Like “This Is Not a Film” before it, Zodiac Killer Project sees its director leveraging their misfortune into an impish and hyper-resourceful attack on the oppressive strictures of modern storytelling (in this case the rigid conventions of the true-crime genre rather than the mandates of a censorious regime), one that allows Shackleton to achieve a measure of freedom through the act of detailing his own cage.

Magic Mike casts a seriously entertaining spell.

It’s biopic syndrome, this impulse to condense events to hit the high notes, to provide fans with recognizable stories, to essentially act as a greatest hits album, and it sinks the second half of an otherwise compelling, funny and extremely entertaining film with a beat all its own.

Although wobbly in parts like so many cinematic anthologies, Garrone's alternately silly and entrancing adaptation of Giambattista Basile's Neapolitan stories provides a welcome gothic antidote to more stately treatments of similar material.

A throwback character study that invokes the kind of mid-budget hits that kept the lights on at Warner Bros. for 50 years, Juror #2 both enriches our understanding of the Hollywood icon who made it and stands on its own as one of the best studio films released in 2024.

Above all else, however, Mortensen gives Captain Fantastic its underlying credibility.

The whole movie is suspended in a pleasant and intimate space between order and chaos, love and abandonment, leaving the nest and building a new one. Every time Shithouse borrows from something else, it only seems to become more itself.

While occasionally veering into melodrama, Brady’s feature debut is a powerful slice of kitchen-sink gloom, and a blazing portrait of women on fire, unsure of where to go in the wake of rippling tragedy.

As an experiment in filmmaking trickery, All the Money in the World is an extraordinary viewing experience; without that, it’s a compulsively watchable rumination on the worst of the one percent.

At its core, A Screaming Man emphasizes the strength of family bonds. It's a sad, moving portrait that has nothing to do with its chaotic setting.

The first-time filmmaker may be attempting to fit too many ideas into one sleek package, but that doesn’t mitigate the truth of "Nanny": All of it haunts.

That it manages to end a note that’s both deeply sad and sardonic only further makes its case as one of the finest forgotten films of its time, and one of the best, period.

It’s easy to imagine how a version of this film might have descended into vaguely connected sketches (and still would have been one of the funniest pure comedies in forever despite its shapelessness), but there’s a clear and rewarding intentionality to DeYoung’s plotting, and it pays off with a finale that — better than almost any scene before it — perfectly threads the needle between all of the movie’s competing energies.

It’s Alive presents a dialectic of horror in which monstrous excess is first repudiated and rejected, then returns in the form of self-loathing and social stigmatization, and is finally painfully accepted as an essential part of ourselves.

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

Colaizzo’s script weaves in enough detail to explain some of Brittany’s demons, but Bell sells the tough stuff too, doing more with a cautious look in the mirror and a slow smile than other performers can do with an Oscar-ready speech.

Emerald Fennell’s raucous debut, Promising Young Woman, twists its buzzword-laden, spoiler-free synopsis — it’s a #MeToo rape revenge thriller with bite! — into something fresh and totally wild.

If you've never heard of LCD Soundsystem or cared much for the group's work, Shut Up and Play the Hits still manages to explore the prospects of fame and contemporary rock music's lasting relevance.

Best Summer Ever isn’t the best movie ever, but what it does is continue to show that disability can be fun, unique, and enticing without being dour. It’s the best at what it’s doing and you’ll want to see more.

The resulting documentary is a nuanced, humane, and more naturally uplifting portrait of three young people trying to keep pace with their dreams in a relay race that’s never offered them the inside lane.

It’s too bad that the movie isn’t as vibrant, funny, and entertaining as the community it wishes to represent — but it’s a start.

The film is an agreeable document of cultural processing that should especially appeal to the niche crowd at its center — it's more or less mandatory viewing for L.A. foodies.

Its creators are so clearly on the same insane wavelength, nimbly blending camp and social satire and actual terror, that “M3GAN” is poised to crack the murder-doll pantheon and stay there forever. Oscars!

It’s always fun to sit through a clip reel when the talent quotient is this high, but Belushi doesn’t sugarcoat the sadness at the core of the actor’s legacy.

Even as the movie lingers on the question of whether one woman has more talent than the other, Always Shine is an effective actor’s showcase for both of them.

I Love You Forever unfolds like a documentary to those who have lived a similar experience — and a stalker horror movie to others.

King Jack, while unabashedly a coming-of-age story, is even better as a portrait of masculinity in crisis, of how its passed down from one generation to the next, and how that process might best be interrupted.

