world to the fiendish reality of Longlegs, and an enigmatic denouement that will be puzzled over and studied. Hell truly awaits.

Chalamet clearly relishes this opportunity to play against his modern heartthrob persona. Win or lose, you’ll still kind of want Marty to take a punch to the schnozz. But at least you’ll understand why he’s that way.

The Dark and the Wicked pulls no punches, either in its sense of perpetual unease, its occasional moments of understated yet truly stomach-churning gore, or in its emotional heft.

If you’re just along for the spectacular ride, then Furiosa is Miller at his nitro-fueled, chrome-covered, overblown best. But if you’re trying to make any sense of this, you’ll find it increasingly stalled out.

So whether you’re here for obscure characters like Charles Xavier’s lost twin Cassandra Nova (Corrin), grisly sword vs. claw fights, queer comedy, MCU mythology, the cover of Uncanny X-Men #251, or just Jackman and Reynolds having a blast being hams, Deadpool & Wolverine has you covered.

This is not some whacked-out drug trip movie, or scolding afterschool anti-drug special. This is anti-psychedelia, grounded in the strangeness of true life.

For experts in the field, who this is most undoubtedly aimed at, this is a rare and incisive look at one party's stance on one of the most important diplomatic initiatives of our time.

Shang-Chi doesn't just pull off a fun western xuanhuan, but makes it feel like a door being opened for future Marvel films. Where Shang-Chi stumbles is in the script.

Sirocco is structured like a children’s book, as a young person’s guide to grownup emotions. Yet it may well be grownups – who can use the story to look back at times in their lives when the word “awe” wasn’t preceded by “shock and” – who will take most from it.

It's Eisenberg who finds Ralphie in those narrative spaces, creating a whole and crushingly convincing portrait of a profoundly lost man, and the damage left in his wake.

Sheridan's flair has always been in ensembles, but here that trait is caught in a stalemate with the desire to provide an underwhelming Jolie with a star vehicle.

Where the Devil Roams may be the family's most complete movie, and its febrile and claustrophobic horrors will sneak into your nightmares.

It's mean, gritty, and brutally nihilist, its mystery unwrapping before it strangles you with its perfect meanness. If noir is about, as the old saying goes, bad people doing bad things for good reasons, then Sympathy for the Devil bleeds in all the right ways.

Unfortunately, The Royal Hotel ultimately lacks the subtle ambiguity about complicity and power that made The Assistant so fascinating. Instead, it's a feel-good ending that borders on trite, and even oddly carries a whiff of cultural imperialism.

There is enough of a sense of awe here, and enough scale, that it brightens up the big screen as it stares into the ebony black of space. And if one child is instilled with a sense of cosmic wonder and channels that into a career probing the mysteries and poetry of the night sky, then Elio will have truly reached the stars.

The Long Night may not be revolutionary, it's definitely got its own dark magic.

It's a slow build to collapse, escaping the traditional trap of such supernatural suspense films in that both of them have secrets, and it's not the acts themselves but the deceits that have led them to this place.

It's all deliberately grotesque, but comic readers will be pleasantly surprised at the degree of compassion for and comprehension of the culture Kline portrays.

While there is undoubted visual spectacle to All You Need Is Kill, Kido’s rewriting of Rita and Kaiji as just ordinary people stuck in extraordinary circumstances is grounded in their mundanity.

Co-produced and edited by Austin filmmaker Karen Skloss, Have You Got It Yet? is as exhaustive a study of Barrett as possible. It does suffer from the flaw that affects so many biographical documentaries, that the subject is somehow unique.

Sweet, silly, with that profoundly bizarre world view that makes a snail trail gag open to everyone for a laugh, this may not change SpongeBob forever, but it's more SpongeBob as we love him, and that's all the fun you can need.

Spoiler Alert is at its best when it's not afraid to be mawkish, sentimental, soppy, honest, and downright charming.

While never taking credit away from the other rescuers who also risked life and limb, The Rescue comes back to the bunch of self-described oddballs who got the kids out.

There's a sense of joy, distilled through a juxtaposition of images of celebration and ritual: women in a forest in Belarus, placing floral tributes on water; an elephant illuminated in a street fair; lanterns lifting into the air over Thailand like shooting stars in reverse; a Chinese cormorant fisherman with his bird; masked revelers at Bolivia's Carnaval de Oruro.

The resolute commitment to finding tiny sparks of hope in a pitch-black cosmos yields its own bitter and oddly warming reward.

Elcar's setup may be minimalist, but Brightwood turns that simple idea into a well-crafted baroque puzzle box.

When Day-Lewis and Bean are allowed to be real brothers in arms, Anemone truly blooms.

Unabashedly warped and horny, Morgan knows exactly when to set off the depth charges lurking in the waters of Bone Lake, making its big, filthy reveal feel like the inevitable result of the characters’ urges.

Dìdi, the debut narrative feature from award-winning documentarian Sean Wang, can be seen as a tale of code switching, but that could potentially just pigeonhole it as an immigrant story. It’s broader than that because it’s a more universal study of being a teenage boy, trying to find something like a sense of identity and working out which lies you can and can’t tell yourself.

Yes, even after all these years, ‘busting will still make you feel good.

At a raw and rare 70 minutes, Invader is Keating challenging himself to deliver the leanest, sparest home invasion imaginable. But it’s only minimalist in the story and cinematography.

In the immediate post-Roe era, any discussion of abortion is going to be timely. But what gives Cherry life beyond this moment is that central idea of facing change, and realizing that not making a decision is in itself a decision. There's something heartwarming in it being less important what choice Cherry makes than in watching her try to make it for the right reasons.

This isn't a definitive history of the Athens indie scene (as indicated by the way that REM and Pylon are only mentioned, not heard), but an overview of the people who created and became associated with the distinctive Elephant 6 logo.

Few can write this kind of acid-dripping parlor drama with as much bite as LaBute.

Dipping between English and Irish, and borrowing wholeheartedly from the fictional music doc/concert format of A Hard Day’s Night (hey, steal from the best), stylish musical comedy-drama Kneecap the movie is an accurate-ish biopic of the real Kneecap, with Dochartaigh, Annaidh, and Cairealláin playing themselves.

Adapting the graphic novel The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg, writer/director Julia Jackman creates a fable that is still damningly important and relevant: that women are not allowed to control their own bodies or their own stories.

It may be about little more than a guy getting his head a little more straight than he thought it was and burying a few resentments that he didn’t even know were sticking up, but Ride the Eagle knows that a small, sad, personal story doesn’t have to be a tragedy. I

Chilling and unsettling, intimate yet monstrously vast in its cosmic horrors, Offseason is as dangerously welcoming as the island itself.

Lux Æterna is barely a film – even Noé has called it an essay – but then it's not meant to be complete. Created in five days on Yves Saint Laurent's franc (one has to wonder what they thought they were getting), it's a discussion, not a conclusion.