Roxana Hadadi

The franchise has always centered Blanc as the champion of the underserved, but in leaning away from his shenanigans and slapstick and making space for someone like Father Jud to illustrate the film’s worldview, Wake Up Dead Man shows how much it has on its mind.

Put aside the (lack of) realism of any of this and it’s thoroughly pleasurable.

To a Land Unknown presents the cousins’ ordeal as something no person should have to go through, something unnatural and surreal and Kafkaesque. But there’s also a creeping devastation in how the film convinces us of their pain and of all the opportunities and chances that were stolen from them through statelessness.

The Last Showgirl is reluctant to abandon the limelight. Amid its hesitation for resolution, though, it proves how much more Anderson has left to give.

Thanks partially to actual protest footage filmed by Woman, Life, Freedom participants, there’s a thoroughness to the way the film presents the perspectives of the young women living in the country.

The movie wants to be a form of comfort food, assuring us that everything would be all right if only women embraced their traditional roles as nurturers, mothers, and healers, but it all just tastes stale.

Alongside Gladstone’s expressive performance, Fancy Dance’s ability to choreograph that criticism gives the film a singular grace.

Sex can be a rigid rubric of performance for some and a fluid experiment in expression for others. The friction between those two perspectives fascinates Femme, a volatile, sensuous revenge film in which the body and its desires don’t lie.

Under the Fig Trees is a big-minded film that grounds its ideas about labor, sexism, faith, and modernity in the zippy rhythms of its characters’ negotiations around friendship, romance, and work. Most of the film’s runtime is people talking, but with evocative dialogue and lived-in performances from mostly first-time actors, it’s an unapologetic slice of life.

The documentary may be understated, with its long dialogue-free stretches. But the distractions that pull Abbass’s stare away from her daughter’s lens give Bye Bye Tiberias a pointedly political backbone that the documentary buoys with clever editing and a tangible self-assuredness.

What elevates the film above trauma-porn gore and pushes it into transcendence, though, is how its philosophical script and unshakeable performances navigate the question of whether survival is a transgression against God.

It’s all thematically muddled, narratively regurgitated stuff that makes the film feel like a nearly three-hour backsliding of this franchise’s onetime political forcefulness.

When The Persian Version shifts to the film-within-the-film Leila is writing and nudges her aside to tell her mother, Shireen’s, story, Keshavarz’s feature finds its performative core and explodes into emotional vibrancy.

Chloe Domont’s film divides the entire world into binary moments of understanding and misunderstanding — without the shades of gray that would make Fair Play and its characters more tangible and its central tension less didactic.

You’ll remember Anaita Wali Zada’s eyes. As Donya, an Afghan refugee in the wry and wistful Fremont, the first-time actor is a steadily building wave, a maelstrom of intention and purpose.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline wants to pick a fight, and it does so with an appealing lack of artifice, its heart on its sleeve and its agenda in its punching fists.

The relationship McInerny and Tucker build is so convincing in its mixture of exploitation and yearning that Palm Trees and Power Lines capably secures what Lea desires most too: your attention.

Maryam Touzani’s film is as precise and vivid as its titular garment.

Something in the Dirt deftly bounces between the oddness of its central story, the silliness of its documentary framing, and the resentments that eventually develop between its main characters, all buried inside what is essentially a hangout movie.

The people who maintain the status quo are those with power, and those with power are often unwilling to share: with those who are weaker, with those who are younger, with those who are other. The propulsive energy of the film is driven both by that injustice and by the scars it leaves on places and on people, and so the horror, the horror, of Saloum is both timeless and timely.

Akl and Clara Roqet’s script provides depth to these characters and immerses us in each of their perspectives and relationships — which shift along lines of blood and love.

It’s too gutless to actually untangle the web of selfishness, Islamophobia, and privilege it weaves around its protagonists.

Neptune Frost is a mission statement by way of a musical, and its defining image is a middle finger taking up the whole lens.

Bob’s Burgers patently rejects cynicism, and The Bob’s Burgers Movie is no different. It’s a pleasantly unchallenging expansion of the family-friendship-loyalty worldview that Bouchard and the Belchers have made their own.

There is a sparseness to Hit the Road that reveals the intuitiveness of Panahi’s filmmaking, his grasp of these characters and how they tug and poke at each other, and his understanding of the ways fear, paranoia, and loss turn us into people we might not like, let alone recognize.

