Ryan Lattanzio

Blending Wojnarowicz’s own audio journals with input from a handful of his contemporaries, Chris McKim’s startling and meticulously edited new movie captures the spirit of the artist as he was, bracing and in-your-face.

You can view the work as a visceral slasher send-up, a stylish academic exercise about gender expression and inquiry in horror iconography, or as just a plain old, super fun, future cult lesbian classic. Either way, it will take multiple viewings of this film to fully embed yourself inside it — body, brains, and all.

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.

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.

Shlesinger’s leading performance has the stuff of a star-making turn, though the film isn’t distinctive enough from its peers and predecessors to match the actor’s obvious onscreen charisma.

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.

[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.

Stars Alexander Skarsgärd and Mia Goth deliver terrifically unhinged performances as a failing novelist and a mysterious tour guide, and Cronenberg has absolutely no shortage of original ideas, but the whole thing feels bloodless, cold and clammy as a speculum.

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.

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

Atlantis is a political howl from the soul about a decaying Europe. But its cold, violent exterior turns out to be a bleak disguise for what is an unexpectedly sweet love story at its molten core.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It’s a clever exercise in no-frills science fiction that should please fans of the genre, but it’s more than just a sci-fi exercise thanks to a script that prioritizes, and cares about, its characters.

While the raw material for something twisted and operatic exists here, Leblanc is too committed to putting meters of space between herself and the material to fully absorb the viewer. The motivations for that choice, however arty, are uncertain.

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.

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

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

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

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.

What a miracle of a movie.

While the film, both written and directed by Lacôte, is grounded in oral traditions that may seem exotic to certain viewers, the movie is really about the universal power of storytelling regardless of tongue — and how it can be used as a way to survive.

[A] warm and heartfelt documentary.

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.

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.

While the meandering sensibility of Acasa, My Home makes it a tough sit at times, the spell it casts through its all-access dive into subterranean life brought to the surface forms a compelling addition to one of international cinema’s deepest, and ever-growing, pockets.

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.

In not trying to reach too deeply into the well of profundity, Sarnoski has incidentally achieved a pretty profound movie.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 Chasing Ghosts is hardly as bold in its stylistic approach as Traylor, that’s by design, as the documentary is keen to get out of the way and let the work speak for itself. This movie should introduce one of the greatest artists you’ve probably never heard of to a bigger audience.

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.

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.

While the narrative hardly goes into the fully unhinged direction it teases, it’s pleasantly askew and always marching to its own strange and, slightly off, beat.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[A] sturdily enjoyable if emotionally uninsightful heart-tugger that aims straight down the middle of the audience for a mildly reassuring experience mostly made with families in mind.

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.

A wish fulfillment in feature-film-shaped form and little else, “You, Me & Tuscany” isn’t especially memorable or surprising, but there’s a soothing, smoothed-over quality to this film — which was shot on-location in Tuscany, so points for that — that makes it a suitable candidate for your next airplane viewing.

Kendrick makes the case for why she belongs in more dramatic roles that allow her to shed her normally peppy usually cheery onscreen persona. We know how good she is, and we’d only love to see more.

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.

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.

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.

Relic exists firmly in the realm of allegory, and if you’re looking for answers to the film’s spooky ambiguities and uncanny set pieces, you won’t find them. James is more concerned with creating an atmospheric rumination on intergenerational trauma, death, and dying that also happens to be a striking horror movie.

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.

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.

A murky, vaguely sinister, but ultimately dreary coming-of-age film about a young woman’s blossoming sexuality under the spell of her mother’s old flame.

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.

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

Godard’s revolutionary crime drama about a guy, a girl, and a gun comes off more like a pet project or even a student film here, part of both the charms and frustrations of Nouvelle Vague.

The actors’ gifts are all heightened by Msangi’s delicate touch in this empathetic portrait of immigrant life in America that is, refreshingly, less interested in big drama than in a family quietly building itself back up when it may be too late.

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

The Order is one of those: yet another Movie We Need Now, but the director inadvertently makes the case that maybe we don’t.

The mythology of Bring Her Back is dizzyingly unclear and patched-together from what feel like studio notes commissioning both over-explication and also less of it, as if ambiguity alone can pass for scares. But the emotions and the performances in the present day are there.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

Chiseled as a haiku, director Wayne Wang’s Coming Home Again opens a window onto dying days in all their ugliness, but also onto their possibility of redemption for a mother and son.

“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.

Madre turns out to be the least twisted, and most empathetic, entry in the damaged mother movie canon in some time.

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.

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.

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

While it certainly offers up a necessary-if-dour vision of patriarchy-dominated life in this particular corner of Europe, by-the-numbers storytelling and a flat, visual style occasionally lead to dramatic intertia. Still, Gashi is powerfully, effectively steely as a woman who must take matters into her own hands, even when they are tied by society.

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.

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.

While occasionally veering into melodrama, Brady’s feature debut is a powerful slice of kitchen-sink gloom, and a blazing portrait of women on fire, unsure of where to go in the wake of rippling tragedy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This muscular and often brutal depiction is chiseled with authenticity, but it’s too psychologically schematic to make much in the way of an emotional impact.

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

Though often lethargic and listless, Is This Thing On? does stir up a vivid portrait of the New York City underground comedy milieu, even when New York City as a character feels more like the afterthought it isn’t supposed to be.

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

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.

Elegant and confounding in equivalent measure, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature could’ve used a finishing touch from an American script supervisor.

For true crime fans, Last Stop Larrimah isn’t an urgent must-see, and I am told that the “Lost in Larrimah” podcast from five years ago is an even sharper recounting of the mysterious events. But the unsettling unsolved nature of the tale remains pungent, and so do the Missing posters throughout the community.

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