Rocco T. Thompson

Kristoffer Borgli delights in creating a hypothetical trap for his lovers, but he also acknowledges that there’s something romantic about being stuck in it together.

The film’s conception of the future, perceptively, looks back to humankind’s primeval past.

The film is a boldly theatrical pop exorcism where the wounds of the past serve as a gateway to forces that can consume or lift the possessed to ecstatic new levels of self-expression.

The Plague is vividly, terrifying attuned to the way children create a social order that resists sensible adult intrusion and influence.

This is a formidable technical showcase and obsessive forensic recreation whose imposed formal limitations become meaning-making ends in and of themselves.

Challengers is an intoxicating showcase for the beauty and excitement of bodies in motion.

Death of a Unicorn taps into the anti-capitalist strain in late-20th-century monster movies from Alien to Jurassic Park by tracing a clever through line from the unicorns of antiquity to the present.

The film is a bizarrely moving and darkly comic story about feeling like you’ve lost something you never had.

Damian McCarthy threads the needle between supplying old-school scares and a richly layered character piece that also functions as a meditation on his own perspective as a storyteller.

Parker Finn, like his entity, is interested in getting his bony fingers into those sticky tender parts we’d rather hide away, slurping our pain like ambrosia and confronting us with the fact that more often than not, the enemy staring back is you.

By turns tender and raucous, Pamela Adlon’s feature-length directorial debut, Babes, spins the uneasy, unwelcome, weirdly cool corporeal realities of pregnancy into heartfelt comic gold.

Everything Smile is doing is familiar enough at this point to be considered old-fangled, but the striking precision of its craft sloughs away any sensations of déjà vu.

The film has a white-hot nerve of pain running inside it that burns right through the screen.

Eddington is especially pointed in the way that it views our online connectedness as a social cancer rather than an engine for progress.

Primarily a vehicle for inventive and wince-inducing practical effects that best anything to be found in a 1980s-era Italian gorefest or the Saw franchise, Terrifier 3 continues the series’s trend of dotting a sparse and sinuous thread of plot with mini-masterpieces of cinematic ultraviolence.

Ant Timpson’s heartwarming Bookworm is an effulgent love letter to ’80s kid cinema laced with a distinctly quirky, Kiwi dryness.

The film unearths new depths of existential anxiety engendered by the increasingly tumultuous 2020s.

Christian Swegal’s feature-length directorial debut is like staring into a national wound.

Much of Road to Revenge plays like a spectacularly gory silent film, with Aatami taking out scores of Red Army soldiers in action scenes that are as inventive as they are incredibly funny.

The film knows that when the stakes are sky high, the emotions need to be firmly grounded.

Though Mickey 17 can feel like a mixtape of Bong’s greatest hits, it may actually be his most refined and articulate anti-capitalistic critique to date.

The mayhem that the monkey doles out makes The Monkey closer in spirit to Evil Dead than Final Destination, as the film is less a Rube Goldberg contraption of overdesigned chaos than it is a Looney Tunes-esque spectacle of quick and dirty violence that hits like a punchline.

Sexy, scary, and occasionally clumsy, Carmen Emmi’s feature-length directorial debut, Plainclothes, is an anxious and unabashed gay drama about social repression and its impacts.

Set to the rhythms of a pulsing, ultramodern New York milieu, the film, at its best, wrings real tension and excitement out of the simple exchanging of clandestine messages and sensitive information.

That Together treats its body horror as just another wrinkle in the complexities of what it means to love someone else is writer-director Michael Shanks’s smartest move.

Just as Stanley Kramer’s Judgement at Nuremberg explored the Nuremberg trials against the backdrop of the emerging Cold War, James Vanderbilt’s film holds the trials up as a mirror to our current era of authoritarianism.

Throughout, Scott Derrickson collapses dreams, reality, past, and present sidelong into a singular cinematic haunted space.

Walking a dizzying line between the stupid and the profound, this exuberant, positively unique biopic is as hard to resist as it is to believe that it got made in the first place.