Zero Fucks Given is refreshingly unwilling to be prescriptive or teach Cassandre any moral lessons, but it often struggles to crystallize how she finds the strength to seize control over her own flightplan.

S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR is a dazzling work of historical fiction — emphasis on the “fiction” — that makes the moving image feel intimate and enormous all at once.

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.

Despite the refreshingly experiential flavor of Szumowska’s approach, her film is handcuffed by the facts of its true story, and Pam remains at such a pronounced emotional remove that it sometimes feels as if she’s only hiking up that mountain because the facts of the matter demand that she must.

Inspired by a rush of paranoia that Stourton once experienced at a wedding where he felt unwelcome, All My Friends Hate Me effectively splits the difference between Ruben Östlund and Ben Wheatley as it pinballs between squirmy laughs and sly horrors.

Bay’s latest reeks of falsehood veiled as righteousness.

For many of the extremely online people born after the year 2000, “Under the Influence” offers a closer look at the cultural history that’s already close to their hearts, less valuable for Neistat’s insight than for his access ... For the rest of us ... this film provides a bone-chilling biopsy of the malignant narcissism that’s quietly metastasized across Gen Z’s celebrity-industrial complex, more valuable for Neistat’s perspective than for any of his characters.

While Baena and Brie, who wrote the film together, don’t exactly flip the script on this seemingly well-trod subgenre, the duo (plus a star-packed cast) certainly add some spice to it.

It’s a film that relies too heavily upon its scenic location and not enough on building any real sense of story, let alone suspense, and only adds to the growing feeling that, when a work calls itself “Hitchcockian,” it’s more of a red flag for something half-baked than an enticing homage to the master himself.

The film unfolds like a runaway train, a rapid-fire thriller and drama and horror film all in one, both breathless and breathtaking.

It Is in Us All, a hyper-visceral portrayal of manhood in its purest unrestrained form, is anchored by the force-of-nature turn from its superlative star Cosmo Jarvis. Intoxicating to the senses, this film boasts an indomitable vitality, a zest for life so uncontainable it brims with mortal danger.

Populated by a feverish humor and governed by fatalistic doom, Reijin’s Bodies Bodies Bodies moves with a slapdash pace that belies its sturdy aesthetic construction.

Master of Light is a gentle and graceful film defined by the capriciousness of sight.

Despite its flaws, Umma is an impressive debut for Shim, the kind of outing that hints at plenty more under the hood or tucked inside a massive suitcase, just bursting with secrets.

As they bond and converse, their conversations take on a closed aspect, never inviting us in to their increasingly close relationship. We remain watchers, appreciative of but never truly understanding the magic of Jane Birkin.

As “The Cow” sinks deeper into increasingly limp twists, turns, and choices, Ryder keeps hold of Kath, offering the film’s most genuine surprise: a real, lived-in, fully fleshed out performance. No one else can match her, but who could even try?

"Deadstream" feels like ’80s Sam Raimi traveled forward in time, became obsessed with streaming culture, and turned Ash Williams into the dumbest possible stunt streamer. And it rules. With stunning creature effects, a great balance between laughs and scares, and one of the best uses of the Screenlife format, this is a film that could easily become a Halloween tradition.

"To Leslie" doesn’t always make things easy, but it’s deeply touching to watch the film’s characters learn how to share their mutual good fortune.

While the filmmaker’s craft has never been shakier than it is in this stilted and wildly uneven tale about the twisted strings that tie some couples together, it’s also never been clearer that said filmmaker is Adrian Lyne. Not only does this delirious movie find him swan-diving back into the same fetid lap pool of envy, lust, and psychosexual control where he used to swim laps every morning, it finds that he’s basically got an entire lane to himself.

Linoleum is difficult to pin down; the obfuscations and slippages that run through it seem just as likely to frustrate viewers as they might compel them.

It may not resonate as anything deeper than a modern satire of the idea that father knows best, but it leans into its high-wire act with the fearlessness of a movie that knows just how fraught it can be to connect with anyone these days.

While West isn’t always operating on the same levels as his influences, his signature flair for tension through simmering slow-burn pacing remains unparalleled.

This semi-autobiographical sketch isn’t really a story at all so much as a sweetly effervescent string of Kodachrome memories from the filmmaker’s own childhood — the childhood of someone who was born in a place without any sense of yesterday, and came of age at a time that was obsessed with tomorrow.

Though movie references and Cage quotes abound, there’s something for everyone in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. It’s one of the funniest movies of the year.

