Ryan Lattanzio

“Hit Me Hard and Soft” is largely shot like a typical concert movie except for the fact that it’s in 3D — but the 3D works exceptionally well to place you onstage with Eilish, who works without backup dancers and with an intimately scaled band (and, sorry, spoiler alert, an eventual cameo from brother and collaborator Finneas). She wants her concertgoers, her fans, to feel like “it’s me and them,” and this film does effectively capture that from the comfort of a heated AMC seat and in Dolby sound. And it captures Eilish in all her romantic grandeur.

Mascaro’s wry and witty new film will remind savvy audiences of bleak apocalyptic films about humanity’s potential loss of feeling against technologies that crush them.

Ropp’s darkly funny and ultimately sweet-natured comedy is a promising start for the actor-turned-director. With a little more scope, his next film will be even better.

Boots Riley deserves applause for his brazen vision. . . He loses grip on the material overall, but as far as genre movies that actually turn out to be political missives go, there are worse entertainments. And with Keke Palmer at the front, you’re always in sure hands.

You might wish Heel were a bit funnier, a bit scarier, a bit more twisted, but it’s still pungently creepy in the right ways and anchored by a suite of top-tier actors capable of wringing empathy out of the darkest Freudian corners of a fucked-up family.

Our Hero, Balthazar isn’t cold by any means, but the result comes off as more ethnographic in tone than the in-your-face bravado of the approach would suggest.

The film’s quietly disturbing power lies in how Franco packages his U.S.-Mexico border metaphor — with rich philanthropist Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) and her young ballerina lover Fernando (Isaac Hernández, in a striking newcomer performance) standing in for each — into an addictive and destructive love story as sharply wrought as the movie’s grander political concerns.

Schleinzer constructs a canny bait-and-switch: The film’s visual language, agrarian setting, and seeming emotional distance at the outset promise a harshly unfeeling European arthouse exercise. Until it isn’t. Until Hüller annihilates your heart.

Çatak fashions a film that’s both a gripping marital drama and a rallying cry against artist censorship.

Internationally savvy gay film fans with a taste for the kinky and sad will want to check out this understated but occasionally quite graphic and sexy new work.

While Crime 101 runs like a remodeled version of earlier, better heist movies from the ’90s or early 2000s (which again are almost always coming from Michael Mann) but with lesser parts, there’s enough gas in the tank and competence at the wheel to merit a spin. At least until Heat 2.

This is a solid biography portrait with enough diaristic candor to compel a relisten to her greatest hits, in life and music.

Wicker threatens to feel largely like a logline writ into something grander (i.e., a short story with a wild idea stretched into a feature), but these actors are irresistibly weird and wonderful, as only they could be.

The central narrative, of the emotional dance between these two men over decades, holds even as the running time, while never boring you, often feels exaggerated for the sake of epicness rather than wholly necessary to this telling.

Blue Film leaves you feeling a little bit ill, and very uneasy about how you’re supposed to feel. But when most films either wouldn’t dare go here at all, or would tell you how to feel about the material, that’s rare and welcome.

[Martel] makes the case that the Chuschas put up a hard-won, long-won, impossible battle that already began centuries before, coming at the material with a visceral filmmaking point of view that never overshadows the material.

The understated performances and coolly detached, shivery hypnotic vibes of this film won’t be for anyone looking for a story, but The Ice Tower casts a creepy spell that lingers and even deepens in the mind long after it’s over. As only the best spells do.

This is a dense, unforgiving movie in the classic sense, an adults-only drama that doesn’t placate despite its stylistic overreaches. It’s disappointing that in its final moments, the movie has come so far off its own hinges, so deconstructed its own rivets, that it can’t put them back together again. But everything that’s come before is so rich that you’re ready to forgive it.

The Long Walk doesn’t tell you or ask you anything new if you’re feeling pent up with rage by American leadership these days, but the film’s grim commitment to the bit is a rarity for a studio movie: There’s no holding of your hand on this long walk, nor does it read you a bedtime story and tuck you in at the end.

The filmmaker creates a tactile universe of nostalgia and regret, heavier on suggestion than explication.

It’s a flawed but affecting film worth more than being treated as everything but a literal write-off.

Bigelow’s explosively entertaining real-time thriller, told from multiple perspectives at various levels of government from situation room deputies to POTUS (Idris Elba) himself, does not mince on hopelessness. Here is a movie that will ruin your day. You’re welcome.

