Little in the film stings as much as the fact that Knoxville and co. have clearly lost a step. It’s a bummer that Knoxville himself is too banged up to get involved to the same degree that he once did, and though some of the new bits reflect the visionary idiocy of the crew’s finest work (Larry the robot is a brilliant addition to the cast), many of them fail to leave a mark.

Alcock, tasked with playing a character that might strike some as “unlikable,” instead finds both the very human dimension and the out-of-this-world charisma necessary to make Kara worth rooting for.

She’s the He might not be the funniest or most fearless film about trans identity to find fans this year. But it understands that while queerness isn’t contagious, hope is.

For Girls Like Girls the movie, the final result is less a standalone work of great cinema announcing Kiyoko as a feature director, and more an act of dreamy devotion designed to comfort her core fanbase. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it does change who, and perhaps what, this soulful and peculiar film adaptation is for.

But for all of its teachable wisdom, this movie knows that life is never sweeter than it is during the moments, and years, when we simply can’t accept that love is also made out of plastic.

There’s only so much marveling at brilliant and grotesque creature designs that can be done before the story needs to get on its feet, but I Am Frankelda does eventually click into place once its world is fully established.

This is the action movie of the year so far as American theatergoers should be concerned, and nothing else really comes close.

The Death of Robin Hood isn’t revisionist history — it’s a history of revisionism. One that fittingly creeps further into fiction with every claim it makes towards “the truth,” as Sarnoski’s ultra-austere effort to cut through a millennium of myths can’t help but create a hard-to-swallow fable of its own along the way.

Filled with sight gags, innuendos, and puns galore, Stop! That! Train! has a shaky hit or miss ratio in its humor, with great jokes wedged between hacky bits that land like a botched lip sync death drop. And it’s unmistakably a fan only affair.

Far-fetched as this popcorn movie gets, it crucially never loses sight of the notion that to look outward is to look within (and vice versa), a theory that only grows clearer over the span of a blockbuster whose 79-year-old director still peers back at his childhood for a better view of the stars.

Ryuya Suzuki’s masterful anime, which spans the century-long life of a J-Pop star, makes it impossible to ignore how little it shows you.

The most compelling thing about Office Romance, which would be as formulaic as it gets if not for its admirably deep bench of deranged supporting characters, is that it gives Lopez the chance to publicly negotiate between the extremes of her own screen image — to explore the frustrations of being a self-possessed woman who has to shrink herself down in order to maintain her power.

The film isn’t so bold as to suggest that it’s never too late to find fortune and fame in the entertainment industry. But it replaces those fantasies of overnight success with something richer, and its conviction in the power of songwriting as something that doesn’t have to be connected to record sales and stadium shows makes it a charming entry in a filmography that has never tried to be anything it’s not.

A nature doc mixed with autobiography, “Time and Water” is a poetic musing on intergenerational memory, a whimsical, yet staunchly political elegy for the glaciers, and a mournful look at the Earth in all her majesty and mystery.

Backrooms is a movie more likely to blow young minds, but remember the first horror movie you saw that changed who you were? This movie will be that for a lot of people.

While hope on the horizon is presented, this rich, deeply moving drama doesn’t shy away from forgiveness being something that cannot be easily forced, even when the will may be there, however far buried.

Mysius is a rigorously attentive filmmaker, obsessed by the small details that make up the frames of a thriller, who I’d love to be served by better material that isn’t such a by-the-numbers thriller.

It is so wholly transporting that its running time flies by unnoticed, and as it barrels toward its melancholic end, you’re left breathless in your seat wishing you could spend more time with these kids, hoping they will all be OK, even while knowing that life still has many more knocks waiting for them, and that perhaps none will be ever be as monumental as when love is lost, but if you have patience, also when it is found.

It’s hard to identify when the emotional circuit board underlying “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning” switches on and a low-key multi-character yarn coheres into a humanist light show, only that after that certain point it achieves the enduring power of a folk ballad.

