With very little dialogue and no cookie-cutter story beats, this fraught family life is vividly, tenderly rendered by Romvari and her naturalistic cast.

Léger and Robichaud’s update is mostly successful in filtering the intent of the original for modern sensibilities, not least in the plentiful sex scenes.

As Bauman falls deeper and deeper into the mysteries of Bilberry Inn, McCarthy masterfully reminds us that a ghost can be real and a metaphor, as the scares demand.

Mārama is arguably at its most effective as a political text when it isn’t trying so hard to be part of the heritage that includes Hitchcock’s Rebecca and del Toro’s Crimson Peak.

It’s an electrifying watch in its profound discomfort, and a testament to McKenzie’s ability to disarm with a smile, then land a righteous blow against the bad guys.

It’s an adept translation that is in turns bloody and cruel, insightful and hilarious, and, under the plentiful gore and uproarious laughter, a surprisingly touching drama. Just one with slapstick bloodbath tendencies.

Lowery may have dealt with the uncanny in A Ghost Story, but the whole point of that film was the mundanity of the afterlife. This is a truly supernatural tale, and the storytelling transitions into his version of horror, abstract and oblique.

It may well be that Ozon has made the best possible conventional adaptation of the book. Yet maybe it requires a more unconventional touch to truly translate Camus’ point.

Much of the fun of The Christophers – and it is very fun – is in anticipating the hitches, then startling when they snag left rather than right. The delight is in watching Coel and McKellen play off each other.

Any SNL fan, and I am one, is still going to get a kick out of the close access and cavalcade of stars like Tina Fey, Chris Rock, John Mulaney, Paula Pell, and Paul Simon giving testimony. By dint of that access, Lorne is by definition revealing. Revelatory? Not as much.

A few unforgivably heavy-handed nods to The Shining aside, [Kawamura] has created a fresh new addition to contemporary J-horror, one that deftly warps the characters around its own rules without rendering them merely props for the next shock.

A Rorschach test of a movie that reveals more about the audience than the characters onscreen. The Drama doesn’t just invite judgment; it’s coded in its DNA.

The film moves at a slow and deliberate pace, much like the wheels of justice. As viewers, we come to feel ensnarled in the grip of bureaucratic entanglement, much like Kornyev, fighting for justice against diminishing odds.

For two filmmakers best known for their comedic scripts like the Jump Street films and The Lego Movie, they know when to pull back on the humor and instead embrace the spectacle, and find their perfect proxy in Gosling.

A testament to the adage that a good filmmaker can make anything out of nothing, Undertone should go in your playlist now.

It’s all rather stunning to behold, especially in black & white, but Below the Clouds eloquently articulates the maxim that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” That eye sees something very different from a safe remove. By and large, the people featured in Rosi’s documentary are in the path of danger.

It becomes a warm and insightful tribute to every kid that finds peace climbing up a tree, to every adult that realizes the value of the natural world, and to the ties that bind us to the world around us. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll learn what a keystone species is.

Mesa Soto initially mines wry humor from Oscar’s sad-sackness; he and editor Ricardo Saravia are especially good at scene transitions that land like a punchline, and the marvelous Rios – small of stature and existentially slumped – cuts a comical figure. But the film, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes last year, subtly evolves (more successfully than Oscar, it turns out) to find just as much to scorn in the poetry center elites, and to nudge the viewer toward a more compassionate approach to its luckless sorta-hero.

The influence of the original Mad Max is undeniable – not the crazy biker bits, but the sense of a collapsing world, of the personal impacts and damage inflicted by the end of everything.

Like its bloodline kin, it’s a perfectly scathing glance at power, money, and how the love of both can curdle the soul.

Onscreen, Lighton explores the imbalance between the two and gently leads the audience with sympathy and empathy to a perfect resolution that asks both to face their own dysfunction.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie may not win over many or even any new fans, but devotees of the TV show, and even diehards from the single-n Nirvana web days will relish having their favorite gentle idiots back and hearing the same joke on a bigger stage.

It’s the same thrill as the Final Destination movies, which Egerton and Hardy have both noted as an influence: watching likable protagonists try and sometimes fail to evade death.