The Lost City might not be as majestic or breathtaking as its loftier influences, but it is the swooning stuff that great romance novels are made of.

Here is an orgiastic work of slaphappy genius that doesn’t operate like a narrative film so much as a particle accelerator — or maybe a cosmic washing machine — that two psychotic 12-year-olds designed in the hopes of reconciling the anxiety of what our lives could be with the beauty of what they are.

While a nihilistic vision of the future — of climate disaster, war, disease, or some combination of the three — is certainly relatable, Gold ends up being rather empty itself, void of any real message aside from the lyrics to the Nick Cave song that play as the credits roll: “People Ain’t No Good.”

It’s a fitting third act for an overly safe film that only feigns at its ambition, and it leaves “The Adam Project” seeming less like a natural fit for Reynolds’ talents than an ill-fitting star vehicle for someone who’s never been less interested in stretching his limits.

Asking for It puts men and women in their own fringe camps, erasing the real and complex struggle for women to achieve equal rights, have their stories heard, and to see their rapists and abusers prosecuted fairly.

If Great Freedom is a subdued film more interested in studying old scar tissue than licking up fresh wounds, the rare instances when it draws blood . . . are all the more bruising as a result.

The lessons are of the usual sort — how to be true to yourself, how to honor your family and friends, the value of culture in all its forms, the need to find humor — but they are rendered fresh and new, with Turning Red turning in one of Pixar’s best films not just about the pain of life, but the very joy of it, too.

The gags in Mother Schmuckers are consistently more gross than funny, and the movie lacks the visual wit or malformed heart required to keep blood pumping as it runs itself ragged from one joke to the next.

Forget “The Terror,” here comes “The Tedium.”

By far the most nuanced relationship here is that between Batman and Riddler.

Brian Petsos’ interminable Big Gold Brick may be a film absent even the faintest trace of purpose or momentum — its endless parade of energy-less moments connected only by the lack of life shared between them, like a daisy chain of skeletons who are all holding hands — but the writer-director sincerely deserves credit for willing his feature debut into existence.

For a movie so intuitively captivating, so visually extravagant, it very nearly papers over all its emotional weaknesses.

There need to be more films like this, if only so the LGBTQ kids seeking them out will realize how normal their own experiences are.

It delivers plenty of blood spattered, gut-spilling gore to satisfy genre lover’s bloodlust, even if we’ve pretty much seen everything a chainsaw can do by now.

It’s a buzzing and vibrant ensemble drama whose unruly cast pulls our focus in a dozen different directions at once, but also one that always returns our attention to the earth shifting under their feet, and in turn to the question of who they will become once they’re forced away from it.

At heart, this is a film that just wants some good pats, and it’s willing to do whatever it takes to get them.

This Much I Know to Be True mostly offers the simple pleasures of good songwriting, performed by charismatic singers, captured elegantly onscreen. And that’s not nothing! However, come the one-hour mark, Dominik does work in more interview footage, revealing a film in many ways structured as a response to its predecessor.

The warts-and-all honesty that Baker brings to the table doesn’t prevent Sutton from repackaging his story as a simple cautionary tale about an industry — and a society — that will fatten people up just to eat them alive. At least it’s a tale that Baker lived to tell, and refused to let anyone else tell for him.

The breath of life and beating heart at the center of countless, Russian nesting doll layers of artifice and art-house reference, actor Denis Menochet doesn’t just anchor Peter von Kant, he makes the Francois Ozon project a film.

The film’s greatest achievement is the measured and elegant gaze on a woman in the prime of life, often referred to as middle age, whose desires (both sexual and professional) are neither diminished nor pathologized.

It feels as if Guiraudie had two separate ideas for a contemporary urban comedy but couldn’t figure out how to develop either of them, so he stuck them in one script and hoped for the best.

Try as it might, its story of a good man caught in a bad situation is bogged down by empty reveals, and by a plot that tries to fool you without first earning your investment.

If, when printed and sent off for posterity, a snapshot like “Coma” offers a small degree of archival value — while answering the question Bonello poses at the start — it might also arrive as a postcard from a time all-too-thankfully gone by.

Like a steady hand holding a straight razor, Argento cuts through the story with clean swipes. Dark Glasses has little room for twists and turns; it holds nothing up its sleeve and asks little more of the viewer than to sit still and enjoy the ride.

As is often the case with Denis’ films, Fire grows more illuminating as it gets hotter; what starts like a constrained and unusually jagged French drama is eventually forged into an incendiary portrait of three people who — to varying degrees — all delude themselves into thinking that the past is possible to quarantine away from the present.