Clocking in at a tight 90 minutes, some changes to the also-slim book are smart, while others dilute its darkest impulses.

Grisebach’s understated approach to character works evocatively at the start when it is a question of blending them into this very specific place (filmed with consistent majesty by cinematographer Bernhard Keller) and teeing up the mystery of the past. However it falters when it comes to paying off that mystery and exorcising the ghosts that Veska is reckoning with.

At a mere 94 minutes in length, its meandering, meta-textual appearance might seem like a misfire at first, but it disguises what might be Jude’s most slyly character-focused work, culminating in a completely unexpected emotional gut punch.

As a war movie, Coward isn’t especially unique. Nor is it as a queer romance. But how many straight wartime love stories have we seen? This is a lovely, if rather decorous and reverent, tale of an illicit affair that’s unlikely to cause as much noise as Dhont’s last two films. But in this case, that should actually work to its benefit.

The film strikes an elegant balance between providing context for his innovations and letting the work do the talking, resulting in one of the more entertaining art documentaries that this critic has ever seen.

This intimate and psychologically astute portrait of the human cost of U.S. imperial violence draws a precise focus from what cinema is built for: putting us in a character’s skin.

Ashes doesn’t feel like a typical immigration tale, not because of where it takes place, but because of the nuance of emotion that fuels it.

Carroll may have made her bones as someone with ready answers and an irrepressible spirit, but Meeropol’s film is best when its subject finally realizes even the best advice only applies in the moment, in certain places, for certain people. Living in the after of those questions? That’s much more important.

The gratification of experiencing all the narrative threads coming together is only eclipsed by an awe at the underlying emotional continuity.

Marre’s position as the most anti- of anti-heroes initially feels like it’s going to generate fresh insight (not to mention contemporary prescience) on the era, yet the film can only restate the basics on one of the most mythologized periods in French history.

Sachs, co-writing the film per usual with Mauricio Zacharias, has a deep investment in the Manhattan arts scene of the period that pays off in terms of the drama’s immersiveness.

Passenger may lack the interpersonal and mythological complexities required of a proper, obsession-worthy classic. But Øvredal is nevertheless skilled at trapping his audience inside a disorienting, semi-liminal space where anything can happen… and it probably will. Like the best late-night drives, it’s an outing without a meaningful destination that lets you have fun in total darkness.

For better or worse, Harari uses gender dysphoria as a conduit to his more immediate concern: The idea that who we are is ultimately a memory that we share with ourselves.

Minotaur isn’t the best movie of Zvyagintsev’s career, but the icily exacting power of his filmmaking is undeniable — and it sucks you in like a vortex. Rarely are you so glued to a tale you’ve heard so many times before. Andrey Zvyagintsev, welcome back. We missed, and we need you.

Nemes’ understanding of the filming methods of the era in which his movie is based sets “Orphan” out from other, more conventional historical dramas. As with “Son of Saul” and “Sunset,” this is a sophisticated endeavor and, in craft terms, a level above the norm.

Bitter Christmas is neither the work of a filmmaker atoning for, nor justifying, their greatness so much as it’s the work of a filmmaker simply explaining how their greatness works.

For all its real-world anguish and fictional dread, Mārama never collapses beneath the weight of its own seriousness. Stappard understands that catharsis matters too, and the film’s conclusion is exhilarating.

“What does it mean to be a good neighbor?”, Fjord wonders in Mungiu’s usual tones, its probing handheld wide shots infused with the callous indifference of the gods. And why is that so rarely a question that people feel required to ask of themselves?

Sheep in the Box is less concerned with feelings than it is with our impulse to elide them.

Gray is no stranger to saga about fraternal strains, but never has he so forcefully tugged at the ties that bind, or more sensitively observed how they can suffocate an entire family when a certain force pulls on them hard enough.

