Rodrigo Perez

Arguably the most persuasive and compelling of Ferguson’s films to date, Time To Choose is an imperative, essential essay on our climate change crisis, and if it ever feels didactic, it’s counterpointed by its very real and very human nature.

Ultimately Beauty And The Beast feels like a cynical rehash seemingly created just to make a fiscal year sound promising to shareholders. This is a product that’s more manufactured than inspired.

Send Help is pure Raimi: a survival thriller that disguises itself as corporate satire before mutating into something far nastier and more fun. It’s ridiculous by design, walking a razor’s edge between menace and mockery, and it thrives in that instability.

The Baltimorons is terrific and features an excellent mix of humor, sweetness, hijinks, hilarity, warmth, wistful melancholy, and charisma that’s off the charts, both in the actors and the movie itself.

While “Frida” does show signs of promise, especially when it leans into the distinctive, and Kahlo’s penchant for magical realism, it’s never as vibrant as her. One wishes the doc could similarly unshackle itself, match the artist’s radiant spirit, and push itself into the next innovative frontier.

Spanning across several continents, and obviously decades, Days Of Future Past feels vast and epic in scope. But as large as the movie is, it never loses sight of character and themes (at least the ones that matter).

Ultimately, as inconsequential as it all is, Rogue Nation is not pretending to be anything it isn’t. And as a sensory escapist experience with laughs, pleasures, and excitement, Rogue Nation will likely be a most satisfying mission audiences choose to accept repeatedly.

Brimming with wit, crushing last-act melancholia, laughs, and poignant heart, Me And Earl And The Dying Girl is a spectacular delivery of tears, love and laughter, and a beautifully charming, captivating knock-out.

As an intriguing and complex portrait of humanism vs. idealism (to be civil about it), there’s also a fine line between faith and madness, and to their credit, The Mission filmmakers leave it up to the audience to decide where they stand; perhaps the sign of sharp filmmakers hoping to leave their viewer hashing it out for hours afterward (something that doc certainly engenders).

Beneath the layers of fuzzy frequencies, feverish absurdism, and kaleidoscopic tints lives an inconspicuously poignant movie about existentialist dread, the very human need to reduce the noise, and the genuine longing for connection in a chaotic, jumbled up world.

Those who find Villeneuve to be a self-serious, humorless, and pretentious bore likely won’t be changing their minds anytime soon after “Dune,” but that just might be their loss. Whether Warner Bros. accepts the call to make a sequel in a climate of dismal box-office returns remains to be seen. But that’s not our concern at the moment; Dune is undeniably impressive, spellbinding, and evocatively immense, regardless.

While far from perfect, Welcome To Pine Hill works more often than it doesn’t and is an intimate and existential character study of a man out of place with his past, himself, and his surroundings, and the push and pull of former and future worlds beckoning him.

Wistfully looking back on the past with a mix of affection for those we have lost, a melancholy yearning for the more tender age of innocence, and anxiety and regret for our trespasses, Gray’s stripped-down drama is a clear-eyed and emotionally intelligent work of great empathy.

Trier crafts a drama that is sublimely ambiguous, austere and also deeply sad and heartbreaking.

A paean to the unsung, Hidden Figures is also a romanticized tribute to everyday problem solvers who, in the movie’s eyes, are their own kind of superheroes.

Lowery is the real deal and understands filmmaking, and this is abundantly clear in this searing, romantic crime drama and love story.

Carry-On works because it keeps it simple, because of its no-fuss-no-muss approach and two actors who can really elevate compelling material. Sometimes that’s enough.

Emotionally and psychologically, The Ghost Of Peter Sellers, is an A-grade film. Aesthetically, however, it’s a little flat, and kind of takes too long to truly reveal itself even at a scant 93 minutes. Still, it’s ultimately an emotionally cathartic and absorbing movie about a man who can’t let go, yet wants to be free.

It’s a compelling, lovely little journey about friends reconnecting and rediscovering each other in a portrait that’s tender, humorous, considerate, and more than deserving of your attention and care.

Heart Of Stone purports to have characters made of sturdy, gritty, golden, unbreakable stuff, but that’s a tagline, not a movie or story; it’s really just flimsy work easily tossed off and broken as it tumbles into the ever-filling bin of barely-one-use Netflix movies.

Narco Cultura is gripping, gruesome and arresting; a disquieting look a pop (sub)-culture phenomenon that is mushrooming all over the United States and Latin America.

Anxious and tightly-wound like “Citizenfour,” with similarly shocking and disturbing content, (T)error is a gripping parallel investigation of illegitimate counter-terrorist stratagems that not only considers the moral consequences of informing, and the wider troubling landscape around it, but does so from a deeply intimate and remarkable perspective.

On The Rocks is almost like a Trojan Horse of intoxicating libations and magical evenings—Murray’s sporty ‘60s candy red Alfa Romeo convertible being the vehicle of these enjoyments— a capricious trick that belies the true nature of its thoughtful and feminine perspective on the difficulties of love, life, marriage, and complex fathers.

"Billie Eilish: Soft & Hard” is thrilling as a concert film, but its force comes from how carefully it maps the machinery behind the magic—the lighting choices, stage movements, emotional calibration, hidden pathways, and private moments of anticipation. It is vivid, immersive, and unusually personal, a portrait of a performer who understands the scale of her platform and still wants every person in the room to feel seen. For a film this massive, its most impressive trick is how close it comes to witnessing everyone.

Ultimately, the film is not only about children who refused to surrender, but also about a country that, for a brief moment, managed to put aside divisions in service of something greater. Like the best of Vasarhelyi and Chin’s work, it transforms an extraordinary true story into something more universal: a tale of endurance, release, and the desperate search for light.

Ultimately pleasurable if very disposable, Homecoming offers strong teen dynamics and for once, serves up high school-sized stakes instead of placing the planet in peril.

A wonderfully eccentric examination of unlikely friendships that illuminates the absurd and lovely corners of life, Prince Avalanche is a deeply enjoyable, wondrous delight.

Good Grief arguably doesn’t quite get there in the end, but there is a promising sense of possibility for what the future could hold for Levy as a filmmaker next.