When Kurzel does penetrate the unkempt veil of Jones’s hair and closes in on his face, it’s to capture how the actor sprints from one emotion to another, alluding to the impetuousness and spontaneity at play within Nitram.

These characters move in a world that is stunningly visualized but superficially conceived, and The Colony embodies a genre that seems — perhaps like humanity itself — unable to take a step forward in imagining a different future.

The quiet poignancy of the film’s previous vignettes are almost overshadowed by the goofiness of Weerasethakul’s final explanation. And though that doesn’t ruin the film, it doesn’t quite match Memoria’s other layers of curiosity and complexity, either.

Practically everything about Wolf truly relies on MacKay, who has to be convincing enough in his at-odds identity to simultaneously draw viewers’ empathy and promote their unease. And he is, for every minute of this film’s 98-minute run time.

Gibney’s challenging interview style, the uncompromising tone of his questions, and the way he undercuts Mitchell’s self-aggrandizing martyrdom (and conveniently murky timeline regarding the deployment of EITs in the field) are satisfying distillations of what so many people who recognize Mitchell as a war criminal who got away would probably like to say.

A country can be a home, and a home can be erased, and the aching, lovely Flee trafficks in the space between belonging and wandering.

As the film reveals its intentions around Ahmed’s character, too many scenes rely on superficial dialogue and contrived situations to push the plot along.

Bruised generally lacks the kind of immersion that a story like this demands. It wants us to step alongside Jackie and stay with her, experiencing her pain and her triumph, but it makes the journey from locker room to octagon unfathomably long.

The Unforgivable transcends its own self-importance and becomes an experience that is often rattling, challenging and haunting.

Pleasant but unchallenging.

A 100-minute spell of beauty and melancholy, intimate and grand in equal measure, a film that derives its power from the universality of its final destination and the relatability of the pain, love, and regret that pave the guiding road.

By probing at the ways people are on their best behavior while inherently personifying the worst effects of capitalism and greed, and knowing when to abandon modesty for brutality, Jones and Williams turn The Feast into one of the year’s most smartly conceived, plainly effective horrors.

Viscerally disturbing and achingly humanistic.

Rarely has a sequel been this listless, this creatively bankrupt, or this unaware of the charm and appeal of its predecessors. Rarely has a film been this craven in appeasing an imaginary audience by mimicking what came before it and refusing to challenge itself in terms of dreaming up a new world, crafting new characters, or fashioning new stakes.

In walking the line between asking empathy for these girls and also using them as a sort of cautionary tale, Cusp fails to offer more than a somewhat surface-level understanding of toxic masculinity.

A tonally bizarre film that’s half motion-capture Pinocchio story, half live-action adaptation of Futurama’s infamously melancholy “Jurassic Bark” episode, Finch relies on Hanks’ instant likeability and genuine warmth to drive home the devastation of a post-apocalyptic world.

Survival is easier said that done, and 7 Prisoners is a fraught thriller that wonders at the fragility of the human soul.

This is an immersive portrait, buoyed by a central performance that’s hypnotizing in its sparse naturalism. What Basholli has made is a thoughtful, humanistic exploration of the fortitude needed to summon hope in a time and place resigned to hopelessness.

Villeneuve has spent his career merging intellectual and philosophical queries with striking otherworldly images, but that duality is frustratingly imbalanced in his vision for Dune. The visuals are mesmerizing, but the world-building is flat.

Attica is a jarring, engrossing, and enraging reminder of how those in power will lie, humiliate, kill and cover up to retain it, and the documentary is one of the year’s best.

The result is admirable for how grim it is in its multifaceted way, but as a whole, Warning is too disjointed and underdeveloped to really make an impact with its dystopian cautions.

Night Teeth isn’t genuinely original, substantive, or scary. But as a remix of the vampire thriller’s most lizard-brain-focused qualities, Netflix’s latest Halloween offering is appreciated for how few demands it puts on its audience.

It’s a testament to Macdonald and Skinner that they inject chemistry into their characters’ underwritten pairing. Their performances are what make “Falling for Figaro” an entertaining distraction, even as the film plays out exactly as you would expect.

Needle in a Timestack lacks the interior worldbuilding necessary to pull off its heartstring-tugging intentions, and the result is a movie that unintentionally confirms how no good ever comes from men who obsessively refuse to leave women alone.

In its strongest, most evocative scenes, Bergman Island feels like peering in someone else’s window, sensing an echo of your own experiences, and marveling at all the ways a stranger could remind you of yourself.

