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.

Charli’s version of herself, though, is a fascinating creation — self-deprecating, yes, and laughing at herself, but with the clinical distance of a telescope lasered onto a forming star. See this movie with a crowd of Charli’s friends and collaborators, and you’ll too be in on the joke.

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.

A nasty, claustrophobic display of creative ineptitude — one that’s packed with as many incomplete ideas as it is tired genre cliches — Return to Silent Hill squanders the rare opportunity to translate one of PlayStation’s most psychologically sophisticated worlds into valuable box office fuel.

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.

Amid all the barbarity for barbarity’s sake, Jonsson carries the film with a deep well of unspoken regret.

The work of everyone involved — from the sleepy performances to the crew doing an okay but never exemplary job — suggests a first draft, a sense of wanting to get the thing out and move on. At every minute of “Mercy,” you can practically hear the filmmakers saying: “Eh, it’s January. Good enough."

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.

Caught somewhere between “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “The Wire,” this dark genre hybrid has a lot of flaws, but none of them are fatal.

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.

It is surely a failure, but it has twice the soul and passion of many technically successful pictures from lesser artists. If only that were enough.

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.

Sure, the jump-scares are wild; the beatings are bananas; and at a certain point, you have to laugh. But Ben deserved better than a cage so primitive and a better owner might’ve really let him run free.

For their part, the Garrity family is asked to carry more weight with less substance, and their non-characters struggle to support the emotional burden of an intimate life-or-death journey, the destination of which is a lot sillier than it was the last time around.

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

If the emotions in Goodbye June are as transparently manufactured as the fake snow that falls outside of the hospital windows, they’re all bundled up in a warm blanket of truth — the truth of how loss has a gravity that can bring a family closer together if they let it.

Anaconda constricts its premise a little tighter as it moves along (if only because the absurdity ratchets up in a way that forces the film to adopt a clearer sense of itself), and there are some undeniably amusing bits of stupidity along the way.

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.

Alas, it’s not veracity that rules in stories like The Housemaid, but the often mealy delights of Feig’s latest film are routinely thrown into sharp relief by Seyfried’s crisp performance. Motivations, emotions, and machinations might be the building blocks of this sort of housebound thriller, but a genuinely good performance? That’s what can really wipe the floor.

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.

The trouble here has less to do with verisimilitude than engagement; this story about the power and pratfalls of emotional projection simply doesn’t inspire enough feeling for us to see much of anything on either of its two blank screens.

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.

The sensory appeal of the technical limitations only lasts for so long. And as a feature, “Dry Leaf” does feel oh so long once there soon proves to be little variety to the bag of visual tricks over three hours.

Scarlet amounts to a frustrating waste of animating and directorial skill for the price of an excessively ordinary story.

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.

Of course, I’m fully aware that The Family Plan 2 wasn’t made for the critics. Not because it’s bad (which it is), but rather because it was only intended to be watched by people who don’t care if it’s good. This movie often feels like it was made by them too, which should be comforting to anyone who considers themselves a fan of the franchise.

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 only people for whom this situation isn’t terrifying are us, the audience, who feel nothing but the purgatorial torpor of sitting through a movie that’s too afraid of its own concept to do anything truly provocative with it.

Lacking in chemistry, clarity, and conviction, Neon’s latest rendezvous with Perkins hits like a crumbling marriage that would serve everyone involved by ending as soon as possible.

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.

If You See Something remains urgent in spite of its flaws.

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.

Perhaps a better film would have prioritized more of the personal over the universal and formulaic, but “Belén” seems more interested in being a rallying cry than a character study. On that count, it will almost certainly succeed, and audiences around the world might soon be chanting “I am Belén” as loudly as Argentine women did in 2017.

While the moral comes through loud and clear, that’s largely because the film’s bland depiction of slumberland isn’t a fraction as well-realized — or even as fun! — as its portrayal of the middle-class disillusionment that sends its young heroes scrambling into their subconscious’ every night.

This is a deeply emotional film in high concept clothing, coded to resonate with those of us well-versed in the instinct to betray ourselves in order to be accepted.