Johnson’s performance is out-and-out wonderful, a beady-eyed fusion of body and spirit that osmoses Safdie’s sensibility to deliver what can’t be disputed as the most layered work of the actor’s career. A vividly contradictory Blunt, funny and sad especially in articulating Dawn’s conflicted response to Mark’s post-rehab emotional about-face during a tense argument, is equally sensational.

Writer/director Jarmusch has called “Father Mother Sister Brother,” which he wrote in three weeks, an “anti-action film,” but if you’re looking closely enough or tuned in to its hangout-movie sensibility, it has more action than most bona fide action movies, even when much of the action here is offscreen, under-the-surface, unsaid.

If you want your del Toro weirder, Frankenstein might not be your cup. But if you want a period monster movie that’s solid, almost oaken in its sturdiness, you don’t need to knock on wood to assure that del Toro is keeping the innermost essence, the soul of cinema, alive at least.

Imagine if Michael Haneke’s Funny Games were instead about a pair of lone-wolf, conservationist vigilantes trying to save the world instead of two sociopathic twinks wanting to tear it down, and you’ll have some idea of the hyper-contained, rigorously controlled torture chamber that is Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia.

With a Michael Haneke-esque impassive glaze and a Ruben Östlund-level satire of manners and emotional stuntedness in adults, the film acquires a quiet power as it plays out all possible permutations of a swimming accident that may or may not have ruined the lives of at least two families.

The grand takeaway is Venter’s astonishing turn. That kid’s got a future, and it began with a filmmaker who knew how to direct her: with patient energy while also encouraging the freedom to play and seek and explore as Bobo does within her little big world.

Romería isn’t without its own unique shape, or visual vitality, or a narrative sense of joie de vivre, but it doesn’t always stand out from the pack even as Simón deserves credit for rendering her autobiography in aesthetically sublime terms.

The Mastermind is a study in one man’s selfishness, his compulsion toward crime as a thrill sport, toward daring himself to execute a challenge to shake up his own humdrum day-to-day schtick.

While The History of Sound suffers from some pacing issues and detours that turn up as dead ends, following Lionel’s path as a budding ethnomusicologist collecting songs and sounds to record on cylinders, this is a lovely movie capable of wounding and haunting you.

Regardless of some of the screenplay hiccups and deus ex machina plopped from the sky, “Left-Handed Girl” still announces Tsou as a confident directorial talent with a rare exuberance.

It also never hurts to be anchored by two actors who are totally game and committed to that vision, and willing to go there, chains, gags, assless chaps and all.

Together, Melliti and Herzi find a rare alchemy between actor and director telling someone else’s story, but one that may turn out to be a bit of each other’s own.

Christian Petzold‘s gossamer latest film, Mirrors No. 3, is as compact as a novella, as ephemeral in its emotion, as delicate in register as one of the Chopin or Ravel pieces that float through it.

What Lawrence achieves here is extremely impressive, a marquee movie star throwing herself with abandon into a filmmaker’s warped and demandingly miserable vision.

What a miracle of a movie.

Still, as with any great theater, the performances here are superb, with Holland telegraphing Clay’s years of insecurity into the confines of a one-night-only movie that opens a window onto a Black identity crisis, only to shut it down on us as we peer over the sill.

Drop works best in its nimblest moments, but ultimately we should have nothing but gratitude for a movie that has almost zero bloat and tells an effective, original story in 90 minutes, even if this sleek package is made up of some shopworn tropes.

OBEX is a warm yearn for simpler times, told by a distinctive cinematic voice.

This film is about the contagious power of storytelling — which includes lying and self-deception — and what a potentially lethal device it can be in the wrong or even right hands.

With an economy of story elements and set design — where most of the movie takes place in nature’s open expanses — Bentley has crafted a plaintive and affecting film about how every moment holds value.

How does a transcript of a conversation become a movie? Sachs is searchingly in pursuit of the answer to that question, but what he has captured here is oddly wrenching and moving.

Here’s a classic story outfitted into something perhaps more bracingly modern — even if its storytelling techniques, female body horror aside, largely are traditional.

DuBowski’s activist portrait Sabbath Queen is overwhelmingly ambitious in its time-spanning, as searching and curious as its primary subject. We don’t leave the movie with a firm sense of who Amichai is beyond his religious backdrop, but I think that’s the point: Who he is as a person has become muddled and tangled up with the one he’s supposed to represent.

That Zemeckis and cinematographer Don Burgess manage to pack multiple lifetimes of experience into a single space, a fixed camera upon it, and mostly pull it off is quite a feat.