It would be impossible not to be emotionally moved by this story, and in that way, The Rescue delivers. But between Vasarhelyi and Chin’s inability to speak with the boys or their families, and the documentary’s initially languid pacing, The Rescue feels like half a story told fairly well, but still, half a story.

Through her unfussy direction and sly editing, Kingdon’s collection of vignettes is a reminder that the destructively frenzied cycle of consumption and waste always trickles down.

There’s Someone Inside Your House is intermittently effective, but ultimately unremarkable, and it feels like a product of its time in disappointing ways.

From a purely technical viewpoint, Lorentzen’s one-side-only methodology makes Seyran Ateş: Sex, Revolution and Islam a lopsided viewing experience, one that seems tailor made for viewers predisposed to agreeing with Ateş’s critical opinions on Muslims, and no one else.

Goth is a scene-stealer, and some of Levy’s visuals are memorable in their otherworldly quality. Cinorre’s initially provocative vision of vengeance at least makes Mayday worth a look.

I’m Your Man offers a perspective on humanity that’s equally whimsical and melancholy, and its intimacy is a welcome change of pace in science fiction, a genre that too often mistakes violence and colonialism as the only drivers of drama.

Language Lessons is an alternately comforting and challenging watch, and between this and Morales’s other 2021 directorial effort, Plan B, she is making plain the winsome appeal of films about platonic love.

Another unimaginative woman-led action flick written and directed by men who telegraph their twists and lean on flashbacks instead of bothering to write character development, Kate mistakes “Women can kill just as well as men!” for some sort of new idea.

The ways Zone 414 lifts from its predecessors, borrowing elements from character development to costuming to questions about the utilitarianism of our physical bodies, denies it identifiable or entertaining qualities of its own.

A simultaneously deeply personal and sometimes-opaque cinematic experience that often feels like walking through memories—messy, malleable—in search of an intrinsic inner truth.

Nebbou and Peyr’s script crackles most with its observations about aging, sex and second chances, and Who You Think I Am spins a tale of love, attention, manipulation and obsession that is recognizably uncomfortable and summarily captivating.

Some of it is sophisticated and more of it is silly, but Behemoth is jarringly effective more often than not.

It’s a shame Maggie Q was so busy carrying The Protégé on her back that she couldn’t make time to kick the film’s embarrassing script into shape, too.

Momoa can believably howl in anguish and throw a devastating punch, but he can’t carry a script this muddled.

The Meaning of Hitler never quite reconciles its central concern of whether continuing to talk about Hitler is an inherently compromised pursuit, and that uneasiness feels like an unintentional capitulation for an otherwise well-intentioned project.

The Beckett character is sparsely written, and the sometimes bland performance Washington delivers doesn’t fill in many characterization gaps; it’s a problem that affects the pacing, too.

Rockefeller only repeats other science fiction, rather than inventing big ideas of his own.

A B-movie designed by people who knew exactly what kind of enjoyable trash they were making, Jolt is unabashedly silly, sloppily written, and overly reliant on the likability of Beckinsale and fellow cast members Stanley Tucci and Jai Courtney. But it’s also a breezily entertaining reminder of how delightful it is to watch Beckinsale get pissed off.

The film’s intermittent delights are momentarily satisfying, but then numbness sets in, like the brain freeze that blooms after you slurp on the film’s titular ice-cream treat.

Its truncated ending, and the sense that there is far more to this story than what “Platform” includes, puts a damper on the otherwise-engaging documentary.

Richardson’s task is to play off everyone else’s broadness, and his ease in doing so smooths over the rougher patches of Werewolves Within.

Although Sisters on Track has some gaps in its narrative that seem as if certain chunks of the girls’ lives were compressed or skipped over, it's most impactful when offering a thoughtful analysis of the rapidity with which children grow, adapt, and change.

A tidal wave of compassion and empathy that crests into rage and sorrow—all of it provoked by the plight of Iran’s child laborers.

Untitled Horror Movie is the kind of finely tuned exercise that benefits from the chemistry of its cast, the managed-expectations feel of its storytelling, and a firm awareness of the kind of low-stakes entertainment so many of us might appreciate right now.

Mark Wahlberg should never be in a science fiction movie ever again. While the Paramount Plus exclusive streaming movie Infinite isn’t entirely his bad — the direction, script, and overall absence of creative vision also range from nonsensical to embarrassing — it suffers profoundly from his bland, phoned-in, looking-for-the-craft-table performance.

