Like a fine conversation, which her solid script mostly delivers, Coppola keeps the tension in the air like a lightly bouncing ball.

Striving to make deep statements about life, art and family bonds, it doesn't quite get there, but the effort is enough to leave a mark. Like the Fangs' own strange craft, the movie's own shortcomings speak to its themes.

The filmmakers excel at crafting delightful musical montages to capture the sense of escapism Yuri finds in his newfound support system, but it’s clear that these circumstances provide only a temporary fix.

Through some of the screenplay’s slight formulaic stumbles, it’s Gallo’s charmingly fierce performance that anchors all the loose pieces.

Structured like a half-remembered pop tune and drifting by at a 75 minutes that feels as if it might not even be half that long, I Will Make You Mine is a sweet little bop about trying to find the rhythm of your life when you don’t really know how the song is structured. Find the melody and you’ll be humming it to yourself for days.

Loveless proceeds like a messy younger sibling of Noah Baumbach's "Greenberg" as it tracks Andrew's ongoing denial of the mounting pressures to settle down, many of which come from his reasonably sane ex, Joanna (Cindy Chastain).

The shagginess of it, the missteps, the rambling bits are pleasurable enough, and there are plenty of laughs and insights here, but there’s also nothing new.

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.

By turns resoundingly human and regretfully half-baked, the film wears its influences on its sleeve.

From a certain perspective, Sami Blood tells a very familiar story, but the hyper-specificity of its telling renders it a wholly new and quietly profound experience.

The detail, attention, and artistry of every pixel in frame is very evidently displayed. In many respects, watching “Ne Zha 2” feels akin to viewing the “Avatar” films, as the film provides a visual experience that’s the absolute peak of what its medium is capable of.

The filmmaker manages to bring much of his sensibility and overall texture to the series. Part of that is due to the nature of the prequel itself (go back to where it all began!), part of that is due to the relative freedom to build in new characters and stories, but much of it is thanks to Sarnoski’s ability to pull deep emotionality out of his stars and audience almost immediately.

As much as Jenkin’s film is hypnotic and strikingly realized, in the final half hour it runs out of tricks up its sleeve.

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.

Like “Green Book,” The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a broad historical outing based on real people and real events, condensed down into an essence that can only be billed as “crowd-pleasing.” The trick this time: Farrelly seems far more aware of how he’s playing fast and loose with history to offer a zippy feature to a fractured world. Dare we say it: It works far better.

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.

What redeems Hotel Mumbai from morbid opportunism is that, in all but its slickest and most Hollywood moments, the thrills of Maras’ heart-wrenching re-enactment are never an end unto themselves.

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.

The President’s Cake is a case of relatively modest filmmaking that becomes rich because archetype and characterization coordinate the story world.

Damon and Bale are such magnetic onscreen figures that it doesn’t take much to inject their various arguments, smarmy asides, and high-stakes bets with plenty of intrigue.

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

Eichner’s gay homage to the great American romcoms of yesterday looks and feels exactly like them, and that’s groundbreaking enough. We’ll take that any day over a movie that tries too hard to pander to gay audiences. This one just hears and sees us.

Beautiful Darling not only explains the appeal of its subject; it actively contributes to her ongoing mystique.

If they can look past their own internal biases, The Mother should satisfy even the most diehard action fans, while leaving the door to some new ones.

Theron and Davis are dynamite together, the actresses playing off each other like two sides of the same coin.

By highlighting sweet, indicative, or hilarious moments rather than tracing the teachers’ relationships with any particular students, the film is more attuned to the rhythms of Headfort than it is the people in it.

This tense, propulsive, and ultra-glossy Netflix oater might lay a thick new Jay-Z track over the opening credits (of a film that he also produced) and assemble an Avengers-worthy team of obscure Black icons from across the entire 19th century into a single explosive shootout, but Samuel has little interest in letting his film be ascribed to fantasy or lumped in with the rest of its genre’s revisionist streak.

True stories about brave, everyday people fighting evil powers never go out of fashion, and “A Call to Spy” joins their ranks with ease.

When Ricki and the Flash pierces its conventional trajectory with music, it gets more interesting. But the fluff surrounding it holds together well enough.

It feels like an utterly ridiculous film before you hit the multitude of twists that blow up its already-shaky premise a dozen times over. But at a certain point, the film’s commitment to its own asininity becomes so overpowering that even the most cynical viewers will have no choice but to suspend their disbelief and be sucked into its magic.

For anyone frustrated with countless formulaic exercises that drain modern horror of fresh ideas, Tucker & Dale is a downright cathartic indictment that encourages comparison to the "Scary Movie" franchise. It's mostly a smart spoof that looks awfully dumb for a reason.

At times more in line with "Blazing Saddles" than the grimly bawdy qualities that define many bonafide oaters, Django Unchained erupts with a conceptual brilliance from the outset that never fully meshes with its clumsy storyline. Nevertheless, it's a giddy ride.