In the context of such a terrible crime, Kreutzer is naturally less concerned with right and wrong than she is with the way that even the most sordid type of abuse is able to disguise itself in domesticity. If victims are our friends and neighbors, then it stands to reason that perpetrators are too.

Club Kid has real potential to break out bigger than its seemingly niche scope would suggest, with Firstman finally shirking the ironic pose he’s taken online for years to emerge as a sincere storyteller with heart as much as humor.

All of a Sudden is so prescriptive with its ideas that its characters are liable to become vessels for them. It’s the one regard in which Hamaguchi’s impulse to mash everything together softens the power of his point rather than sharpening it, and the one regard in which this three-and-a-half hour sit threatens to seem too short.

Written alongside her real-life husband (and fellow filmmaker) Mark Duplass, Aselton has made it clear in press materials that the film, about a loving if troubled married couple (played by Aselton and Daveed Diggs) isn’t explicitly about her actual marriage. But it’s also not not about her and Duplass’ long-running relationship. Still, once you see where Aselton and Duplass’ script takes their characters, the differentiation becomes easier to swallow, if not all the more intriguing.

The internet is the closest thing these teenage cyberthieves have to a real life, and Corrigan’s dopamine onslaught of a film is an authentic portrait of the most alive they’ve ever been.

It’s only once Butterfly Jam seems doomed to repeat the same dark fatalism of Balagov’s earlier work that it suddenly affirms itself as the bittersweet fable that it’s been all along.

Pawlikowski’s elliptical style — keen on empty spaces, minimal dialogue, and crisp cutting — has its limits in terms of achieving an emotional payoff, but the actors’ understated turns make for a captivating (and, at 82 minutes, miraculously short) elegy to a lost homeland at the kickoff of the Cold War.

Gabrielle is at the center of all things, but what about her center? Well, it’s not going to hold. And there’s no one better to portray that than Drucker, who has become one of our foremost portrayers of women on the edge.

If Nagi Notes is so watchful and unforced that it often seems as though it isn’t looking for answers — or for anything — as hard as it should be, Fukada’s elegant plotting gradually allows this quiet film to assume the forcefulness of a full-throated shout.

Harris refuses easy answers, and announces herself as a singular cinematic force in the hell her story brings just the same.

You can view the work as a visceral slasher send-up, a stylish academic exercise about gender expression and inquiry in horror iconography, or as just a plain old, super fun, future cult lesbian classic. Either way, it will take multiple viewings of this film to fully embed yourself inside it — body, brains, and all.

The tightly crafted story ensures that everyone is running a different race as the characters sprint to the finish line, leading to a deliberately unsatisfying ending that reflects those divergent goals.

The filmmaker’s documentary background also adds that kind of touch to the film, which so often feels like we’re watching something, well, true. We are, though, and even if it’s a different kind of truth, a scripted one, it’s still sprung from the same well of experience. Elizabeth Cook has plenty of it, now it’s time to keep finding new places for it to shine.

Learning how to face difficult emotions as a natural part of life: that’s a great lesson to teach kids, just as much as how to solve their first whodunit.

A bluntly effective instrument of cinematic torture, the Tampa Bay-shot The School Duel is here to embed you in the bullets, shrapnel, and consequences of random violence.

Maybe it’s something about seeing Sally Field bond with an octopus, or watching a true inter-generational friendship blossom on screen, or maybe it’s just something more obvious: taking the best parts of a sweet story, and paring it down to its best bits. Or, well, best arms? Tentacles? Whatever can reach out and touch you, just as this film will.

“Hit Me Hard and Soft” is largely shot like a typical concert movie except for the fact that it’s in 3D — but the 3D works exceptionally well to place you onstage with Eilish, who works without backup dancers and with an intimately scaled band (and, sorry, spoiler alert, an eventual cameo from brother and collaborator Finneas). She wants her concertgoers, her fans, to feel like “it’s me and them,” and this film does effectively capture that from the comfort of a heated AMC seat and in Dolby sound. And it captures Eilish in all her romantic grandeur.

