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.

Wicker threatens to feel largely like a logline writ into something grander (i.e., a short story with a wild idea stretched into a feature), but these actors are irresistibly weird and wonderful, as only they could be.

It’s so earnest, so vulnerable in its portrait of the disappointments and anxieties of young adulthood, that one tends to forgive its tweer flights of fancy.

The honesty with which Bamford approaches all of this (and, yes, surely you must be sick of reading the word “honesty,” but there is simply no better term for who Bamford is and how she lives) is, as her fellow comedians have told us, real and refreshing and actually unique.

Ultimately The Only Living Pickpocket in New York shows us that old school and new school aren’t opposites. Like the city’s many seeming contradictions, they are meant to coexist.

Leviticus is not a perfect horror film . . . But the film’s moody atmosphere — including a soundtrack full of clanks and bangs — makes it an enjoyably disquieting ride.

Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! offers an effervescent spirit so often missing in this milieu, with a lovely performance from Kikuchi at its center.

“The Oldest Person in the World” remains an affecting watch — and potentially the first installment of a worthwhile series — because of how vulnerably Green interrogates why he cares so much about the subject at hand.

The nuance and specificity that makes the film so interesting is also why it requires a decent knowledge base to appreciate — this is about as far from an introduction to the Harlem Renaissance as you’ll find.

Despite an occasional tendency to speed through its most compelling passages and flatten their mottled texture under the weight of Simon Russell’s emotionally instructive score, “One in a Million” is still a raw and absorbing epic about “what comes after” — one that naturally unfolds with all the joy, anguish, and unresolvable inner conflict of life itself.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is best understood as a basket of jokes and non sequiturs that simply need some kind of framework to keep things semi-coherent. That’s a compliment, of course, as these are very, very funny jokes.

The success of Extra Geography rides largely on Clear and Duggan who make a wonderful odd couple pair.

Simply put, Buddy is everything you could want from a midnight movie. It gets harder and harder to find something that feels fresh enough to be truly shocking and executed competently enough to transcend its gimmicks, and we should all celebrate when we find one.

It’s a flashpoint depiction of American life filtered through a specificity that feels rare, romantic, and essential right now.

Execution is more of the issue, as the film’s 112-minute running time feels both packed to the gills and unable to fully tackle everything James’ script throws at the wall. Yet a strong visual sense and excellent performances, especially from Midori Francis, are tough to beat.

Union County doesn’t completely bypass addiction-drama clichés. But its detailed, humanistic approach successfully creates a realistic world that supports its muted storytelling

If you’re hooked, which I wasn’t, or haunted by it, which I was, that will likely have less to do with an acute emotional connection to these characters than with the overflowing rewards of watching someone rediscover the sound of their own voice, and hear a way forward into the future in its echoes.

Wickedly lovable with the potential to be timeless, “Send Help” is controlled delirium microwaved on high heat.

De Araújo’s masterful ability to interrogate tension on every level keeps the film clipping along, each turn both a surprise and an inevitability.

A truly adult comedy with plenty to say and even more laughs to share.

A Gregg Araki movie will never be boring, and this one is a good time even when it’s tripping over itself to complicate its story and disguise the fact that it’s trying to serve as a teachable moment.

Between meaning and mayhem. This meandering but laser-focused essay film is, like the best episodes of Wilson’s show, sustained by parallel dramatic questions that inevitably answer each other by the end.

Carousel feels ripped from the fabric of a million lives. Don’t let the seemingly small nature of the film fool you; there is career-best work here, especially from Pine, who was always made for a romantic drama. This one was worth the wait.

If King Hamlet has any legacy as a film, it will likely be as a comfort watch for Isaac’s superfans and Shakespeare devotees. It won’t be joining the canon of great nonfiction cinema, but I have no doubt that many viewers will find that watching a shirtless Oscar Isaac play with an adorable baby while quoting Shakespeare is a great use of 89 minutes.

In Unidentified, women are good, women are bad, and women are everything in between. In a society where a woman’s death can easily go unnoticed, this film makes sure the audience pays attention.

But the most important reason why The Rip is a slight cut above the average streaming fare is the lived-in history that Affleck and Damon bring to their characters’ dynamic.

Aramayo’s sensitive portrayal of the man and Jones’ unflinching dedication to showing some of Davidson’s most painful moments, the ones that pushed him into action, add up to an insightful biopic that chronicles a very worthy subject.

Even if it occasionally makes you crave more narrative heft or elaboration about the facilities it discusses, the film is a vital work of public service that demonstrates why we can’t cure these social ills by simply throwing more money at them.

A strange, hysterical, and thrillingly audacious continuation of a saga about the nature of faith in a godless world, “The Bone Temple” might appear to be a more traditional genre offering than its immediate predecessor, but don’t be fooled by the fact that it wasn’t shot on an iPhone: This is very much the part two that 2025’s smartest and most humane studio horror movie deserves.

