That From Ground Zero exists is both a tragedy and a miracle in unequal measure, a fact that proves impossible to forget over the course of a film whose every frame has been rescued from the rubble of an ongoing genocide.

The scares are mostly metaphorical and the sparse imagery becomes repetitive by the end, but “The Damned” remains a promising debut that offers a moody exploration of the human condition.

There’s no denying that Los Frikis were punk as hell, and errant traces of that anti-establishment attitude can be found in Nilson and Schwartz’s refusal to judge their characters for injecting themselves with HIV as a “fuck you” to a government that hadn’t left them any other choice, but the declawed safety of their storytelling undercuts that energy at every turn.

It might be enough to entertain young children or diehard SEGA loyalists, but the rest of us are left to lament that the running time isn’t as fast as its blue protagonist.

Mufasa has hidden charms that are arguably best described as Jenkins released straight to VHS.

Carry-On doesn’t aspire to be too much more than good, trashy, yuletide fun, but it consistently over-delivers on that front in the process of telling a sweet little story about a guy who learns that a difficult career setback doesn’t have to result in a lifetime of surrender.

Alas, the special effects in “Kraven the Hunter” are bad enough to completely undercut the only decent setpiece — a chase through the streets and rivers of London — in an action movie that doesn’t take advantage of its R rating until the final shootout, as the CGI devolves from “adorably cartoonish” to “done as cheaply as possible by a studio trying to cut its losses” so fast that it comes dangerously close to “Scorpion King” territory by the end (which doesn’t stop Chandor from burdening the effects with selling his story’s most pivotal moments).

Like “I’m Not There” before it, “A Complete Unknown” would rather celebrate Dylan’s mystery than attempt to explain it (each of their titles emphasizes his elusiveness as a defining factor), but where Haynes’ solution was to make Dylan infinite, Mangold’s is to make him as small as possible.

At least it aspires to mine a fresh experience from the all too familiar tedium of watching Hollywood pick a franchise dry, even if it ultimately falls well short of that goal.

From beginning to end, The Six Triple Eight never trusts its audience to actually engage with the material beyond its inspiring surface, evidenced by a lengthy coda featuring title cards that literally restate the film’s plot over archival footage of the 6888th Battalion. Unsung heroes deserve better.

Get Away works better on paper than as a visceral entertainment experience, as its raison d’etre of subverting folk horror expectations sometimes feels more like a screenwriting class exercise than a fully immersive world.

Without any omniscient narration to speak of, the music becomes a character in of itself, connecting all the various media and many different perspectives into one cohesive whole.

Eggers doesn’t want us to see in the darkness, he wants us to see the darkness itself. To recognize it not as the absence of light, but rather as a feral and undying force all its own — one that we carry within ourselves like a secret corseted in virtue.

It’s way too much and a bunch of nothing at the same time, and even agents of chaos who take wicked delight in witnessing this type of pandemonium may find themselves worn out before the film’s predictably hyperbolic conclusion.

The central premise of the friends’ dropping their high school relationships never takes off when the film has so little interest in fleshing those connections out even slightly, but it’s easy to root for the two of them to find happiness.

The film is both masterfully unadorned and wholly original, steering forward confidently under Kandari’s guidance. It’s a movie best viewed with absolutely no primer, a delicious little adventure with a humorous — and human — heart.

There’s fun to be had here, at least so long as audiences know what they’re getting — and what they’re not.

Beatles ’64 does what it can to emphasize the positive — and downplay its sociopolitical theorizing — by seeing the British Invasion through the eye of the storm.

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?

The film serves as a tribute to a certain brand of journalism that can only be achieved by venturing out into the great unknown and putting one’s self in harm’s way. But more than anything, it tells a human story about someone who understood herself well enough to live the exact life she wanted while accepting every consequence that came with it.

What comes through most by the time Bread & Roses wraps up is that our responsibility now is not to ourselves, but to future generations, to ready them to face down their aggressors instead of merely accepting their will.

Stories that are “timely” or “prescient” may be the norm these days, but Spellbound works a little magic to ensure that such messaging, as important as it may be, doesn’t get in the way of a good time for the entire family. That’s another thing we need now, more than ever.

Cole clearly deserves as many posthumous tributes as the culture can afford, especially since he received so little in his lifetime, but reverence, particularly as a way of combatting decades of indifference, isn’t necessarily the best solution

As is so often the case for Hong, his latest is a gentle, hypnotically watchable film that breezes by as Iris does herself, dallying around Seoul in a loose summer dress and her striking bright-green cardigan.