This isn’t just another great Bong Joon Ho movie about how much he hates capitalism (though it definitely is that too), it’s the first Bong Joon Ho movie about how much he loves people.

The film is smartly assembled, making the most of a limited indie budget and building a compelling world to boot.

Rather than smothering the material in bad vibes, the filmmaker uses them to gradually reveal a fascinating world in which anger and resentment becomes the only weapon any of these people know how to wield.

For all of its clumsiness and rookie missteps (which continue through the film’s gut-punch of a coda), His House is an urgent and spine-tingling ghost story about what it means to begin anew in a home that may not want you to live in it.

Director Barr’s intimate filmmaking finds the space to cover a multitude of moments in Sophie’s life that add up to something profound, from the mundane sequences that see her fully engaging with her grief to brief moments of respite.

Princess Cyd is a triumphant little film — little in the detailed moments it creates, not the content of its character. Anchored by complicated, smart, funny women, Princess Cyd is a rare delight of a film and a model for others to follow.

Marrying the sensitivity of “Spirited Away” to the lushness of “The Legend of Korra” and the narrative coherence of a lucid dream, Big Fish & Begonia is the very rarest of Chinese exports: An animated film that was made for adults.

Boy From Heaven wants to offer up a character study of a young Muslim man who ends up in hell and keeps going. Sadly, a deep and meaningful portrait of Adam is forgotten as the film — like the state officials it depicts — prioritizes functionality above all else.

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.

Unlike "Citizenfour," there's not a whole lot here that hasn't already been revealed through the scrutiny of Assange's iconoclastic legacy, but the filmmaker's skillful treatment of the material yields another look at major historical events on an intimate level.

Anyone who’s hacked through enough “Demon Slayer” to keep pace with “Mugen Train” can surely handle what this movie has to offer. It’s the rest of us who might want to think twice.

This story, like the people in it, wouldn’t have held together on dry land, and there’s something wonderfully indulgent about surrendering to the undercurrents that swirl beneath Alice’s friendships. But the run-and-gun approach that makes this movie possible is also what ends up shooting it in the foot, as the clock is always ticking and Soderbergh never has time to get out of the shallows.

Where this all takes Lucy and Jane might feel a bit predictable, but that doesn’t deter from the warmth and wit that comes from the story that gets them there, a sex comedy with major heart, a friendship drama with plenty of spice, and a lovely new calling card for both Notaro and Allynne.

All this cutting from one perfectly framed shot to the next, never remaining inside a scene long enough so that the hopes and dreams of a flesh-and-blood being might emerge, felt rather like treading in a vacuum; and left this viewer longing to know more about these resilient gauchos.

7 Days is a film about a lot of things — matchmaking, familial expectations, being your best self, opening your heart — but it’s also about a strange, horrible time in all of our lives and how it changed us. In the minimum of time, Sethi and his cast give that a truly honest go.

“The Fast and the Furious” with wheelbarrows, Paraguayan action-thriller-romance hybrid 7 Boxes is a rollicking good time at the movies that offers breathtaking action and suspense, humor and appealing characters all in one visually flashy package.

Not since Klaus Kinski has Herzog aimed his camera at such an uncontrollable subject, and that includes the erupting peaks of “Into the Volcano” and the radioactive crocodiles in “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

There’s certainly enough here to provoke meaningful questions that transcend the boundaries of the frame, and Nine Days hits a commendable note about the value of embracing life’s unpredictable turns. But no matter its celestial implications, the movie can’t shake the impression of a brilliant concept that never takes flight.

Exhibition infuses its cerebral exposition with a strong dose of humanity.

This is an important and compulsively watchable portrait made by someone who understands the brute power of broadcast media and the people who make it for all the world to see, but it can only afford Mike Wallace with a little moment of truth, and the satisfaction of playing his part in the greater continuum of things.

For a movie about the sky, “Weathering with You” is ironically one of Shinkai’s most grounded films — immediately more warm and engaging than “Your Name,” if not at all capable of delivering the same emotional payoff.

Stars Alexander Skarsgärd and Mia Goth deliver terrifically unhinged performances as a failing novelist and a mysterious tour guide, and Cronenberg has absolutely no shortage of original ideas, but the whole thing feels bloodless, cold and clammy as a speculum.

Aided by a dynamite performance from newcomer Laura Galán, Piggy uses the tension of a slasher thriller to weave a painfully relatable tale of adolescent angst gone terribly awry. As body shame and self-loathing morph into a disturbing complicity with violence, Piggy pushes the torments of youth to their naturally wicked ends.

