Tomris Laffly

You can’t help but wish that this edition of the story was a bit more… groundbreaking.

Because Apex is only interested in surface-level backstory about the characters, the pursuit between the duo can feel repetitive on occasion. Then again, prioritizing white-knuckle thrills over excessive emotion and explaining is one of the most refreshing qualities of this gorgeously shot picture about survival and fortitude.

A movie that will soothe the hearts of every single female journalist who, on various occasions, felt pushed to the periphery while bearded dudes in plaid tossed around their self-satisfied takes, “Mile End Kicks” instantly offers a breath of fresh air about what it means to pursue one’s passion for writing about the arts while being a woman.

The Bride! is more a film to feel than to explain.

For Worse might be a tiny step among its kind, but it still feels like a leap for its thoughtful auteur, ultimately celebrating new beginnings as an ageless milestone.

It’s hard to feel freely when you are constantly and loudly reminded by every aspect of the movie that you are supposed to feel things.

The Friend’s House Is Here is defined not by the many constraints that it battled during its production, but by the artistic vision of the resulting work.

It’s the kind of unapologetically local love letter to the Big Apple and its less-illustrious denizens that New York deserves.

A film that mines reserves of tenderness in young female angst and cluelessness with loving empathy.

An optimistic film that feels truthful about aging, even if it doesn’t say anything we haven’t heard before.

Sadly, the film doesn’t live up to its charming premise, spending most of its runtime chasing its own tail with pointless jokes and dog-related puns that are only mildly amusing, along with an undercooked love story that doesn’t know how to steal our hearts.

While there is nothing hilarious about these topics, Eliassi and Coexistence, My Ass do the impossible and deliver radical ideas through humor. Rarely has comedy felt this serious and urgent.

A handsome follow-up that both seizes the predecessor’s sense of heartbreak (albeit at a lesser degree) and dials up its chills by transposing them onto an icy, blood-soaked youth camp in the Rocky Mountains.

Sometimes, we should be made uncomfortable. And that is, in the end, what “After the Hunt” attempts and mostly succeeds in.

What One of Those Days When Hemme Dies lacks in budgetary means, it often makes up through the sharp intentions of Fıratoğlu, a thoughtful filmmaker we will hear from again on the international festival circuit.

The film’s tonal inconsistencies hurt its impossibly talented co-leads considerably.

Despite the nostalgic glow that prettily coddles the film, there is a delectably unsubtle passing-the-baton theme that runs through the richly populated affair.

Rest assured, finding out whether an on-screen couple have what it takes has rarely felt this cutting, and, ultimately, this rewarding.

Elegiac in tone, melancholic in style, and documentarian in spirit, Simpson thoughtfully captures the micro preoccupations of the film’s characters, against the understatedly political macro backdrop of our shifting and worsening climate.

While The President’s Cake mostly plays like a genial fairy tale, with superbly balanced humor and drama, Hadi's still unsparing about the ills of patriarchal society.

There are no grand moments, enormous revelations or manipulatively overpowering scores in his delicately constructed and produced film — it is as narratively straightforward as movies come.

Ramsay lets her film, and her characters, exhale just a little. But there is a lot of earned wisdom and lived-in pain in that exhale, and in the entirety of Ramsay’s masterwork.

Tsang has made a small, affecting, and studiously minimalist film here, with lived-in and tactile visual and design elements signaling a major auteur in the making.

The Wedding Banquet serves its richest dish through the shared love amongst its characters, even inspiring a few organically shed tears during compassionate, wisely written moments between Chris and Ja-Young, especially Angela and May.

There doesn’t seem to be a single original bone in this film’s body that gives you a parade of half-baked comedic scenes braided with a trite thriller and family mystery.

With a tender spirit, gorgeous Tulum locations, and a poetic, dialogue-driven calmness, Pritzker’s “Ex-Husbands” is a surprising delight, astute and humorous about humans that both lived a long life and are just starting out their adventure. It’s a movie that looks back and moves forward, with grace and wisdom.

This is a smart and emotionally immersive comfort movie where you get the happy with a side of sad in the same way that the messiness of our own lives often unfolds, with laughter and tears served as a pair in a package deal.