For gay viewers more aligned to these experiences, for those of us familiar with these “dickheads that fucked us over” firsthand, Departures is a cult classic in the making. And that’s true whether you’ve been fucked over by others or fucked over by yourself in a similar fashion to Benji’s own self-hatred.

Though “Lorne” is prone to some overly relaxed pacing, the film is held tight enough by the grip that Michaels has maintained over his little fiefdom for more than half a century.

There’s no outright preaching, no plea to condemn or sympathize either way. What unfolds is far more complex, morally speaking, even if the bones of the narrative and how it’s shot are deliberately pared down.

A singular, hypnotic, and formally unbound psychodrama that’s staged between a Lady Gaga-like diva (Anne Hathaway) and the only person who might be able to quiet her demons (Michaela Coel), this talky chamberpiece of a film is almost entirely confined to an unheated barn somewhere outside of London, and yet it grows to feel as vast as the synaptic gap that stretches between literalness and metaphor. A wound and its memory. A pop song and the person who wrote it.

Indie films about indie filmmaking are a tired trope for a reason, but it brings me pleasure to say that The Travel Companion is one of the better ones in recent years.

Huo’s project is to portray these social relations and material disparities with crispness, therefore the image is sharp, and though expansive, also concise.

It works if you are really paying attention to the pageturner storytelling and have the spatial intelligence to proactively connect plants to payoffs.

Here is a smart, fun, and deeply unsettling post-modern slasher that know it can’t manufacture anything scarier than what people scroll past on their phones every day, and leverages that awareness into a multiplex-ready meditation on the terror of living in a world where even the worst atrocities have been flattened into digital wallpaper.

Mascaro’s wry and witty new film will remind savvy audiences of bleak apocalyptic films about humanity’s potential loss of feeling against technologies that crush them.

If The Drama is effectively a one-gag movie, there’s no denying that its gag is a good one, or that Borgli — a hyper-online shit-stirrer whose salable provocations, combined with his sometimes not so salable ones, continue to position him as an A24-friendly Lars von Trier — milks it for all that it’s worth. Possibly more.

Ropp’s darkly funny and ultimately sweet-natured comedy is a promising start for the actor-turned-director. With a little more scope, his next film will be even better.

The more it generates spectacle, the more you notice how the screenplay fails to keep in step.

Grabinski’s writing style is goofy and (obviously) reference-heavy, and the jokes spray indiscriminately like so many bullets from an automatic weapon. The constant wisecracks get tiresome after a while, but not before introducing some clever gags and quotable quips.

McCarthy loses focus after this symphony of tightly controlled terror midway through the second act, adding a little too much backstory and a few too many scenes to the film’s denouement. Still, when Hokum works, it really works.

It is a vital reminder that, no matter where you live, the past and present must always be in conversation if we ever want to see a brighter future.

Boots Riley deserves applause for his brazen vision. . . He loses grip on the material overall, but as far as genre movies that actually turn out to be political missives go, there are worse entertainments. And with Keke Palmer at the front, you’re always in sure hands.

That someone as successful as Jacobs is so beset by a lack of confidence is a compelling conceit — it also speaks to Coppola’s own interest in the subject, admirable indeed — but in Marc by Sofia, we really believe him. He really is just that worried, always that worried.

It’s smaller, quieter, and it feels true. Not soapy, not silly, not like something ripped out of an airport book buy. That’s the first step.

It’s an engaging if well-trodden setup, enhanced by the director’s slick but artful aesthetics.

An ultra-immersive portrait of grief, acceptance, and the role that hope can play in delaying them both.

O’Connor’s film is worthy of its subject matter, faultlessly curated and illuminating in the instrumentation of its material.

To write more about the pleasures and pains of Project Hail Mary would be (yes, over 1,300 words in) a disservice to what’s most entertaining and satisfying about the film: watching it unfold, enjoying the process, accepting the mission, asking the big questions. That’s about as much as you can ask from any blockbuster film these days.