DuBowski’s activist portrait Sabbath Queen is overwhelmingly ambitious in its time-spanning, as searching and curious as its primary subject. We don’t leave the movie with a firm sense of who Amichai is beyond his religious backdrop, but I think that’s the point: Who he is as a person has become muddled and tangled up with the one he’s supposed to represent.

A Photographic Memory is guided by a probing specificity, and the deeper it pushes into the weeds of Sheila’s past — and the harder it listens for how they might reverberate through Rachel’s present — the easier it gets for viewers to hear echoes from their own lives in the stuff of the filmmaker’s search.

In some ways, Dream Team feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. By leaning into its low effort, too-cool-to-care aesthetic, it subliminally tells audiences that anyone offering substantial criticisms is just a square who didn’t get it.

At least superficially, Hello, Love, Again offers something for everyone: stirring romance, politically-tinged drama, and shots of Calgary that resemble a regional tourist board’s wet dream. In execution, however, the film exhibits something of a split personality by awkwardly moving between cutesy soap operatic romance and an unsparing, oft-devastating portrait of the myriad hurdles facing foreign workers.

As a holiday rom-com, however, The Merry Gentlemen is sorely lacking the sparkle and comfort that is found in so many other recent holiday movies like it.

Musicals are meant to be big, expansive, overstuffed, emotionally rich, so consuming that the concept of singing and dancing about it make all the sense in the world. Just as “Wicked” starts hitting its highest notes, it’s over. For now. For another year. And not for good.

Neither the deficiencies of Thorne’s script nor the made-for-TV feeling of Taylor’s direction ever fully obscure the enduringly relevant principle they exist to serve: Science will always keep inching forward, but it’s society’s job to ensure that bringing life into this world is a happiness worth the heartache of living in it.

With a generous scope and ease of tone, Sankey never fails to let her most vulnerable material breathe even as the subject’s enormity threatens to suffocate.

The lessons here may go down easy, but “Out of My Mind” knows better than to resolve the lifelong tug-of-war between what’s possible for Melody and what isn’t. Instead, it simply suggests that she has more to say than most people have learned how to hear, which is almost their loss as much as it is her own.

Wang leaves audiences with the sense that, for good or for ill, the individuality of humans will never be fully stamped out. The same variance that makes it difficult to herd people into ideological molds ensures that, when things go wrong, someone will always be ready to speak up.

“Life Comes in Flashes” doesn’t go out of its way to highlight the more salacious details of Bogart’s story, but it’s also not as bowdlerized as some viewers might expect from an estate-approved doc.

That Christmas may be holiday-centric, but its messages about community, doing good, and kindness are timeless and universal.

Ghost Cat Anzu may be much sillier and less substantial than “Spirited Away,” but this warm little weirdo of a charmer eventually builds into something that squeezes your ribs like a hug, as it blazes a scattered and unhurried path towards its own acceptance of the fact that life is for the living.

Gladiator II” wouldn’t be the first sequel to become bogged down in its resemblance to its forebear, but the various superficial modifications made to characterizations and action sequences operate under faulty bigger-is-better sequel logic.

The film, adapted by Ryan Swanson and Platte F. Clark & Darin McDaniel from Barbara Robinson’s 1972 novel of the same name, is much more interested in providing spiritual lessons than narrative excitement.

Rapaport and Farley’s script turns the speech patterns of amoral idiots into a science, relying on perfectly placed filler words and profanities to wrap horrible ideas in hilarious sentences.

There is a stirring sense of discovery in every corner of the searching “Luther” that will awe both the most knowledgeable Vandross fans and those who are only versed in the well-known brushstrokes and ballads of his career. That latter group will learn a lot, too, hopefully making it their mission to broaden their playlists with Vandross classics.

Meanwhile on Earth is a film that feels more compelled by its premise than it is by its story, but Clapin is able to suffuse it with the same ethereal hauntedness that brought “I Lost My Body” to life.

The moments when 100 Yards lands its blows are exhilarating in a way that makes the movie feel miles removed from most of its competition.

Even when the storytelling falls short, Pedro Páramo never fails to offer up ideas worth pondering.

You don’t watch Red One so much as stare ahead at the screen. It is a movie that is playing in front of you, I can comfortably give it that much, and for one meant to summon up the Christmas spirit, there’s not a whiff of mirth from the screenplay to the production level.

