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.

From its title on down, Letter to You is a testament to the power of communion.

As a platform for Bilot’s efforts and why they deserve a national profile, the movie has a sincere sense of purpose. It’s a 20-year-old drama that extends into the present, and as environmental concerns continue to escalate, it couldn’t feel more contemporary.

With its persistent inventiveness and a lack of unearned sentimentality, the movie provides an antidote to a lot of lazily produced dramas about death, American or otherwise.

The Dig resists the the kind of obvious triumph that would overtake a lesser film. Whether it’s a mere whiff of romance, the memory of a loved one passed on, or the encroaching consequence of a nation readying for conflict, there’s a bittersweetness to “The Dig” that lingers just as much as the facts of the story.

Athena effectively taps into the class, racial, and religious angers of modern France, which it sees as a powder keg that’s just waiting for the right spark to explode, but the film’s broad saga of brothers in crisis is so thin and symbolic that any deeper connection to the real world is sacrificed at the altar of intensity. An intensity that resists psychology, muffles sociopolitical context, and eventually swallows itself whole.

The Taiwan Oyster manages to be consistently engaging despite its flaws.

While Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President doesn’t always manage to fuse these recollections together, it compensates in a bevy of amusing anecdotes.

In telling his story, Amalric is greatly aided by his ace cinematographer, Christophe Beaucarne, whose images pick up on a great many tiny but telling details, as if life were a mosaic composed of an almost infinite number of parts that are all equally important for the bigger picture.

The film offers no answer, instead choosing to examine the conundrum of a man who repeatedly washes his face when things get too overwhelming, right before heading back out to the streets.

It’s a crowd-pleaser that works its formula well, even as it breaks new ground.

Grounding the lightness and frivolity with real heart, Booster’s laugh out loud script and Ahn’s artistic corralling of the energetic ensemble is a match made in heaven — or gay paradise.

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.

It’s no crime to have another wholesome heroine for a new generation to look up to, only a shame that this is a sanitized reproduction and slight distortion of one who already existed.

Lowe finds ways to make it all feel if not wholly original, at least quite fresh. You’ve heard this story before, but you’ve never seen it quite like this.

Even in their most intimate scene, Mary and Charlotte and their love remain at a remove.

Without breaking a lot of new ground, the result is one of the more positive depictions of millennial community-building in recent cinema. None of the group’s fancy flips or grinds top the degree to which “Skate Kitchen” turns its subjects into a fascinating microcosm of American youth.

Every clip of Buckley performing lifts the film off the ground, highlighting how his talents often felt otherworldly.

Though this thriller is packed with memorable characters, the diner itself might be its greatest.

While it doesn’t quite justify the sprawling courtroom antics or the blunt metaphor they entail, the movie nevertheless provides a profound look at the effect of historical trauma on modern Lebanese society.

Despite trafficking in a wide array of Sundance tropes — from its modest but ethereal monochrome cinematography by DP Laura Valladao, to Mahmood Schricker’s Sqürl-adjacent guitar score — Fremont is always more delicate than it is precious and mercifully never quite as cute as it sounds.

The movie casts an unmistakable spell out of Pfeiffer’s ability to imbue Kyra with a profound sense of sorrow.

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.