For a movie about stinking, bloated corpses, on the whole, this one is surprisingly fresh.

Director Derek Drymon does better than you’d expect with Paramount’s spooky new feature film — expanding the swash-buckling legend of the Flying Dutchman (Mark Hamill) into a funny, vibrant hellscape sure to lure in kids and millennials alike.

I know that Cameron has committed himself to another two sequels, and now I know why he’s starting to hedge about whether or not he wants to direct them himself; even the most orgiastic moments in “Fire and Ash” left me feeling like he’s ready to come back down to Earth.

The latest Silent Night, Deadly Night is an audacious 2025 season capper for Cineverse and a solid achievement for Nelson, one that promises the director will give us more genre worth unwrapping down the line.

Few leave unscathed as the handheld camera whip-pans and fast-zooms between cringe-comedy and genuine pathos and back again — especially once the hapless prof paves his own road to hell with his good intentions.

Most of all, it’s about the depressing reality that some of us are capable of holding both of those extreme views about a person without noticing any level of contradiction. There might be no fixing such a fundamental flaw in the human condition, but “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo” does an admirable enough job of dramatizing it.

Watching Ella McCay can sometimes feel like time travel, particularly for those vested in bygone eras of American filmmaking, but if you’re capable of tuning into its wavelength, an old but worthwhile spirit can be found.

Overall, the big swings this wending odyssey takes in merging genres and weighty ideas do pay off — it’s a gargantuan, continent-crossing feat.

Although most of Endless Cookie is cheerfully comedic, it also very much lives up to the “political” descriptor Seth aimed for in the opening.

What could have been a generic sexual awakening circumvents tradition and expectation with surprise developments and increasingly sensual turns. Even when the film toys with cliche, as it does with multiple time-lapse montages of flowers in bloom, it’s still in keeping with Lucija’s viewpoint, to which Djukić becomes so perfectly attuned.

Fackham Hall succeeds because it effectively skewers its target genre, and its top-tier actors know how to deliver a joke to its furthest possible endpoint.

The White House Effect largely steers clear of overly simplistic narratives about politicians exclusively making decisions to serve whatever special interests whose “pockets” they happen to be in. But it doesn’t shy away from the role that the oil industry played in turning a party that initially seemed interested in fighting climate change into one that has spent nearly half a century adamantly denying it.

The result is a roman candle of a movie that feels like it was shot out of a cannon, despite being burdened with the gravity of an implausible dream; a totemic Jewish-American odyssey about where such dreams come from, where they might lead to, and where they’re liable to come apart at the seams along the way.

Worth the wait? Yes, and we can’t wait for the next one to take wing (wink).

If earlier segments of Middletown suggest that we’re building to something revelatory, the latter half feels a bit like a train that chugs on aimlessly after passing its destination. It’s a pleasant ride. It just lacks a little edge.

Through majestic overhead shots of Shahverdi (and her young girl gang) speeding through the mountain-cradled landscape, alternated with intimate closeups (Shahverdi’s expressive face sometimes speaks louder than her words), we’re brought closer to a world both foreign and undoubtedly familiar.

It’s not clear where else the series has to go — both in terms of the character’s journey and the fact that Finland only had so many geopolitical foes in the 1940s — but if the story ends here, our journey with Aatami will have been a satisfying one.

In a crumbling empire where common sense has been eroded by ideology, and the political will to solve a problem can’t hope to compete with the ghoulish impulse to profit from it, creating a new business sector might just be the only kind of healing that the richest country on Earth can afford.

Much like Wicked, Wicked: For Good works its way up to a massive duet between the pair, so emotionally resonant than even the most wicked of audience members will still likely shed a tear (the song is, of course, “For Good”). It’s an unmitigated high note, but it’s a lonely one indeed. Is it alone worth the wait? Maybe, why couldn’t the entire film feel that way?

Come See Me in the Good Light co-mingles the kaleidoscopic themes of genderqueer poetry with the grueling daily management of a deadly illness — and does the vulnerability of its well-chosen subjects remarkable cinematic justice. Through that, White creates a sense of existential wonder and a film bursting with hope for all kinds.

The central narrative, of the emotional dance between these two men over decades, holds even as the running time, while never boring you, often feels exaggerated for the sake of epicness rather than wholly necessary to this telling.

Angus Wall’s super watchable Being Eddie is among the more convincing films of its kind, because instead — or by way — of trying to show us who the real Eddie Murphy is, it commits itself to arguing that Murphy has always known.

Its ending might cop out of the novel’s most ghoulishly prescient detail, but that isn’t enough to completely neuter the rare Hollywood product that dares to stoke our anger rather than mollify it — that reminds us that our rage is a valuable resource worth a lot more than money, and one that we can’t afford to waste on each other.

The crime-fighting? That’s nice, but the real fun is in the bonding, most of it at the hand of oddly wholesome sequences in which they all try to one-up each other’s magical skills.