Through the alien beauty of its visuals, Andrewin’s hidden-waters-run-deep performance, and its increasingly tense atmosphere, Tragic Jungle casts an unsettling spell.

What results is a very Western-specific view of this conflict and of the Oslo Accords that doesn’t embody the “both sides” approach the film ostensibly intends to provide.

Amid the paper-thin plot, stilted script, inartful editing, and imbalanced character development, Jolie stands unblemished. She isn’t the only good thing about the otherwise rote Those Who Wish Me Dead, but she doesn’t have much competition, either.

Between its evocative ensemble, fluid editing, and interest in Aboriginal culture, High Ground is worth a watch, even if it ultimately feels overshadowed by the message it’s trying to send rather than being defined by the story it actually tells.

The film’s as compassionate as it is unsettling, and as provocative as it is poignant.

Set in rural Iceland, The County unfurls as if Ken Loach found himself near the Arctic Circle, looked around at the myriad villages and struggling farms, and thought, “Hm, I wonder if there is a labor struggle to found here!” There is.

The narrowness of the frame forces us closer to what is caught within it, and the result is often bracing or achingly tender.

That go-for-broke violence has always been a core component of Mortal Kombat, and this reboot succeeds because McQuoid and his team remember that, and have the self-awareness to acknowledge it. It isn’t a flawless victory, but it is lizard-brain fun.

Laden with demoralizing tragedies, Haroula Rose’s film is only fleetingly affecting, preferring to put its characters through the wringer rather than provide them with much interiority or consistency. Without that depth, neither the external nor internal journeys of Once Upon a River captivate as much as they should.

Burger has crafted a shrug of a movie that insists teenagers should follow the rules and submit to the greater good, but fails to imagine what toll that kind of sacrifice would really take.

As much as Charli is the star of this documentary, her fans are, too, and Alone Together manifests as both a wild ride and a soothing balm—as long as you don’t think too hard about the labor ethics at the center of it.

When progress stops feeling like progress is what Da-Rin captures in The Fever, and fantastic lead actor Regis Myrupu is a conduit for a calamity that builds and builds.

Asili experiments with cinematic form as he considers “inheritance” as legacy, heritage, and tradition, resulting in an engrossing, challenging film that allures and confronts you in equal measure.

Filmmaker Freida Lee Mock draws from photographs, video footage, and audio recordings of Ginsburg; collects interviews with mentees, colleagues, and fans; and utilizes animated sequences of courtroom proceedings to pad out this 89-minute documentary. That tactic means that the documentary is essentially stitched together by available archival material, and makes for an uneven balance.

Nearly every scene in Sophie Jones is either meditative or combative in some way, and Barr nails the flickering, shifting, visceral emotions of adolescence.

Billie Holiday’s skills as a talented singer, vibrant performer, and intuitive improviser never come first. All the qualities that made her singular play second fiddle to her many relationships with awful men.

To the credit of The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, the film knows its pop-culture touchstones (Groundhog Day and Time Bandits) and acknowledges the influence those Harold Ramis and Terry Gilliam classics have on its YA story. That doesn’t make the film particularly unique, but at least it makes The Map of Tiny Perfect Things honest.

The failure of The Wanting Mare is in how superficial its world building is, and how unexplored its greatest questions remain. Technically, the film’s use of visual effects is unquestionably impressive, but all that CGI is in service of a narrative so underdeveloped that its 88-minute run-time sometimes feels like an eternity.

There is so much more to know about these people that Gianfranco Rosi’s film fails to communicate because of its prioritization of beautiful visuals over narrative contextualization, and while Notturno shares many moments of profound fragility and deep beauty, it also paints an incomplete portrait.

While the young actors draw us into this recognizable world of secret notes and schoolyard fights, Mouaness’ insistence that love is a unifying force and opened-hearted acceptance is all we need doesn’t quite match the intensity of the aggression and bloodshed that the film is re-creating.

Scene by scene, The White Tiger punctures the fantasy that a rich man could also be a nice man, and although the comedy here is pitch-black, it strums with a particularly focused anger.

The film’s ultimate admiration of celebrity is only vaguely tolerable because its concurrent message of inclusivity is theoretically admirable — but must it be delivered by the likes of a thoroughly exhausting, irredeemably self-satisfied James Corden?

The brightly rendered details and Mulligan’s full-throated performance accessorize a film that ultimately might not be as groundbreaking as Fennell thinks it is regarding gender roles and heterosexual dynamics. But there’s an undeniable satisfaction to her brutish approach.