Perhaps the film’s Walmart approach to its action would’ve been more forgivable if the Uncharted games weren’t so frequently suffused with Spielbergian flair, just as the film’s archetypal characters may have been less underwhelming had the games not managed to establish 10 times the pathos with none of the same flesh and blood.

As usual, Strickland has made a sumptuous meal out of social impropriety — a strange cinematic delicacy about the discomforts that need to be shared so that others don’t have to be stomached.

Like nearly all of Dupieux’s previous work, Incredible but True stretches a high-concept, low-execution premise about as far as it can go, wrapping things up the nanosecond before they outstay their welcome. But unlike his previous work, this film leaves the viewer with a pleasant, and almost bittersweet aftertaste; it almost leaves you wanting more.

More than anything else, Diwan seems interested in exploring how, at many points in history, young women had no choice but to bear this particular burden alone.

Save for dashes of Jeunet’s bespoke visual flair and an enthusiastic cast of actors whose go-for-broke performances scream for stronger material, Bigbug doesn’t resemble a late-career misstep from a beloved auteur so much as it does the product of a neural network that was simultaneously forced to binge-watch “The Terminator” and “The Dinner Game” until it spat out a shooting script.

While Wandel does well to leave some things to the imagination, like what happens beyond the schoolyard, she not-so-subtly nails the point home in the end, showing how all it takes is one person to stop bullying at its source. Still, her film is an arresting, eye-opening look at how violence begins at an early age, and how we can learn to be bystanders, or have the strength to speak out.

Caught in between a love story and a ghost story, the film accidentally disproves the very epigraph that opens it — “Every love story is a ghost story” — because this is one that fails to haunt or to hurt.

Gehraiyaan seldom earns its melodramatic turns. However, the buildup to them proves to be dynamic enough, emotionally charged enough, and above all, honest enough in its approach to infidelity and flawed human relationships that the film remains worthwhile.

There’s a deeper, more serious film at the heart of I Want You Back, but a bent toward offering up off-kilter comedic set pieces instead keeps it from hitting any harder truths.

But while that stew sounds familiar, Marry Me takes almost too long to get really cracking, with both romance and laughs in short supply, until a mercifully charming final act.

In the hands of director Josephine Decker, a filmmaker uniquely suited to depicting personal expression on the big screen, the film version of The Sky Is Everywhere makes for a satisfying and special take on a particular sub-genre of YA story.

The sheer banality of Angela’s cat-and-mouse game against the corporate assassins on her trail is chilling enough to compensate for the movie’s limited scope, and Soderbergh creates such a vivid sense of plein air claustrophobia — of being caught in a net as wide as a wifi signal — that he can stage an intense action set piece in a public/private space as small as the back seat of a van.

Expensive but never fancy, and solid enough to emit a faint whiff of sophistication, this entire project is powered by the same eccentric confidence that allows Branagh to play Hercule Poirot like a neutered Pepé le Pew.

A blockbuster as big and hollow as the Moon itself; one small step for bland, one giant leap for bland-kind.

Despite its new failures and familiar assortment of dud stunts (Wee-Man being launched onto a pile of metal is a pretty lame payoff to that musical chairs gag), Jackass Forever inevitably benefits from a stronger emotional undertow than any of the series’ previous films.

A misfire that’s as stilted as it is inert.

Lessin, Pildes, and their many subjects eschew cheap emotion in favor of something much more intimate and, ultimately, more honest.

Basic yet enraging ... it shines a harsh light at one of the greatest evils of our time with all the panache of a "Dateline" special.

Jaw-dropping but often unfocused ... A rich film that nevertheless calls regular attention to any of the even richer (if perhaps less entertaining) films it might have been.

For all its otherworldly beauty, “Utama” could benefit from slightly more robust dramatic beats to complement the hyper-sensorial experience that imbues in the spectator, especially in addressing the displacement of Indigenous communities across the Americas and beyond.

Set at the explosive intersection of technology, politics, and indigenous persecution, the film is gorgeously and sometimes ingeniously conceived, painting an intimate first-hand portrait of joy, pain, and community, before bursting with rip-roaring intensity as it captures a high-stakes struggle for survival unfolding in the moment.

All That Breathes is determined to illustrate how two peoples’ failure to listen to each other is no different than one species’ failure to acknowledge the rest of its environment — that each aspect of Delhi is sharing the same broken conversation, whether they recognize that or not.

Whatever their respective agendas, Navalny finds subject and filmmaker alike bound together by the shared belief that authoritarian governments are as scared of their people as their people are of them, and the documentary is galvanized by the spectacle of Putin shitting his pants.