Selena y Los Dinos is no mere tribute, it is a vibrant argument for Selena’s humanity, as well as her status as a legend.

This is a filmmaker capable of glimpsing both an instant — and the eternal.

The genius of the franchise-reviving “Prey” and last summer’s utterly awesome “Killer of Killers” is that they both cast the Yautja as a foil first and an antagonist second. Now, the super fun and fantastically spirited “Predator: Badlands” takes that approach to its logical conclusion by making one of these creatures the hero of a story in which he gets deprogrammed of his culture’s “The Most Dangerous Game”-inspired approach to other species.

The film’s honesty, whether loquacious or laconic, sears even more in the absence of a score. Its observational ethos is remarkable given that it is quasi-autobiographical.

Bienvenu comes up with a stirring ending, one so emotional it almost paves over the bumps in the narrative road that got us there.

Powell is an exceptionally promising filmmaker, but by the time he arranges all of his ducks in a row for the finale, he’s lost track as to whether Lucas is continuing the cycle of vengeance that has poisoned so much of his family, or if he’s breaking it.

This is a film that should make us all more sensitive, more attuned, more questioning of our biases. The fact that it’s such a riveting experience makes it all the more powerful in that regard.

Blue Film leaves you feeling a little bit ill, and very uneasy about how you’re supposed to feel. But when most films either wouldn’t dare go here at all, or would tell you how to feel about the material, that’s rare and welcome.

Complicated enough to lose a casual viewer but never so convoluted that André and co. are sublimated into the system around them (which would have been fatal for a film so attuned to the relationship between personal interest and collective perception), Bonitzer’s plot spins forward at the speed of an auctioneer’s mouth until raw suspense becomes appropriately inextricable from meaningless gibberish.

Occasionally, Love + War does suffer from a sense of only skimming the surface of Addario’s life and complexity. . . But on its whole, it’s a smart, compelling documentary, one that sticks out by making its lead refreshingly, vulnerably human.

Really, there are two documentaries here, each made with a different approach. And while they are both searing fusions of the personal with the political, the attempt to meld them together doesn’t wholly work, undercutting the momentum of both. However, Coexistence, My Ass!, remains a compelling front row seat to a country on the brink of implosion.

Pálmason’s overall sincerity has its dividends, even for what it lacks in candidness: the poignant closing shot distills that this is his vision on this eternal topic, open to the risk that its alternating visual modes won’t harmonize.

Its brevity allows it to maintain that delicate balance between joy and grief — discovery and heartache — from start to finish, and to use the sweet cocoon of childhood as a way of crystallizing how that dynamic grows with us as we get older.

Taut and well-acted as this queasy little thriller can be, its unflinching tale of corporate authoritarianism is much too streamlined to reflect the emotional truth of watching totalitarianism in motion. The result is a hollow synecdoche of today’s America that seems timely and ridiculous in equal measure.

Rather than mock their small-time dealings or direct them to chase brighter lights, “Song Sung Blue” treats Mike and Claire’s pursuit of tribute band glory as a sufficient driving force for a meaningful life. This isn’t a story about how you’re never too old to chase your wildest dreams and play in the big leagues; it’s about how there shouldn’t be any shame in realizing that you are.

The arc of time is long, but it bends toward justice, The Eyes of Ghana argues, and movies can help bend it a little further.

It’s one of the best films in the recent crop of anime TV expansions, and its bittersweet teen love story is certainly potent enough to make you cry.

Life and art will always be more tightly entwined for Stiller than he knows how to untangle; that he’s at least learned to become aware of that is perhaps as touching and honest a tribute as he ever could have paid to his parents’ legacy.

Tucked into the melodrama of Regretting You, there is a sweet story about a mother and daughter trying to figure things out, but the reliance on their outside romances often detracts from it. That’s a shame.

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is easily at its best whenever it digs into the art of repression — repressed feelings, repressed desires, repressed pain.

Emotionally honest and algebraically stylish, Maio Mackay is a filmmaker the entire industry should watch in the coming years. But her latest purple-hued feature demands the attention of hot, tattoo-having, “Buffy”-loving, “Charmed”-binging, queer horror fans right now.