Depending on how you look at it, Black Dog is either the most violently depraved feel-good animal movie in recent memory or the most wholesome neo-noir we’ve seen in a while.

Ultimately, Reversing Roe is a productive contribution to its ever-growing genre because it sharply dissects the process by which abortion soured from a private medical issue to a public political one.

The undeniably moving nature of Winton and his associates’ deeds swell the narrative with rich emotional currents, however the film’s bid for consistent quality is kneecapped by a ridiculously on-the-nose script.

In spite of the movie’s tropes, Haapasalo clearly understands that, when you’re young, desire can feel confusing or gratifying, thrilling or overwhelming. In her snapshot of contemporary girlhood, Haapasalo contains all of the above — making the movie an affecting achievement that never feels less than loving.

Unapologetically long and messy, Snowpiercer offers an unhinged ride that's worth the investment for its mixture of batty personalities, consistently impressive visuals and mad swipes at heavy symbolism jam-packed together.

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

It's hard to imagine Captain Phillips in the hands of any other filmmaker -- and Captain Phillips in the hands of Greengrass looks exactly like anyone familiar with his work would expect. It does justice to the material even while playing too conscientiously by the book.

While The History of Sound suffers from some pacing issues and detours that turn up as dead ends, following Lionel’s path as a budding ethnomusicologist collecting songs and sounds to record on cylinders, this is a lovely movie capable of wounding and haunting you.

If Ready or Not never quite feels like a cult classic in the making — the scares are soft, the imagery is familiar, and the ending is so batshit that it confirms your nagging sense that the previous 90 minutes were holding back — it’s still wickedly entertaining from start to finish, and painted with enough fresh personality to resolve into something more than the sum of its parts.

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.

It makes up for a dry and sometimes stilted filmmaking approach through sheer clarity of purpose.

Escapes prefers to approach its star in a roundabout fashion, immediately launching into one of Fancher’s slippery and rambling monologues about his wandering days as a charmed lothario.

Like Stephen Walker's delicate nonfiction portrait "Young@Heart," it's a genuine heart-tugger about senior citizens rediscovering their youth by singing pop music; like Craig Brewer's crowdpleasing "Hustle & Flow," it sympathizes with a struggling rap artist without glossing over his flaws.

While the film, both written and directed by Lacôte, is grounded in oral traditions that may seem exotic to certain viewers, the movie is really about the universal power of storytelling regardless of tongue — and how it can be used as a way to survive.

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.

It seems odd to deem any film an instant cult classic, but “Barb and Star” is such a giddy outlier, a dense, flawed assemblage of zany humor that people will happily tear into for years to come.

Any weaknesses lie more in the slightly tired general themes Ma explores. The Mother and the Bear doesn’t bring a lot of new material to the familiar narrative of parents becoming enlightened towards their child’s sexuality.

If this one still bites off more than it can chew, its ambition nevertheless reaffirms Sanga as a skilled and emotionally sensitive filmmaker who’s attuned to the low-frequency wavelengths that tend to get flattened out by stories with this kind of sweep.

As with Lizzy’s sculptures, which go into the kiln all mottled and damp but come out glistening with new layers of color, Showing Up is transformed by its finishing touches.

While the film lacks the originality of many of the films it tries to emulate, it’s still a solidly crafted reminder of the absurdly tragic fate that our current housing system appears to be guiding us towards.

In not trying to reach too deeply into the well of profundity, Sarnoski has incidentally achieved a pretty profound movie.

What Lawrence achieves here is extremely impressive, a marquee movie star throwing herself with abandon into a filmmaker’s warped and demandingly miserable vision.

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.

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.

Matching a crackling wit with the absurd dissonance of time and place found in the best of Monty Python and Mel Brooks, Little Hours is so eager to please that its one-note humor lands with ease.

While Bill Nye: Science Guy may not spend all its time on the man himself, it proves that the guy behind “Science rules!” hasn’t gone anywhere.

Coppola presents a smart cross-examination of the impact of media exposure on fickle young minds. While the ambitions of its young thieves often blur together and lack precise definition, The Bling Ring is the director's breeziest work, allowing the story to glide along with the ease of a heist movie.

Megalopolis is one of those movies that feels like it offers an accurate window behind the scenes of its own creation process, and Megadoc confirms as much without ever becoming redundant.

Real or fake, finished or not, a genre exercise or a full-hearted statement of purpose, the things we create have an impact on the world that no market could ever be able to measure. And, for better or worse, the same is true of the people who are brave enough to create them.

It’s the brilliance with which Erradi performs, especially in the musical sequences, and the touching portrait of a woman pursuing her art despite the world seemingly conspiring against her to do so, that sustain and invigorate the film.

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.

Remote Area Medical lays bare the injustice of a system that fails to provide for those who need it most.

Rock’s lack of self-importance prevents the doc from fetishizing the past, and Clay — who appears to have met the photographer on the set of a TV on the Radio video — is wise to assume that the world doesn’t need yet another reminder that it used to be full of gods.