The 70-year-old Choy isn’t the subject of their film so much as she’s the lens through which it looks back at yesterday and the fire that kindles its hope for a brighter tomorrow, but her inextinguishable spirit can be felt burning away behind every scene.

Semans’ film stands out for how purposefully it seems to walk the line between schlocky crap and serious cinema.

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.

Without the influx of talking heads and other bits of opinion and information, the audience is forced to confront their own judgements. ... The effect is ingenious and chilling.

Smart and affecting ... It’s not flashy. It’s not often revelatory for any super fans, or even anyone who watched "Being the Ricardos" ... "Lucy and Desi," however, is still meaty as a standalone work, and an essential, authentic salute to these trailblazers.

Throughout the film, both Dack and her revelatory star teeter through shifting concepts, black and white, yes and no, that only grow more jarring and tense as Palm Trees and Power Lines unfolds.

What emerges is a more ephemeral portrait of the time and place that O’Connor sprang from and was rebelling against.

It’s a challenging movie, but one so overflowingly empathetic for even its cruelest characters that the emotional beats outweigh the headier structural conceits that make for a narrative often hazy, out of reach, and gorgeously weblike.

Instead of leaning into the ambiguous tensions and uncanny experiences, Watcher fails to live up to its inspirations, ending up a heavy-handed, predictable trip through genre tropes with a rather lifeless cast at its core. Watcher spells out every plot point to a tee, when we wish it would slowly, playfully tug at the threads of our anxieties.

Speak No Evil is the most cunningly depraved horror film in years, offering a piercing commentary on the ways we accommodate others to the point of self-subjugation.

Something in the Dirt functions as a disturbing and acerbically comedic riddle of a movie where finding the answers is a secondary, mostly unfruitful goal. What we are after is understanding the personal voids that push some of us to look for them in the first place.

Detailed and deliberate, assertive but rarely obvious, Diallo’s Master is a towering, inventive shot in the arm for Black horror.

Featuring stars Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown doing predictably divine work (do these two performers know any other way?), “Honk for Jesus” is equal parts hilarious and painful, an incisive upbraiding of the sorts of people who should have long ago realized no one — especially nattily attired pastors — is above God.

Bergholm is skilled at keeping the tension high while finding amusing pockets of pure comedy (whatever Volanen is doing is genius, full stop), but the power of “Hatching” is diluted during a final act that can’t quite thread the needle between empathy and insanity.

Julian Higgins’ excellent film constantly dangles redemption in front of our faces, begging us to imagine a better world, but ultimately delivers a stark reminder of how bitterly divided the country is.

You always know a Plaza performance will be good, but over the past few years, Plaza has seemed to make it a priority to surprise her audiences with just how good she is.

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.

Ver Linden’s film may play out mostly in a straight-forward chronology, but that choice doesn’t do “Alice” (or Alice) any favors, expecting major revelations and revolutions to happen in the exact minimum of time.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a touching little two-hander that does right by its title character even if the lion’s share of the conflict in this audience-friendly charmer hinges on Nancy’s seesawing relationship with herself.

Dual adds a fresh sprinkle of doom to the already savage deadpan of Stearns’ previous work, and bitterly crystallizes the existential anxieties that have crushed down on so many of us with new weight since the pandemic started. That it also allows Karen Gillan to give two hilarious performances, both colder than death but at distinctly different temperatures, is just icing on the cake.

While Call Jane might suffer from a litany of the usual first film missteps — a tricky tone often hobbles it, as does a bent toward gliding over history in service of telling a singular story — Nagy’s affection and respect for women is a strong fit for the material. And Banks, who has stealthily proven her ability in a variety of genres, both in front of and behind the camera, turns in a career-best performance as Joy, a woman who is about to undergo a shift of her own.

The moral of this story is supposed to be shrugged off despite its overwhelming honesty, but Living downplays its drama to such an extent that it can feel as if Hermanus and Ishiguro lacked the nerve to attempt the same trick.

Attempts to ride the film through its own uncomfortable wavelength do offer some treats, even if they all come with caveats.

Raiff scales up the disarming earnestness of his debut without losing any of its DIY intimacy.

It has so many things it wants to say about the state of modern America, but it finds no suitable or impactful way to say them.

Cave has an imaginative sense of camera placement, and she’s an expert at inserting ultra-close-up shots at precisely the right moment to induce a laugh, gasp, or shiver. Her camera is always in service of the story, rather than distracting from it with artifice.