Fingscheidt’s nonlinear approach allows the film to ride the tidal rhythms of addiction, while Ronan’s committed performance churns those ebbs and flows into a widescreen journey that earns its epic backdrop.

Beneath the pixelated gags, the stakes are relatively familiar. However, much of the humor in Wreck-It Ralph riffs on the nostalgia associated with real games.

The result is relentless and involving even when it stumbles. Jolie may not be a full-fledged auteur yet, but she unquestionably possesses a singular aesthetic that courses through her work and exists completely apart from her high-profile acting career.

Power achieves a profoundly unsettling sweep by prioritizing breadth over depth, and Ford’s doc is able to cover a ton of ground as it hopscotches between chapter titles like “PROPERTY” and “STATUS QUO” in order to argue that policing has always served as an instrument to maintain class order.

Unlike the polished universe of Pixar's "Brave" or countless other recent CGI efforts, ParaNorman maintains a delicate, handcrafted look that underscores its ideas.

The filmmaker sticks close to the theatrical roots of the material, sometimes stumbling on wordy, overzealous monologues that might land better on the stage. But the cast goes to great lengths to sell the premise.

Christmas in Miller’s Point is just happy to be an immaculately conceived vibe.

Knappenberger has delivered a film brimming with outrage, whose zeal becomes persuasive once Swartz takes on his activist mantle.

The movie is so cautious about avoiding disaster movie tropes that you can practically sense the resistance to arriving at the tragic finale. The result is a tasteful, well-acted bore, but so out of sync with traditional studio filmmaking it deserves some kudos anyway.

Fireball splinters into so many scattered pieces as it hurtles into our atmosphere that it almost seems as if the movie is trying to ignore any of the harder truths that might hold it together.

While Farrier is extremely likable — and his subject the polar opposite of that in every possible way — the documentary he’s made about Organ inadvertently complicates the matter of who is trapped with who, or if anyone is trapped at all. The finished product often feels more like watching a strained pas de deux than it does someone latching onto their prey.

The fact that Woods has already made it (and with an incarcerated mother of her own) only adds to the perfection of her casting; even without the meta elements, which underline the extent to which America’s disenfranchised look to pop culture as a pipeline to salvation, her performance is beautifully expressive and open to the world.

It may not be entirely inspiring, but Betting on Zero captures the everyone-for-themselves desperation that would make any wronged individual furious, be they jilted employee or frustrated stockholder.

The Coens get their cake and eat it, too: The lavish period details, paired with marvelous song-and-dance routines, work on their own terms while a firm self-awareness looms over every scene. It's a tricky balance indicative of directors who know exactly what they're going for: An old-fashioned homage to classic Hollywood and a send-up of the very same thing.

The Painted Bird spirals between fairy tale and history lesson as if it were trying to fly with a clipped wing. Several passages create a stomach-churning sense of inertia, but only during the very last shot does the whole thing manage to get high enough off the ground to offer a valuable perspective.

The Mad Women’s Ball capably sells the fact that Salpêtrière was a naked reflection of the institutional sexism that existed outside its walls, but Laurent’s eagerness to confront the barbarism of Charcot’s hospital tends to stifle the finer details of a story that hinges on female empowerment.

The film’s focus remains largely on the crowd — not the forces that pull and push at it, contort its shape, and determine its movement through space and history, but rather, the crowd as mere spectacle, divorced from all the things that paved its path to the Capitol.

There’s so much to see in The Color Purple that this critic made the rare choice to see the film twice before reviewing it. The experience deepens, in both good and bad ways, with a second watch. The performances are better — Barrino’s subtleties are easier to track, Brooks’ absolutely star-making turn is even more dazzling and heartbreaking — but the overstuffed story sags more often and more obviously.

Dare to peek under the scales of this wholly original and ominously enchanting nightmare, and you’ll find a simple story about the things that society forces a girl to give up if she wants to be part of our world.

Only the band's continuing popularity makes his journey stand out. Like its director-star, Mistaken For Strangers struggles admirably but can only go so far before letting the established talent win out.

While Babes begins its approach to domesticity with the same aversion to responsibility that powered “Broad City,” it ultimately settles on a more mature attitude that illustrates the way many of Glazer’s fans are growing up alongside her.

An expertly crafted noir-like depiction of Chubbuck's descent into psychological duress, Campos' grim character study makes up for an occasionally stifling icy tone with a stunning lead performance by Hall.

