Ryan Lattanzio

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.

There’s almost nothing about “Emilia Pérez” that’s conventional — until the movie unravels into a third-act bit involving a hijacking, guns, and a live human body in a trunk. Which is just a reminder of where Audiard’s head really rests all along.

The Weight could use a tighter edit throughout, but it’s not without one central force pulling the film across its Europe-shot version of the Oregon Trail, and that would be Hawke.

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.

While Margiela’s visions likely deserve a more radical treatment onscreen, Holzemer’s film offers perhaps the most complete insight yet into one of fashion’s most elusive geniuses.

The result is a sophisticated, tart-tongued revival, and a gayed-up “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that surmounts the challenges faced by stage-to-screen adaptations, specifically the utter confinement to a single space.

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

This is a gentle and joyous film not to be slept on, even as its low-key aura lulls you into a soothed state of mind.

The way the editing (by Alain Dessauvage and George Hanmer) so gracefully unfolds from present to past suggests a kind of cinematic Proustian madeleine, conjuring how involuntary memories can be jolted again by encounters in the present.

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.

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

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.

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.

Graf makes “Going to the Dogs” an unpredictable visual experience, bracingly experimental for a 68-year-old filmmaker who hasn’t run out of gas.

My Old School seems to believe its surprises are more revelatory than they actually are, and for the sake of avoiding spoiling the whole thing, it’s hard to sum up what the filmmakers were so fascinated by in the first place.

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.

Despite the claustrophobic entrapment in a violent and hyper-masculine world, The Shadow of Violence is an ultimately moving morality tale announcing a confident new voice in international cinema. Not to mention a powerful vehicle for its two leads, Jarvis and Barry Keoghan.

There’s enough go-for-broke and whiplash-inducing shifts in tone on display to suggest this filmmaking duo has a future, even when their characters don’t seem to have a past.

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.

This version of Speak No Evil, despite an effectively creepy performance from James McAvoy, grinds the unsettling contours of the original into gory, “Straw Dogs”-lite, home-invasion comeuppance pulp in a last act that’s exactly the sort of dragged-out predictable material Tafdrup sought to avoid.