Sheila O'Malley

Delusion feeds addiction, and addiction needs a constant supply of delusion. Uncut Gems shows this electrified-fence feedback loop like no other film in recent memory. It's excruciating and exhilarating.

Keegan's writing is spare and controlled: she gets a lot done in 116 pages, and Walsh's adaptation captures the suggested interiority of the story.

Only 90 minutes long, the film feels intimate and yet at the same time vast. It has a relaxed pace, but an intensity of focus.

Alexander Nanau's Collective has a propulsive energy, relentlessly building in urgency and outrage.

Even with all the sexual trauma, The Chronology of Water manages the impossible, making a lot of the sex Lidia has as an adult look not just fun and playful, but mind-blowing and revelatory. Reclaiming your sexuality after having it stolen from you as a child is a huge, huge deal.

Vesuvius might erupt again. The angel of history keeps moving forward. Time destroys, preserves, and then returns (one hopes, at least). Rosi’s film is a meditative and moving document showing that process and possibility.

No Other Land is a portrait of relentless cruelty, but it is also a portrait of the resilience of this besieged community.

Played by Matthias Schoenaerts, Vincent is a tormented and inarticulate man, and the riveting center of Alice Winocour's sexy, relentless thriller Disorder.

My First Film is very emotional, but it’s also filled with ideas about cinema, being a woman, and creating art. Anger is willing to acknowledge her flaws and shortsightedness, and brave enough to recognize it is our flaws that make us artists, not our perfection.

Emotions never before experienced come surging to the surface. How Martinessi pulls this off — in what is his first feature — is nothing less than extraordinary.

Annette is an exhilarating and exuberant experience.

The Swerve is the opposite of comforting.

The fantastical and surreal are presented with unshowy practicality. It's magical realism mixed with kitchen-sink drama, seasoned by a haunting sense of history as a sentient entity.

A riotous medieval-era sex romp played with lunatic conviction by a great cast.

Would the magic hold? The magic holds. It holds from beginning to end.

Chained for Life is more than a polemic. There's a free-floating absurdist mood established, humorous and self-referential, allowing space for the audience to not just feel, but think. This is no small feat.

Foster is masterful in evoking a child's point of view.

The resilience in Scrapper is a type of lived creativity, an imaginative space where Georgie—and her father—make up their own rules and their own world. This is an amazing directorial debut.

Dinner in America, written, directed, and edited by Adam Rehmeier, is a movie with anti-establishment anti-social quicksilver coursing through its veins, but at its heart it is a sweet love story, one of the sweetest in recent memory.

Super Dark Times has a deeply unnerving mood, more unnerving than "what happens."

The Cathedral marries form to content in a striking way.

Thankfully, Eileen doesn't betray its source material by turning Eileen into something more palatable and sympathetic, but the film loses something in the transfer.

Queen & Slim is not interested in "neutral tints" either. Or "understatement." I appreciated the "big mood" of it all, even in those sequences that don't quite work. I responded strongly to the film's sense of scope and scale. The "rhetoric" of Queen & Slim reverberates with anger and love and mourning.

Megan Leavey is that rare breed: a war movie that actually shows something new about war, a sub-culture within a familiar sub-culture, the world of the military's K-9 units. For that alone, it should be applauded.

The Mad Women's Ball is part psychodrama and part melodrama, and it wears those mantles proudly and confidently. Each scene throbs with urgency and emotion. Nothing is unimportant. At the same time, the film is highly controlled, with a taut assured script.

Ma is more about its visuals than anything else.

It's one of those rare films where the title has real meaning, one that grows in power the moment the credits roll.

You may think you know where it is going. And maybe you're right. But how the film gets there is a very different matter.