Even the most formulaic scenes in the film bop with the zest of history being lived first-hand, as if the script were happily oblivious to its own clichés, and while the filmmaking itself falls well short of creating the chaos that it aspires to celebrate, Fluk at least taps into the fun of telling us about it.

The film’s anti-patriarchal thesis is a worthy one that feels oddly undeveloped given that it’s the entire point, the actors here merely reading lines from a script as pat as a canned solicitation to swipe right.

See Fuck My Son! not because it’s good, but rather because it refuses to pretend that it isn’t bad. If only that argument were enough to convince me that it shouldn’t have been better.

The director is so eager to make a spectacle out of this scenario that Good News begins to feel as self-insistent as its characters.

Mr. K succeeds as both an homage to Kafka’s fascination with the absurdity of life, and especially with the socio-bureaucratic systems we humans have wrought upon ourselves, and as a sumptuous and surreal feast for the eyes. It poses many questions, leaving them for the audience to ponder for themselves after the screen fades to black.

Though often lethargic and listless, Is This Thing On? does stir up a vivid portrait of the New York City underground comedy milieu, even when New York City as a character feels more like the afterthought it isn’t supposed to be.

It might seem a bit showy and cheesy in its final moments, but that kind of over-the-top shock is missing from most of the rest of the film. It’s a thriller missing the thrills, and we’ll take them where we can get them.

While five-plus hours of mostly hanging out in strangers’ apartments might seem like an increasingly tedious invitation, Loktev ends up justifying the running time as her “undesirable friends” soon become ours as well. Smartly structured so that different “foreign agents” take centerstage from episode to episode, we’re forever kept on our toes (right through to a finale that hints at a part two, currently in the works).

[Martel] makes the case that the Chuschas put up a hard-won, long-won, impossible battle that already began centuries before, coming at the material with a visceral filmmaking point of view that never overshadows the material.

Homebound is a resounding triumph.

Ultimately, The French Italian has far more to say about navigating the mundanities of a stable and pleasant relationship in your thirties than about theatre, revenge, or noisy neighbors.

Anyone who lives, breathes, and bleeds “Rocky Horror” will find comfort in “Strange Journey” and its celebration of the musical’s enduring legacy. Anybody else won’t find much to grab onto.

Leto’s performance works because he’s so utterly believable as a soulless ghoul that it’s easy to buy into the happy-to-be-here warmth of his emergent humanity.

Most of the shorts here try to use holiday goofiness as a gateway to serious terror, but unsurprisingly struggle to make it across that hell-mouth intact; meanwhile, the sole episode that keeps a straight face and taps into some of the real fears that accompany trick-or-treating manages to become the franchise’s most genuinely upsetting short in years.

Some movies suffer because of bad timing. Shell wouldn’t be a very good movie under any circumstances, but it fares especially poorly against Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a better and more outrageous film that deals in very similar subject matter.

Every scene is relaxedly suffused with the tension between the limits of perspective and the empathy of storytelling, until the act of seeing becomes as problematized as the refusal to look, and the boundaries between reality and fiction grow as blurred as those between the various genres that Gavagai swirls into an unclassifiable sludge.

The understated performances and coolly detached, shivery hypnotic vibes of this film won’t be for anyone looking for a story, but The Ice Tower casts a creepy spell that lingers and even deepens in the mind long after it’s over. As only the best spells do.

Fundamentally, Shenk and Cohen are trying to argue for a particular solution here, and it might be promising indeed, but it’s also presented as a little too much of a silver-bullet for the issues they’ve identified.

Obsession should keep everyone awake long after they get home from seeing it.

While this isn’t quite the stuff of vintage Black, it’s close enough that I wouldn’t mind seeing him crank another one out every two years for the next decade.

This is a dense, unforgiving movie in the classic sense, an adults-only drama that doesn’t placate despite its stylistic overreaches. It’s disappointing that in its final moments, the movie has come so far off its own hinges, so deconstructed its own rivets, that it can’t put them back together again. But everything that’s come before is so rich that you’re ready to forgive it.