Ryan Lattanzio

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.

Schrader adapts the 2021 novel Foregone by Russell Banks into his own specific creation, and one that leaves viewers dizzied and lost by the chopped-up melancholy of it all.

The feature, Parvu’s third, blends suspenseful procedural with family drama but is missing a key point of view: That of the victim, whose assault is a Trojan horse into the film’s more macro interest in how bigotry and conformity entwine, and how emotionally repressed adults deal with teen homosexuality when it hits close to home.

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.

[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.

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.

Renck’s film leaves [Sandler] quite literally lost in space with nowhere to go, and rather than leave us with new perspectives on space travel or marital discord or an awe-eyed curiosity about either, we leave with a shrug.

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.

Freaky Tales is Boden and Fleck’s attempt at applying their studio lessons learned circa “Captain Marvel” to something supposedly more personal, but this film just ends up only repeating that one’s most grating tendencies.

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 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.

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 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.

While this film probably needed more time in the storytelling doghouse, Landry Jones’ performance is a lovely watch.

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.