Gordon and Lerman are two committed performers with excellent chemistry and comic timing during these scenes, and much of Gordon’s physical work as the crazy soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend is genuinely impressive and funny. But the seams of Brooks’ writing show often, becoming impossible to ignore.

Following Zhu’s peculiar white rabbit is never less than an intriguing experience, but in the end, it feels like a hollow one.

Spiritually guided by Dabis’ personal and familial memories, the narrative film is sometimes deeply stirring, other times clumsily heavy-handed, often hampered by Christopher Aoun’s bland cinematography.

With a confused tone stuck between satire and horror (that also informs Malkovich’s eccentric, out-of-place performance), and various half-baked ideas about cultural icons and toxic fandom, “Opus” mostly feels like a missed genre opportunity.

Alive with plenty of droll British humor and with a music-filled, picturesque finale that is sincerely earned, The Ballad of Wallis Island is the best kind of crowd-pleaser: disarming, joyful and full of compassion for its oddball characters. This Sundance charmer doesn’t hit a false note.

You want to be moved by this seemingly conservation-minded affair, but Autumn and the Black Jaguar sadly turns into a cringe-inducing experience fast in a number of ways, undermining the intelligence and taste level of its young audience in the process.

A Complete Unknown is an honest film that wants to get close to an enigma, maybe even unlock his mystery a little. After the film, Dylan might not be any less of an unknown, but it’s the film’s breathtaking pursuit that counts.

With "Maria," about the final days of the iconic American-Greek soprano Maria Callas, Larraín turns his "historic women" movies into a near-perfect trilogy, giving us a stunning conclusion to his series.

It's no coincidence that outspoken women are often seen as a threat in conservative governments looking to unambiguously establish and advance a patriarchal order. This truth rarely comes into more urgent focus than in Afghan director Sahra Mani's harrowing, Jennifer Lawrence-produced documentary "Bread & Roses," a vital account of present-day Afghanistan under the Taliban.

There is a stirring sense of discovery in every corner of the searching “Luther” that will awe both the most knowledgeable Vandross fans and those who are only versed in the well-known brushstrokes and ballads of his career. That latter group will learn a lot, too, hopefully making it their mission to broaden their playlists with Vandross classics.

As expansive and inviting as its picturesque New Zealand landscapes, a joyous sense of adventure shines through in Ant Timpson’s Bookworm, a delightfully quirky father-daughter adventure with the perfect blend of childlike wonder and grown-up bite.

On the whole, there is an old-fashioned grandness to Blitz, charged by a cumulative sense of civic toughness and rebellious spirit that always spreads itself over a people, a city, or a country when they are collectively faced with unspeakable tragedies they have to endure.

It’s a gorgeous artifact and a cinematic experiment that works beautifully, one innovative frame at a time, centered on Ronan’s soaring and soul-restoring performance.

While the YA genre can be very capable of unearthing outsized desires and rebellions in all of us, the problem here is the source material itself. Or rather, the timing of its screen adaptation.

On the whole, what Baker has created here is nothing short of pure movie magic— his smartly interwoven urban machinations make you giggle and inexplicably tear up on repeat (sometimes within the same sequence), while somehow keeping you acutely aware of the sorrow that is bound to rise to the surface.

With the exception of “The Tragedy of Macbeth” Oscar nominee Kathryn Hunter’s fiercely committed performance, much of this well-designed but boring film yields a shrug.

A gradually swelling, deeply intellectual, and unexpectedly fun political thriller, Berger’s twisty film takes the audience behind the notoriously secretive closed doors of the Catholic Church for one of its most private processes: the election of a new pontiff.

Ross’ formal dedication sometimes stands in the way of story and emotion, prioritizing visuals over earned moments of expressive, swelling feelings. And so this critic did wonder if Nickel Boys should have dialed up its narrative ambitions from time to time, stepping just a bit away from its creative non-fiction temperaments.

Hilarity ensues, but so do the lessons. . . In this raunchy little escapade, actions have consequences.

The film’s greatest asset, along with a sun-dappled cinematography, Banks is certainly game for every shade of Hope in her journey of poor decisions, escalated by bad luck and an eerie city that couldn’t care less about who falls down or survives the elements unscratched. In that, “Skincare” nails a routine well worth investing in.