Dope provokes a discussion about the dichotomy between societal expectations of the race-defined self, as well as the democratic American right to be who you want to be — but it's an unfocused and tangential one, limited by the trappings of comedy and the flash of the hip-hop aesthetic.

Guadagnino wants not only to expand your consciousness as a moviegoer, but to cut you open and rearrange all the parts of you that see and feel things when you watch a film at all.

Imagine if Michael Haneke’s Funny Games were instead about a pair of lone-wolf, conservationist vigilantes trying to save the world instead of two sociopathic twinks wanting to tear it down, and you’ll have some idea of the hyper-contained, rigorously controlled torture chamber that is Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia.

Never indulging in outright scare tactics or loose improvisation, the movie primarily works like an awkward narrative that plays with perspective.

Kim's movies are generally grim, disturbing affairs, but "Pieta" leaves much to the imagination in favor of its unsettling implications.

Cicėnas and Grineviciute are both strong actors, each conveying their character insecurities and vulnerabilities with nuance, but their chemistry together isn’t quite enough to paper over the cracks in the movie’s love story

Charmatz’s nimble direction allows the action to flitter between the imagined past and the “actual” present without missing a beat, and that deftness proves key to the Pete Docter-like anthropomorphism that renders the Dark and his colleagues as working stiffs with a job to do.

Director Jeff Feuerzeig tracks Albert’s bizarre scheme in her own words, constructing a fascinating treatise on creative desire, internal grievances and fame as compelling as anything the writer herself dreamed up.

Possessor never manages to wrest control of your mind, but it’s unnervingly good at getting under your skin.

Despite its meandering plot, Bellflower presents its doom-laden vision as an astonishingly distinctive state of mind, arguing that the end of one self-made world always marks the start of a new one.

For all the great action and idiosyncratic antagonists (Erika Toda, as a brutally efficient warrior who can’t stomach violence is a particular standout) Blade of the Immortal is altogether too much.

Piponnier dominates every frame, with a mesmerizing screen presence that pushes the drama well beyond its formulaic premise and visible microbudget constraints.

With its everyday setting and social interactions mixed with an obtrusive, innovative soundtrack (composed by the band Aunt Sister, along with Colin Self and Ben Babbit) and hyperactive visual style, The African Desperate straddles the line between shock and banality.

In a film that barely has a grasp over its own hare-brained conspiracy and often feels like an extension of the mental breakdown that its protagonist might be suffering . . . Cummings’ performance adds a key measure of consistency.

Creepy implications keep Super 8 engaging, but the cast makes it click.

This is the kind of experience that might tell you more about yourself as both a viewer and a person than you’re comfortable knowing; it’s also the most alluringly strange movie of the year so far.

A soaring, sweet documentary that welcomes its audience into an unexpected new arena, The Eagle Huntress offers up a movie-perfect story with a leading lady who has something to share with everyone.

That this film can stand on its own, all while paying tribute to the show that helped birth it, is maybe the most impressive escape act of them all.

Zellweger, as ever, is sterling in the role. There is no Bridget Jones without Renée Zellweger, and the force of her performance and obvious admiration for the role do plenty to skate over any off-kilter beats (a few odd subplots, Bridget’s total lack of concern around money, etc.) with effervescence and pluck.

Too obvious and haphazard to boil over with the full caustic fury of its premise, Old Stone is nevertheless a bluntly effective thriller that makes great use of its gritty noir touches.

While DaCosta ably toys with the usual genre trappings — jump scares, things that go bump in the night, eye-popping gore — the filmmaker, directing only her second feature, effectively adds unexpectedly artful touches.

With his intimacy drama Golden Exits, Perry strays from his typical fare of people behaving badly to, well, people behaving not quite as badly and certainly with more believable motivation.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves conjures its own type of movie magic that proudly stands apart from other fantasy films. The heartfelt story, enchanting characters, dazzling visual effects, and fun-filled nature will allow the film to be a treasured classic. An adaptation of this caliber could be considered a roll of the dice to some, but Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves has already proved itself to be an ironclad winner.

With the band’s headstrong co-founders leading their tale, Sirens is a powerful reminder that punk isn’t dead if you know where to look.

El Conde isn’t big on subtlety (Lachman’s rich cinematography offers the film its only shades of gray), and so it feels like a missed opportunity that Larraín didn’t squeeze more juice from the all-too-relevant fact that deposing a fascist from power isn’t the same as defeating them.

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