Funny, joyful, and brimming with confidence, The Colors Within chronicles its characters’ tentative first steps into a world outside of the ones built for them by their families and teachers, and it does so with a vibrancy that allows us all to feel as if we’re seeing that world through Totsuko’s eyes.

What this story reminds us isn’t that a woman named Sara Jane Moore was radicalized into action, but that history — for all of the larger than life sweep that word implies — is ultimately written on a level too personal for textbooks to ever understand.

The central connection is palpable, speaking yet again to the talents of the film‘s two leads, but the queerness that beats at the heart of it is often vaguer than it needs to be, just a silhouette in the night rather than a shadow play of outright love and desire.

On its own, Paddington in Peru is a fun if forgettable matinee for the whole family to enjoy, but — like its hero and its villain alike — the movie belongs to a tradition that it implores us to cherish like an heirloom, and it would be a direct contradiction of its story to orphan it from the greater context of its creation.

“How does he do it?,” someone asks. Music by John Williams doesn’t have the slightest idea. This long and indulgent doc is content to let us bask in the mystery of it all, if only because it understands that people will be asking that same question for centuries to come.

The film turned out to be a fascinating microcosm of the continued effects of Hollywood sexism. In Turner’s wit and Adams’ pain, we get a glimpse of the brilliant women who were sidelined in favor of childish men in this one tiny corner of Hollywood. All the pieces are there in “Chasing Chasing Amy,” but it all proved a bit unwieldy for what is essentially a Kevin Smith fan film, albeit a charming one.

It’s not that Absolution is any worse than the awful likes of “Retribution” (quite the opposite), but this seedy crime saga makes it uniquely clear that Neeson’s special set of skills have taken him as far as they can.

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.

The film just lacks in, you know, tension, danger, build, and stakes, the hallmarks of dramatic narrative. It’s almost as though the word “mellifluous,” pertaining to Hania Rani’s score, was coined for this film.

Vengeance Most Fowl updates the look of Wallace and Gromit’s established world by combining classical craft and cutting-edge tools to fit the modern era. While the results are seamless (Aardman Animation never phones in the work) and the cheeky comic tone remains the same, it inevitably calls attention to the loss of something intimate and handcrafted that was previously part of the infrastructure.

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.

That Zemeckis and cinematographer Don Burgess manage to pack multiple lifetimes of experience into a single space, a fixed camera upon it, and mostly pull it off is quite a feat.

New Wave is piercing in its unveiling of the cycle of blame that came out of the Vietnam War.

Netto and Schindler are less interested in pulpy sadism than they are in pure suspense.

For the most part, Black Box Diaries — per its title — is a personal testimony of a stressful journey, illustrating how survivors struggle, cope and find relief in support.

If nothing else, audience members will walk away from Martha with a far greater understanding of Stewart — of all the “good things,” in her parlance, and plenty of the bad — and equal admiration and unease of what that all adds up to.

Despite the film’s best efforts to melt its characters into the vast sludge of superhero cinema, the union between Eddie and Venom is simply too pure to be diluted down to nothing. Thanks to Hardy, even the least of the movies in this franchise is definitely something, and it’s something that its genre may not be able to survive without.

The film is determined to prove that people can meaningfully interact with the world in any number of ways, now more than ever, and it accomplishes that goal with real clarity and rare emotional force (the last shot is the kind of gut-punch that hurts so good).

The movie struggles to translate its noble aims to compelling drama, with any audience investment merely being a byproduct of the inherently high stakes.

All the individual pieces that make “Allswell” interesting are smothered in treacle.

Not to be missed, Falling Stars reimagines the fantasy tropes of witchcraft through the kind of regional character specificity that indie audiences see more often in films like “Winter’s Bone.”

Time doesn’t stop in the world of Nocturnes, but in this introspective and captivating doc, a respite isn’t just possible, it’s imperative.

Nothing about it feels the least bit real, but nothing about it feels dishonest either.

What I wish for this film is that it had trusted the lilting rhythms of its own initial story more confidently rather than a crash into various melodramatic episodes in the finale that only serve to get us to a hurtled-toward cathartic ending.

The Line is a must-see for a peek behind the coke-filled sheets of fraternities, well, everywhere.

As more people try to make peace with how their darkest hours have irreparably damaged them, actors with creepy smiles should breathe a little easier knowing that they’ll be employable for the foreseeable future.

A potent but emotionally diffuse coming-of-age drama in which everything — even faith, even love — has the potential to be as exploitative as the deforestation that continues to eat away at the soul of the Amazon.