While not the same league as “Leviathan,” Zyvagintsev’s latest slow-burn look at anguished people tortured by problems beyond their control displays his mastery of the form.

As a minor work, it provides an enjoyable snippet of rambunctious formalism that puts Noé in a category of his own.

It’s always a tough ask to improve upon an original, but “Moana 2” is a sprightly addition to this sea-faring legacy. It does something nearly impossible in our sequel-glutted world: made me want further adventures. “Moana 3,” ahoy?

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.

While The Salt of Tears threatens to devolve into a sympathetic male gaze with each new turn, Garrel actually manages to burrow within those boundaries and deconstruct their flaws from the inside out.

Winning and losing are relative terms, but this is the first time in forever that Affleck feels like he’s got skin in the game.

After the wearying sameness of so many recent American features, You Can (Not) Redo is as shocking and energizing as the slap a Zen master would administer to a student.

While it never reaches the psychedelic heights of Guerra’s previous effort and relies on a more conventional pattern of events, Birds of Passage delivers another fascinating tone poem about Colombia’s fractured identity.

More media installation than movie, The Image Book bemoans a vapid world well into the process of disintegration, and his film is engineered to simulate that process in visceral terms.

A simple courtroom drama that never betrays its convictions, the film is a basic but bitterly urgent reminder that history is far more fluid than fact, a garden that must be tended to at all times lest it wither and grow weeds.

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.

Writer-director Todd Berger, improving his technique with his second feature-length credit following "The Scenesters," combines enough energetic performances with charged wit to make this one doomsday comedy that earns the right to its familiar backdrop.

Filmlovers! melds fiction and non-fiction, the personal and the political, popular and art cinema, into a lyrical tribute to spectatorship, embracing all the theories and emotions that come with it.

It might not be his best filmmaking, but Fahrenheit 11/9 is fraught with a critical mindset that syncs with the zeitgeist. It’s a messy movie for messy times.

The Origin of Evil is ultimately Calamy’s show as a calculating and desperate woman seeking love and acceptance in all the wrong places.

If Black Bag denies us the kind of duplicitous confrontations that other versions of this story might take pains to savor, Soderbergh’s aversion to giving audiences what they want — and the severe angularity that he tends to offer us now instead — is almost as rewarding here as it was utterly indefensible in “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”

Leaning Into the Wind will inspire anyone who sees it to look for the beauty in every gust, to admire how nature constantly rearranges itself, and us along with it. Even at its most self-conflicted, this is a fascinating reminder that some art wasn’t made to be owned.

The movie has few tricks on offer but above all, delivers a solid reminder of Penn’s filmmaking talent, and welcome evidence that it runs in the family.

Sorry Angel doesn’t strain from too much ambition; it’s a sharp snapshot of two men at pivotal moments in their lives, and ends on a note not too different from the one it starts on. But that cycle is central to its gentle intellectual flow.

Just like To’s characters all have a little something to learn from each other, Three is a master class in how movies can be as unique and infinite as the people who make them.

Enola Holmes doesn’t just use its heroine as a cute way to nod at progressive thinking; it fully embraces a story that is, at its heart, deeply feminist.

Much like its subject, the film is beautiful, compelling, hard to watch, and spread too thin to stay with us for long.

A Private Life does manage to create an interesting dynamic as it posits the need to balance psychology’s theoretics with actual results and action.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Ferrara movie without some jagged edges. “Tommaso” manages to feel rough and risky while somehow sensitive at the same time, like the best of them.

While a straightforward documentary in the classic sense, it’s polished, affecting, professionally edited, and bursting with big personalities.

The film embodies its namesake’s oft-repeated — if increasingly suspect — ethos of making sure that fun comes first.

The movie takes its time to provide a satisfying rationale, occasionally suffering from a sluggish pace and sleepy atmosphere that lessens the underlying mystery surrounding Erin’s mission, but Kidman imbues the material with continuous bite.

Light of My Life delivers a lush variation on familiar elements, and wends its way to a tense final showdown that makes the wandering trajectory worthwhile.

An elegant little film about the things in life that are worth taking risks for, Arcadian is a reminder of how much Cage has to offer us when he’s not contorting himself into something indescribable.

Suri’s film is full of non-actors who excel at being themselves in front of the camera, the result so eminently watchable because it feels so remarkably like the real India.

Rogue Nation plays out like a sufficient rejigging of the same variables tossed around many times before, which is just enough to both celebrate the material and demonstrate its limitations.

A slow-burn tale filled with beautiful imagery and understated performances, its elegance yields one of Scorsese’s most subtle efforts.

"A New Era” doesn’t feel like a cash-grab, but a true continuation. Lush settings, well-appointed sets, and an eye-popping wardrobe only add to the magic, and good luck not happily sinking into two hours of confectionary entertainment. (The endless jokes about the film industry somehow only add to the zip of it all.)