New Wave is piercing in its unveiling of the cycle of blame that came out of the Vietnam War.

What I wish for this film is that it had trusted the lilting rhythms of its own initial story more confidently rather than a crash into various melodramatic episodes in the finale that only serve to get us to a hurtled-toward cathartic ending.

There’s nothing especially mold-breaking here, though an ending moment elicits a gasp even as Apartment 7A ends with a cruel shrug — and perhaps the best thing I can say about that is that now I immediately want to rewatch Rosemary’s Baby. Plus, Garner gives a captivatingly distressed performance as a woman being attacked from all sides, where the only way out is through a window.

Baby Invasion has a clearer focus this time: It’s to make you, the viewer, feel bad, and often wanting to beg to the screen, “Please god let this end,” or perhaps more aptly, “end me.” Here is a filmmaker who, these days, resents his own audience. Here is a movie for no one.

Guadagnino wants not only to expand your consciousness as a moviegoer, but to cut you open and rearrange all the parts of you that see and feel things when you watch a film at all.

Even if Wolfs is a light affair in the end, it’s a smashing good time, confidently told and unpredictable, with two charismatic leading turns that are nearly even upstaged by Abrams.

September 5 works most powerfully as a behind-closed-doors, single-room thriller, even as what we see on a wall of monitors is almost too unreal to believe.

Without Kidman in a fearless turn and Dickinson there to pivot her to the edge, “Babygirl” wouldn’t work as smashingly as it does. This is a sexy, darkly funny, and bold piece of work. Don’t sleep on it.

Hartnett is in on the joke, going against the type he was pigeonholed into by Hollywood as a teen matinee idol who won our hearts and other body parts in “The Virgin Suicides” as too-cool boy-next-door Trip Fontaine, or as a self-induced sexual ascetic in “40 Days and 40 Nights.”

National Anthem is high on mood and feeling rather than story. This very horny queer Western is a rush of sensory pleasures, from the reddened, rust-colored rocks of New Mexico as captured by cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi to a killer soundtrack featuring the likes of Angel Olsen, Perfume Genius, Susanne Sundfør, and Spiritualized.

This is a rare nonfiction chronicle of an artist that also avoids hagiography — we see Dion at her lowest because that becomes the reminder of who she is at her very best.

Menuez and Rendón share a terrific chemistry as long-holding-on friends questioning whether they should stay friends at all, and if they should, then why? Comedies like Summer Solstice rarely ask that question with such candor and insight, and with a trans lead actor and character the movie lets simply be themselves despite living in a world rigged against them.

Rasoulof crafts an extraordinarily gripping allegory about the corrupting costs of power and the suppression of women under a religious patriarchy that crushes the very people it claims to protect.

It’s sexy, disturbing, yet cold despite the simmering equatorial heat and hot lava of freely flowing attractions.

The film’s excess of energy almost never burns out, pummeling you with the bacchanal brewing inside its lead.

Even as Ullmann Tøndel’s two-hour movie grows a bit too winding and weird for its short film-scale conceit, Reinsve grounds the film’s more experimental, almost stagelike leanings in a constant state of heightened emotion that will make you love her even more than in “Worst Person” — and, even better, will make you scared of her.

Bird is not Arnold’s best film — how can you top the cross-country raptures of “American Honey” or the final synchronized dance to Nas in “Fish Tank”? But it’s certainly her most ambitious in terms of willingness to stretch her creative reach beyond the social-realist-only confines of some of her early work.

The film’s outsides, all darkness and furtive lighting, seem to pour out of the characters’ insides, where pockets of trauma live in their own self-erected shadows.

This film is as muted in its approach to character and drama as its color palette, but the result is devastating.

Akin’s approach feels so tied to novel-writing — with shifts in perspectives and at least one plot-twisting formal deceit that whiplashes you only to leave you breathless and a bit swoony — and yet the axis around which his universe orbits is entirely cinematic, and universal.

In its wryly amusing self-awareness at all turns, the film actively and relentlessly lampoons the very language and gesturing we all affect in trying to broach the political maelstrom of identity politics.

What we’re left with is a rather opaque portrait of the artist as a man, but certainly a vivid one of the man’s art.

A heartfelt and hopeful portrait of four of the original AGs that feels more complete and finds each of them on steadier footing — eventually.

Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography is a film of many visual pleasures, and they’re ones Preciado clearly shared in while devising this generous and buoyant inquiry into institution and identity.