Daddy’s Head offers enough bone-chilling imagery — often delivered via razor-sharp jump scares — to make Shudder’s latest headscratcher worth a watch and a think.

Blitz creates a rousing show of strength in the face of horrific civil strife, and there’s an undeniable power to how McQueen revisits the most visible chapter of his country’s history through the eyes of someone who’s so frequently been erased from its pages. If some of the movie is hurt by its failure to bear his imprint, that only serves to remind us just how valuable his imprint has become.

While Grant’s film nails certain elements necessary to the genre (like casting a pair of likable, capable stars who generate some real heat), the film is also prone to falling into just as many bad habits and limp tropes synonymous with big screen romance.

“You’re Next” doesn’t work particularly well as a stand-alone film, but that’s ok because it nails so much of what fans might be hoping for and expect from a new feature length take on the story.

More than anything, Blink succeeds as a film about the lengths that parents will go to give their children every possible ounce of joy in an indifferent world that too often has cruel other plans for them.

With elegant acting from its two young leads and picturesque cinematography from Matthias Koenigswieser, it serves as a competently executed morality play for audiences craving a bit of unambiguous humanism.

The filmmakers’ decisive presentation is enjoyable enough as an entrée served straight to streaming.

There’s good fun to be had in watching so many limbs get hacked off for the better part of two hours, but Director Kim can only dismember so many body parts before he starts to lose track of his movie’s spine.

This lilting tale’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it brevity proves inseparable from the lasting power of its punch-to-the-gut impact.

If The Platform 2 iterates on the original idea in a way that proves this property’s franchise potential, it falls apart in almost the exact same way as the previous film, abandoning the broadly representational nature of its premise in favor of the maddeningly specific mythology of its silly non-characters.

At its heart, Dead Talents Society is an affectionate ode to East Asian horror cinema, and its earnestness — and silliness — are key to its appeal.

Notice to Quit is redeemed by the simple fact of its nature: This isn’t a film that lives in the lows and highs of its defining moments so much as it’s a film that’s sustained by the strength it takes to put one foot in front of the other, and by the rush of rushing through New York City in lockstep with someone you care about.

Terrifier 3 is decking the halls with a triumphant celebration that’s horrifying for all the right reasons and snaps into focus what it is that Leone does singularly well. That may or may not win people over, but it shouldn’t lose any repeat customers.

A movie brimming with sentiment but not sentimentality, this is one of the most moving animated films in recent memory, and, beyond that, groundbreaking too.

Yes, life can only be understood backwards, but Memoir of a Snail makes a sweetly compelling case that we’ll see the beauty in it one day — such a sweetly compelling case, in fact, that you might just start looking for it now

Daaaaaali! sure seems like the one movie that Dupieux was destined to make.

In aiming for a piece of atmospheric sensuality, she instead lands in an erotic no man’s land, where the dramatic but obvious filmmaking — like an orbital shot when Emmanuelle finally reaches orgasm — isn’t surprising or evocative enough to make up for the silly monologues and empty characterizations.

There’s nothing especially mold-breaking here, though an ending moment elicits a gasp even as Apartment 7A ends with a cruel shrug — and perhaps the best thing I can say about that is that now I immediately want to rewatch Rosemary’s Baby. Plus, Garner gives a captivatingly distressed performance as a woman being attacked from all sides, where the only way out is through a window.

Maintaining a feel-good tone without becoming saccharine, “Rez Ball” is a charmer with enough of an edge to keep viewers on their toes.

Watching Errol Morris‘s urgent reminder of a documentary — possibly the most enraging film yet made by a director who’s certainly known how to illuminate infuriating topics over the past 45 years — will raise your blood pressure considerably.

Certain twists will remain unspoiled, but “Never Let Go” should resonate with both horror junkies seeking fall escapism and parents looking to see their struggles visualized.

The Deb may not be the most memorable movie musical of the year, but its heart and funny bone are in the right place.

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.

Although made up of many mesmerizing moving parts, “Harvest” ends up as feeling less than the sum of these. There are sparks of what makes an Athina Rachel Tsangari film great within this impressionistic period fable, even if — unlike the fires that bookend the film — it never fully takes the blaze.

On Swift Horses is a stunning tableau of almost-romances, weaving together ephemeral moments of magic with the pain that inevitably follows when the universe takes them away.

Life may have been very beautiful in this mountain town but even during its most tumultuous years, spending time within it isn’t exactly fascinating.