Its gentleness and incremental increases in weirdness are a feature, not a bug.

The film tracks the laborious training process of how anxious, heartbroken Helen forges a bond with Mabel, and it’s fascinating stuff.

By restricting the action almost exclusively to this one building, the audience is taken floor-to-floor on an adventure that stays engaging throughout. Bunny is a race against time and an exercise in controlled chaos.

Bennett’s true genius is not merely in his words – although few have ever achieved his flair for simplicity and wit. It’s in his compassion.

An undeniably novel film that nevertheless lost its novelty for me around the time the Shakers washed up on American shores (that’s about an hour in?), The Testament of Ann Lee still had me in its grip every time a musical number rolled around, which is often enough.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is not just a reminder of the crimes against humanity being committed in Gaza. It’s a reminder that the constant smears against human rights organizations and aid agencies are vile slanders by people who want this to happen again and again and again.

While there is undoubted visual spectacle to All You Need Is Kill, Kido’s rewriting of Rita and Kaiji as just ordinary people stuck in extraordinary circumstances is grounded in their mundanity.

Rather than this being some random moral crusade, Flaherty’s understated anger is about how the very rehab process that helped him so much has been perverted into a system indistinguishable from how street dealers operate. It’s his furious curiosity that informs the film, and gives it such devastating insight.

[DaCosta] may divert the series from its withering dissection of the green and pleasant land’s self-image, but her absurdist perspective on this inherently absurd franchise is still undeniably entertaining.

Like the weeping sores that spread on Eli’s body, the bloody gouges that Ben carves into his thumb with nervous scratching, and the haunted look in Daddy Wags’ eyes, Polinger delivers a troubling and heart-stopping lesson that such childhood horrors will always leave a mark.

What truly enthralls the viewer is Bi Gan’s journey through the history of cinema.

At the end of the day, Brewer reminds us, it’s all about hands touching hands.

There’s real magic in every paired-off scene where two characters confront each other – creating wonderful clashes of physical human contact that challenge the disassociation insisted on by the system they’re all being run through.

Chalamet clearly relishes this opportunity to play against his modern heartthrob persona. Win or lose, you’ll still kind of want Marty to take a punch to the schnozz. But at least you’ll understand why he’s that way.

Anchoring all the wild plot machinations and shocking, garish violence is Wagner Moura’s focused and forceful lead performance.

If future films deliver similar spectacle and true, epic filmmaking, then this lengthy sequel can afford to be a prelude.

Acheson channels exploitation legend Sid Haig as Charlie, and it’s just delightful to see Nelson give one of the all-time “oh, it’s that guy” bit part specialists a truly memorable role. That it’s in that rare remake that successfully inverts an old favorite while staying true to its grisly inheritance makes it even more of a gift.

In its strange and successful mixing of genres, Dust Bunny is arguably everything that Mockingbird Lane, Fuller’s misguided attempt at an edgy take on The Munsters, was not.

Adapting the graphic novel The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg, writer/director Julia Jackman creates a fable that is still damningly important and relevant: that women are not allowed to control their own bodies or their own stories.

With Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, [Tarantino] finally gets to complete his own work of cinematic archeology, and what he exhumes springs to life like the first time it was projected. Viva Kill Bill!

Hamnet is at its best when exploring primal emotions, following the example of Agnes, with her elemental connection to the earth.

The first film was both a fun and furry buddy cop romp and a gentle metaphor for acceptance and cohabitation. Zootopia 2 goes further down that path in a fashion that is unabashedly moralizing when it comes to how some groups are excised and othered in a community, and how gentrification can be a tool of oppression.

Johnson may need reminding that atheists aren’t just here to provide comfort to believers. That misstep aside, Wake Up Dead Man is a cunning and entertaining mystery, a return to form for the franchise.

Sentimental Value lacks the giddy bracinginess of The Worst Person in the World; it’s a more measured, more meditative thing. It is also a return to form, of a sort.

Its open-ended nature, its calm ambiguity, and its captivating, self-contained world all come together to give a clear view into Oshii’s creative and spiritual obsessions – even if that view doesn’t really provide much insight.