The Good Half reclaims attention every now and then with its occasional humor and grace notes around its side characters. . . But what we eventually get with The Good Half doesn’t even feel half good.

You come to Blood for its aura of spiritual sustenance, only to leave it feeling curiously alienated and undernourished.

Despite some miscalculations that weigh this installment of fearless tornado chasers down, “Twisters” is an enthralling summer blockbuster on the whole, thanks in large part to Powell’s presence, which is fun, disarming, and even cheekily silly.

In the end, this is a sufficiently rebellious film about women’s refusal to be forced into sandboxes fashioned by oppressing norms—about fighting for air and resisting the urge to sink into that quicksand, however beautifully decorated.

A proudly old-fashioned Gothic fable with grain and grit, the delectable “Vourdalak” is swift to announce in its early moments that we are in the hands of a skillful stylist.

Sadly, the film plays more like an artless quickie than a fully fleshed-out romance.

At first glance, Jazzy might seem more polished and traditionally structured than its predecessor. But the two films share a proudly scrappy and loose-limbed spirit in their soulful, tranquil pace.

It’s surely a worthy enough premise for a good time, but one “Summer Camp” squanders through dull jokes, an uninspiring story without any real stakes and an overall phony feeling that the film can’t shake.

Throughout Rønning’s sophisticated film and alongside Ridley’s stunning performance — a career highlight for her — we all hold our collective breath and swim with Trudy. Talk about the kind of film they hardly ever make anymore.

Atlas does have Jennifer Lopez in all her starry glory in the driver’s seat. It’s not nearly enough, but it’s something.

Krasinski’s concept borrows generously from Pixar films like “Monsters Inc.,” but is so chaotic and half-considered that you don’t feel as inspired as you should be, making it hard to submit to the film’s alternate reality.

To be clear, “Kingdom” doesn’t have the answers. But you can bet your bottom dollar that this rare, deeply cinematic Hollywood franchise won’t stop digging until we get a little closer to knowing.

Nowhere Special is the kind of confident, understated film that doesn’t need to pound the audience with its sentiments in order to make us feel alive and human in front of it.

This broadness of info only means the Tickells remain surface-level on most topics. Their Common Ground only teases but doesn’t dig deep enough into the intersection of racism and capitalism that brought us to today.

Even in its quietest moments, “We Grown Now” feels alive through the kids’ joint triumphant spirit and Baig’s discernible love and care for them.

The whole thing is so provocative, beautifully cinematic and in touch with its head-decapitating roots.

Cabrini is in no way a perfect movie, but a damn dignified one that honors the little-known efforts of these fearless women.

Nelson pulls off something strangely lovely and generous on the whole, a clear-eyed film with something to say on the kinds of lives many would rather not talk about.

The aftertaste of this madcap escapade is unexpectedly sweet and romantic thanks to its unapologetic commitment to womanly smarts and pleasures.

There is a curious datedness, monotony and lack of excitement throughout “Lisa Frankenstein,” that feels dull despite its preferred power-ballad “Can’t Fight This Feeling” by REO Speedwagon, and colorless in spite of its magenta-heavy production design. In its best moments, Williams’ debut feels very much like its central monster—undead, but with no place to go. It’s a cosmic disappointment.

The story overstays its welcome eventually, with the impending tragedy that would conclude the film fizzling as a result.

Suncoast joins a more forgettable crop of teen movies, lacking plausible character development and sufficient depth to make its themes resonate.

[An] unevenly written but good-looking directorial debut that gradually runs out of steam.

The result is something deeply reflective about femininity, culture, commerce, friendship, sexuality and the various souls who dwell in the impossible intersection of it all.

It’s here to show you a respectably fun, inspiring time and it does just that.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is something sadder than the worst movie of 2023. It is the year’s most disappointing.

The End We Start From is down-to-earth, beautifully conceived and thoughtful, a shrewd piece of filmmaking in support of the story’s thematic preoccupations, particularly motherhood.

Undercooked dishes aside, with eye-popping production design and an invitingly rowdy premise, you feel just thankful enough for the full, calorie-rich meal Roth’s latest slasher provides — bones and all, but no leftovers.

