Tomris Laffly

Avatar: The Way Of Water not only delivers upon everything its predecessor established, but advances them in ways gleaming and ocean-deep, through the eyes and heart of a cinematic storyteller with a passionate and well-documented love of the sea.

Kovgan’s ode to choreography master Merce Cunningham is sensational in every sense of the word. Renewing one’s appreciation of the many wonders of the human body and the space in which it fills and drifts, Cunningham celebrates all the things our joints and flexed muscles are capable of, as seen through the mind and poetic dances of an iconic creator.

La Chimera is a pictorial delight to luxuriate in, as it is a philosophical wonder on the unknowability of time. The earth belongs to the past and the future, this miracle of a film quietly suggests. We just live in it.

Killers of the Flower Moon is vast and vital in its scale, purpose and emotional scope, a Western-thriller and ensemble piece that is every bit a Scorsese crime picture as one can dare to imagine.

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

In the end, Lelio earns the powerful close of The Wonder with every temperate turn. His film, a career-best, departs like a birdsong, with an optimistic finale as perfect and revelatory as they come.

The team behind this new “Mission: Impossible”—like the makers of all the installments that came before it—seem to know on a deep level why viewers flock to this group of action movies: the indispensable big-screen proficiency and collective soul of the series first and the plot of individual chapters, second.

While The Eternal Daughter manages to sell a truly spine-tingling atmosphere of ghosts, it feels closer to a thought and style experiment in the aftermath. But the film’s time-and-logic bending final reveal arrives as a gut punch nonetheless, with a restrained parting note both ethereal and lifelike.

It’s a stellar film that hits a rare sweet spot as both mainstream, accessible entertainment, and also an undeniably incisive piece of cultural commentary. And best of all, it will keep you on your toes until the sensational final moment of its breezy drift.

A film of mounting artistic imagination, Sorry to Bother You spirals into a type of mind-bending madness that is both persistently fun and one-of-a-kind.

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.

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.

It’s cinematic poetry, if there ever was one, bourgeoning in meaning the more you linger in its shadow.

It’s an endless metamorphosis that unfolds like some kind of real-time art installation, and in all honesty, it can be a touch overwhelming to take in at times — which is why the digital release of The Wolf House is a blessing in disguise, as audiences can rewind to fully appreciate this awe-inspiring film’s layers of details.

In its final moments, How to Blow Up a Pipeline proves it has the guts and lucidity to challenge even the most capitalist of minds, even if the film never blatantly endorses the extreme measures it depicts.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Admittedly, it’s all a bit much, an exercise in familial grief, inherited burdens and compressed feelings of guilt, but that excess is entirely the point of Aster’s longest and most ambitious film to date.

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.

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.

It’s a searing, mesmerizing and unforgettably wintry mood piece and character study.

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.

This is both an immensely humanist film, and a tough, heartbreaking watch.

Throughout the mostly wordless “Stray,” we wonder with compassion and considerable self-critique whom the society uplifts and supports vs. whom it chooses to disregard and deem invisible.