The ending simply lacks the guts to remain committed to King’s sociopolitical fury, and what starts as Wright’s best post-Cornetto Trilogy film ends up as his weakest. But when it’s really up to speed, The Running Man laps the competition.

As much as The Carpenter’s Son threatens to swallow you whole, and as much as it probes the oft-ignored darkness inherent in the Bible even outside of the Apocrypha, its thesis remains a little too academic to move the soul.

Peter Hujar’s Day is a monument to the thrillingly mundane minutiae of living. I found it almost indescribably moving.

The ninth film in the franchise, Predator: Badlands flips the whole Predator equation on its severed head from moment one by, for the first time, really concentrating on the Yautja rather than on humans.

At just under two hours, Die My Love is a lot of movie with not a lot of story. Good thing, then, that it centers Lawrence in very nearly every frame.

What Stitch Head mostly aims for and generally achieves is a warmth of comedy and emotion that will sit well with young audiences.

It’s arguably Linklater’s best use of an ensemble – and that’s saying something. But great as each individual performance is, and broad as Linklater pulls his aspect ratio, Nouvelle Vague is really a close-up on Godard.

The air of fear that still pervades every frame of It Was Just an Accident is undeniable and institutionalized, to the point that cops take cash or cards for bakhshish, the customary bribes required just to live in public.

Lean as a hellhound, Shelby Oaks doesn’t rely on jump scares, although there are plenty of those. Instead, its true terror is found in writer/director Chris Stuckmann’s ability to move effortlessly from adrenaline shocks to creeping psychological strain.

Much as Blue Moon is a eulogy for the death of a creative life, it’s also a testament to Linklater’s continued vitality as a filmmaker.

For a film that gets right up close to a musical genius, it’s when he’s walking away, hands jammed in his leather jacket, that you can see the resemblance most clearly.

There are no life lessons here, only an uncommonly focused look at one life – the sometimes joyful, sometimes punishing day-to-day existence of a young man whose future is more uncertain that most.

Black Phone 2 may be a power ballad to the original’s minor chord metal, but it still rocks.

It’s one of Roberts’ best ever performances, not in least part because of how confidently she wears her age and Alma’s secrets, now that her ingénue years are firmly behind her. The woman with the mile-wide smile is no longer interested in courting our favor.

The script, and Byrne’s suitably breathless, solipsistic reading of it, give the audience every reason to not simply dislike Linda but despise her.

It’s a dead-serious cautionary tale and sincere call for de-escalation, dressed like a political thriller by a director who’s aces with action (and whose actual best film, by the way, is Point Break). A House of Dynamite does not always easily straddle the gulf between docudrama and disaster movie conventions.

Like Johnson’s Kerr, The Smashing Machine is a surprisingly gentle giant.

Unabashedly warped and horny, Morgan knows exactly when to set off the depth charges lurking in the waters of Bone Lake, making its big, filthy reveal feel like the inevitable result of the characters’ urges.

When Day-Lewis and Bean are allowed to be real brothers in arms, Anemone truly blooms.

Nature may be healing, but too many static shots of it can drag an already slow movie out even more. Still, it’s not enough to detract from the moving performances of its three leads, who make The Summer Book well worth the watch.

Anderson still directs with purpose, and while One Battle After Another is never as coherent as it is exciting, it avoids the tag of being “lesser Anderson.”

Eleanor the Great never quite grapples with the ethical dilemmas that it raises, either in Eleanor’s stories, Nina’s efforts to turn them into a news project, or Roger’s usurping of their wishes for a segment on their show. But if the narrative logic falls apart, at least its emotional core remains solid, much of it bound together by Squibb’s warmth and charm.

While Figgis gets this extraordinary and unrestricted access, there’s a real question about what he does with it. Coppola is infamous for finding his films in the edit, but it’s hard to see that Figgis found that much more than he had in the camera.

Attempted but abandoned by filmmakers from George A. Romero to King regular Frank Darabont, six decades after completion and 40 years after publication, now it crosses the finish line as one of the best King adaptations.