You might wish Heel were a bit funnier, a bit scarier, a bit more twisted, but it’s still pungently creepy in the right ways and anchored by a suite of top-tier actors capable of wringing empathy out of the darkest Freudian corners of a fucked-up family.

Our Hero, Balthazar isn’t cold by any means, but the result comes off as more ethnographic in tone than the in-your-face bravado of the approach would suggest.

The dimming prestige of the brand perhaps allowed Hoppers the freedom to be something much more modest, and also way more fun and satisfying — a hilarious, joke-a-second comedy that has its moments of sweetness and emotional resonance, but isn’t looking to force tears out of you.

The film’s quietly disturbing power lies in how Franco packages his U.S.-Mexico border metaphor — with rich philanthropist Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) and her young ballerina lover Fernando (Isaac Hernández, in a striking newcomer performance) standing in for each — into an addictive and destructive love story as sharply wrought as the movie’s grander political concerns.

Schleinzer constructs a canny bait-and-switch: The film’s visual language, agrarian setting, and seeming emotional distance at the outset promise a harshly unfeeling European arthouse exercise. Until it isn’t. Until Hüller annihilates your heart.

Çatak fashions a film that’s both a gripping marital drama and a rallying cry against artist censorship.

Internationally savvy gay film fans with a taste for the kinky and sad will want to check out this understated but occasionally quite graphic and sexy new work.

While Crime 101 runs like a remodeled version of earlier, better heist movies from the ’90s or early 2000s (which again are almost always coming from Michael Mann) but with lesser parts, there’s enough gas in the tank and competence at the wheel to merit a spin. At least until Heat 2.

Clocking in at over two hours, there’s no lack of dazzling design and insane ideas to keep every minute of Fennell’s feature thrilling to watch. As with all of Fennell’s films, boredom is never on offer. And yet, that doesn’t entirely dissipate the feeling that something is still missing here.

Exit 8 is a cinematic captcha, tasking us with finding the difference between one image and the next to prove our humanity.

A schematic but sensitive prison drama about a maximum-security lifer who begins to care for an older inmate suffering from early-onset dementia, Petra Volpe’s Frank & Louis soberly interrogates what it really means to “serve time.”

The most striking moments that Ataei and Keshavarz create here are the ones in which their characters are forced to negotiate between self-expression and self-preservation rather than choose between them.

The director shoots the place with a Haneke-like remove that makes every member, caddie, and Chinese tourist feel like they’re conspiring to bury an awful secret of some kind.

Timeliness is a poor metric for evaluating nonfiction, and in most respects “American Pachuco” is a boilerplate “American Masters”-style overview of an artist’s life. But in a moment of revanchist white supremacy, Valdez’s lifelong thesis . . . and his undiminished assertion that Chicano art is as American as it gets is difficult not to find rousing and as defiant as it was in the 1960s.

Documentaries should inherently spark questions and debate, but Nuisance Bear too often throws out a buzzword or heady topic and abandons it.

Gibney unspools an ambitious, three-pronged timeline that mixes and mingles throughout the documentary, including the immediate aftermath of the attack, Rushdie’s youth and early years of writing, and what happened in 1988 after the publication of his “Satanic Verses.”

If Lady is more successful as a series of interconnected vignettes, than as one fluid narrative, it has a moving ending up its sleeve. After presenting a morass of rich themes, Nwosu teases out a small, surprising finale that transcends the blinkered concerns driving her protagonist.

This is a solid biography portrait with enough diaristic candor to compel a relisten to her greatest hits, in life and music.

But aside from calling for some bland common sense regulations that should be uncontroversial to any sane person, Roher doesn’t attempt to make anyone agree with him. After all of the information is presented, the film is much more interested in exploring the human story of how each of us has to wrap our own mind around an impossibly large topic.

It’s when the film mostly gets out of its own way and lets the men’s experiences do the work that Soul Patrol really shines.