Unfortunately, the script — co-written by Lee and Christopher Chen — leaves a lot to be desired, squandering the old-school appeal of the true-crime drama for a dull and overlong mood piece in which nothing much happens and no real sense of danger ever registers.

“The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” unlike the stellar predecessors of the series, feels curiously starved for real insights into the opposing shades of the human soul.

So if you’re in search of a new horror film to watch in the countdown to Halloween this October, look elsewhere—no need to go exploring this particular noise in your streaming pool.

What’s perhaps most miraculous about this tight and taut film is Domont’s unforgiving economy.

The Creator instantly feels like a classic old-school sci-fi escapade delivering a thrillingly gorgeous ride, one that is immersive and handsome enough to hide the film’s escalating thematic dubiousness about artificial intelligence elsewhere.

The first thing you need to know about Expendables 4 is that its studio somehow made the grating decision to fashion its title as Expend4ble. It’s a needless spelling challenge for a dull and vulgar flick with a lot of empty-calories muscle, but little-to-no skill or fun to spare.

The most brilliant aspect of the script, penned jointly by Green and Oscar Redding, is its flair with sketching out the ups and downs of Hanna and Liv’s friendship.

Some films merely offer you a clockwork plot. Others, like Jeff Nichols’ smokin’ cool The Bikeriders, whisk you away with a roar of mood and atmosphere.

Origin is so rich, expansive and wildly varied that one could easily see how DuVernay could have turned it into a mini-series. How great that she instead chose a compact and coherent feature, with articulate editing, buttery cinematography (by Matthew J. Lloyd) across various visual palettes of different time periods, and opulent costume and production design.

Sadly, Wolfe’s direction and the film’s overall visual palette fall flat when compared to Domingo’s mesmerizing performance as a tireless leader.

Although it might promptly be added to your holiday movie rotation as a new staple, The Holdovers doesn’t exactly feel like a new classic—it feels too familiar for that. Still, it does something tried-and-true so well and affectionally.

In the end, Saltburn works as a distinct and wildly entertaining probe into familiar waters of privilege, rather than the definite word on it, one that reinforces Fennell as a distinguished auteur of the big and the bold even on shaky grounds.

Narrated in crispy voiceover like a Grimm tale, the result is something unexpected: fun, bloody and ambitiously centuries-spanning, the film demonstrates with sting over one-too-many freshly-blended heart cocktails that malevolence has always been an everlasting presence amongst us.

In a lot of ways, All Of Us Strangers is a poignant, deeply melancholic exercise on the attempt to bridge the past with the present, a cosmic inquiry into resolving all that was unsaid through second chances that never were.

Perhaps it’s not quite the teen movie to define a new generation, but it’s one that gets at something unique about female rage and drive, gifting its young viewers a reset button and a release outlet, however imperfect.

Unfortunately, López can’t sustain the momentum. Every time a new turn emerges within Red, White & Royal Blue it feels like a new film has sprouted out of the story with embellishments that land as superfluous scenes begging to be deleted, instead of grace notes that elevate the movie.

There is a big difference between a campy film that doesn’t take itself too seriously and one that is just wall-to-wall miscalculated execution. For clarity, “The Trench” is firmly in the second camp.

That miscalculated manner that often transposes Dreamin’ Wild into an overtly psychological zone works against the rest of the film’s gentle demeanor.

This uneven film is more a showcase of all the craftsmanship and horror knowhow the Philippous are capable of bringing to the genre table than a movie that fully works. For now, it’s not a bad reason to shake hands with this gifted duo.

Who knows if the creative team behind this sufficiently unique “TMNT” will be able to preserve this lean and sweet demeanor through the already announced sequel. But for now, “Mutant Mayhem” is a small win in the tiresome world of IP, one that doesn’t need to mutate into anything further in order to be accepted.

Thanks to Gerwig’s imagination, this Barbie is far from plastic. It’s fantastic.

In its final moments, the potency of Fremont sneaks up on you. You go in reluctant and even skeptical, and come out wondering how and why you’re moved to tears.

Few movies this year will be as quietly sizzling as German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s “Afire,” a novelistic and sophisticated character study that kindles inside a chamber piece, as languid as a relaxed summer day and as heartbreaking as the end of a short-lived summer love.