Liu’s adaptation of Atticus Lish’s PEN/Faulkner Award-winning 2014 novel wends its way through the contradictions and tragedies of love between two people who need more than just a bed warmed by another body. Preparation delicately brings them together and devastatingly gives every reason for them to fall apart.

With its strong cast, crisp writing and exploration of the messiness of rash decisions, The Threesome embodies the essence of the romantic comedy while never falling into stereotypes or cliché. It’s fun, thoughtful, and heck of a ride.

Splitsville succeeds because it never seems fragmented. As a director, Covino dances between the sensual and the silly while constantly exploring the core thesis of the messiness of relationships.

Pulsing up and down the arterial route of the B train from Brooklyn to the Bronx, Caught Stealing is a portrait of NYC at its most grimily charming.

Don't let the big (but not that big) budget fool you: It's Troma, baby, just how you like it.

What Taylor illustrates in this version of Little Red Riding Hood is a sensitive portrait of guilt, of the difference between people who simply want to bury it and those that are consumed by it.

An impression is ultimately all that coalesces in 105 minutes, and I wonder if that has something to do with how little the film engages with his songwriting.

There’s a ridiculous level of glee to how the Indonesian filmmaker orchestrates a good old-fashioned headshot, or a kick that sends a knee buckling the right way.

Lee makes the material his own, for better and for worse.

As a first-time feature filmmaker, Beecroft’s storytelling technique could stand greater development, but her sense of place and mood is spot-on. Her film will definitely make you want to scrape the mud off your boots before you leave the theatre.

Writer/director Seth Worley is clearly having fun with the Amber-inspired monsters made real: They bear googly eyes and vomit sparkles before incrementally scaling up to more malevolent creatures that may test younger viewers’ mettle. But Worley is just as invested in the emotional nuance of the story, which meets each of its grieving characters at their own speed and shows them a lot of grace.

Weapons is such a deliriously twisted blast that, as soon as it’s complete, you’ll want to shake up the box and do it all again.

There’s a profound mournfulness to this elegiac portrait of the end of an era, given greater poignancy by Jones’ understated performance.

By film’s end, my cheeks were wet with feeling so many feelings for these young people just getting going. I am in awe of their boldness.

This The Naked Gun never tries to lampoon or merely copy the original beloved films. Instead, director Akiva Schaffer and his co-writers, Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, get to the heart of the humor in a non-ironic, non-revisionist fashion.

Everyone who has been in a long-term relationship has gone through that moment when they wonder where they end and their partner begins. Adult connection horror Together takes that inner fear and makes it physical.

While Pulse was a warning, Cloud seems more like a funeral bell, a despairing look at life on the online economic periphery.

It’s a bleak and introspective movie, interrupted by outbursts of bloody, senseless violence, made tragic by the interactions between Nathan and Polly.

AJ Goes to the Dog Park doesn’t feel like a movie so much as two creative friends getting together and having fun exploring a comedic person.

There are worse accusations to hurl at a filmmaker than that she has too much empathy for her characters, but in the case of Oh, Hi!, it stymies the potential in its provocative premise and holds a pretty good movie back from greatness.

At a time when everyone is complaining about superhero fatigue, it seems almost perverse to say that maybe the Fantastic Four should have had another film first. Instead, they rush to an ending that bolts them so neatly into the greater continuity.

Shot on location in Northeastern Massachusetts, chilliness hangs in the air of every frame, but Sorry, Baby – a uniquely special thing – is suffused with warmth.

Gunn’s script grasps two major aspects of the Superman mythology. One, that journalism done right will save the day as much as punching bad guys will, and two, that immigrants will often subscribe to the principles that Americans claim are so self-evident more than most Americans will. Corenswet embodies both in a way that no one since Christopher Reeve has, willing to be the gosh-darning nerd if that means doing the right thing.

One of Chaplin’s sweetest and most humble movies.

There is enough of a sense of awe here, and enough scale, that it brightens up the big screen as it stares into the ebony black of space. And if one child is instilled with a sense of cosmic wonder and channels that into a career probing the mysteries and poetry of the night sky, then Elio will have truly reached the stars.

Modestly scoped, sometimes sweetly dopey, and sincerely moving, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a charmer.