The Origin of Evil is ultimately Calamy’s show as a calculating and desperate woman seeking love and acceptance in all the wrong places.

Chastain and Sarsgaard give a pair of haunting, expert performances as damaged people making sense of their own agony together. Franco gets out of the way of his actors without manipulating them.

You almost wish there was a little more magic, but that’s maybe because some of the truths Silva comes up close to are so skin-crawlingly real that you want to cover them up.

Evil Does Not Exist is a slow-moving film with few epiphanies and no answers to the questions it posits.

The Killer is nothing if not committed to its own one-note bit, an existential nihilism that stays the same even as the protagonist, in a mostly silent Michael Fassbender performance, starts to change. It’s as unfeeling as any Fincher thriller, at once predictable in its simplicity but also strangely daring because of it.

As a study of how the Bernsteins’ near-three-decade marriage endured Lenny’s gayness and genius, Maestro succeeds off the chemistry between Mulligan and Cooper, but the film often looks and feels too fussed-over, almost too precisely manicured, to ever erase its own parameters as a linear biopic.

Poor Things is the best film of Lanthimos’ career and already feels like an instant classic, mordantly funny, whimsical and wacky, unprecious and unpretentious, filled with so much to adore that to try and parse it all here feels like a pitiful response to the film’s ambitions.

Ferrari is more gritty than glossy even at its most tightly coiled, with Mann’s searching camera never quite fixed in one place.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed lacks for drama in its portrayal of the quotidian realities of sexual kink, but Arnow’s voice is distinctive, shrewd, and spiky enough to keep it afloat.

The Young Wife can be a chaotic experience, but Poe has the skills to carry us through the noise and toward the future.

It’s as consistently surprising and deranged a movie as any from his output, even if not for all tastes, which he knows.

Rockwell’s direction is sophisticated and visually imaginative even as the movie could benefit from a tighter edit around its New York cast of characters and the rapidly changing city in the hands of mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

What sounds, on paper, like a challenging sit is actually a wondrous 97-minute feature, whose director and star are obviously poised for greatness.

Oldroyd is clearly a master assembler of styles, but he never lets his vision outshine the wonderful central performances at the movie’s core.

By the final jaw-dislocating cut to black, you’ll have no idea what just thwacked you.

While a straightforward documentary in the classic sense, it’s polished, affecting, professionally edited, and bursting with big personalities.

Eichner’s gay homage to the great American romcoms of yesterday looks and feels exactly like them, and that’s groundbreaking enough. We’ll take that any day over a movie that tries too hard to pander to gay audiences. This one just hears and sees us.

Coggeshall’s script isn’t especially sharp, as the movie really does hinge around that big twist, but the visual approach and performances from the actors give Orphan: First Kill an edge that should satisfy fans of the original.

It’s a challenging movie, but one so overflowingly empathetic for even its cruelest characters that the emotional beats outweigh the headier structural conceits that make for a narrative often hazy, out of reach, and gorgeously weblike.

At an economical 90-minute running time, Fire of Love packs a visual and emotional wallop, with enough close-ups on erupting volcanoes — one, at a point, is called “a bathtub with a hole in it, sowing death all around” — to leave you slack-jawed, terrified, and awe-inspired.

You can hardly see the scaffold of a documentary film at all. In fact, “Simple” unfolds more like a riveting neorealist drama, with no trace of the woman and her crew behind the camera, no talking heads, no filmmakerly intervention of any kind

[A] warm and heartfelt documentary.

Luzzu is beautifully shot, if at times emotionally restrained, in its centering around a man who’s occasionally hard to read. But it boast a true discovery in the casting of Jesmark Scicluna, a real fisherman who plays a version of himself, and here playing a struggling parent trying to eke out a living along the docks.

The Tale of King Crab is an engrossing, if slight riff on 1970s foreign arthouse classics — though not quite as spellbinding as its forebears, despite a bifurcated structure that makes for two occasionally tantalizing films in one.

This is an odd film of poetic abstractions and ellipses, but consistently fascinating in its unrepentant coyness.

While this nasty film seems headed toward a conclusion where the rich win and the status quo is maintained, that’s abruptly shattered by a violent climax that assures that no one on either side of the divide is left without a bloodstain.

This is a lovely film that will appeal to Bernstein’s most ardent fans, while warmly inviting neophytes into his world.

Unclenching the Fists turns out to be hardly the neorealist dip into misery that some of the film’s more disconnected camerawork from DP Pavel Fomintsev promises.