On the surface a sports documentary about the titular tennis legend, John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection is also a call to watch things more closely.

Whatever else he ends up doing in his career, Adam Driver will always have Annette. Surely this will go down as his most notorious performance (and yes, I’m including his snit-fitty—and thoroughly magnetic—turn as Kylo Ren in the Star Wars movies).

Thanks in part to McKenna-Bruce’s performance, How to Have Sex never feels exploitative. She gives Tara a sharp emotional intelligence.

There are clear reasons why some might consider The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp their definitive film: its very Britishness, its doomed romanticism, its cheeky bits of humor, and moments like the crane shot during Candy and Kretschmar-Schuldorff’s duel.

Soderbergh, who serves as editor, cinematographer, and director, gets significant mileage out of the visual conceit alone.

Nickel Boys overflows with formal ingenuity and daring.

If Sunlight worked even a quarter as well as it does, the movie would still have been something of a miracle.

Bad Hair really needs a loud, live audience, preferably around midnight, to reach its full potential. But it’s a fun, guffaw-producing horror comedy even without that.

Just putting us in Maud’s head—even as grippingly as the filmmaking does here—is not the same as trying to empathize with her. Still, the movie marks Glass as a filmmaker to watch.

If anything identifies The Killing as a Kubrick picture, it is the movie’s overall sense of fatalism – even as we watch how carefully things are planned, there is a sense of impending doom.

Spencer relies quite heavily on Kristen Stewart’s central performance. Once you adjust to the repetitive rhythm of speaking she employs—a rush of words, followed by a pregnant pause, then another rush with a single syllable of emphasis—you can appreciate some of the more delicate work she’s doing, particularly her darting eyes and changing posture.

Unless you’ve seen every Archers’ film, you’ll come away with at least two you’ll want to track down immediately after watching Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger. And you’ll want to revisit Scorsese titles like Raging Bull and The Age of Innocence to fully appreciate how their work directly influenced his.

Sandy is heartbreaking in the lead role, as his face registers surprise, then betrayal at the way the adults in his life—including, at times, his parents—fail him.

The screenplay, by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman, shows sophistication both in its characterizations and as a trauma narrative, although I was a bit unclear on the mechanics of Laura’s grand scheme, especially during the gonzo climax.

For all its opulence, it never creates a distinct sense of space like, say, Black Narcissus, where an ethereal version of a Himalayan convent was created on an English soundstage. Yet The Tales of Hoffman is never less than dazzling, given the elaborate, multi-dimensional sets, fanciful costumes, and opulent makeup design.

In only 80 minutes, Red, White and Blue tries to tackle a lot of Logan’s life (his relationships with his parents, his wife, colleagues, and wayward kids on the beat) and as such can feel a bit scattered. It’s the only Small Axe installment that feels like it might have worked better as its own series.

Keeping in mind that he was well aware of the presence of the camera—as was everyone during the cast recording session for the Broadway hit Company—lyricist-composer Stephen Sondheim comes off as the kindest, gentlest genius you can imagine in Original Cast Album: Company.

While some are hailing Mission: Impossible — Fallout as something truly special, I wouldn’t go quite that far. It does, however, offer as many thrilling dance numbers—I mean, action sequences—as any of the other installments.

Brosnahan trades in the quick quips of Mrs. Maisel for a quieter intelligence and vulnerable uncertainty.

In its eagerness to please, Eighth Grade does go for some sunnier touches that feel good in the moment but don’t necessarily ring true upon closer inspection.

The film is an admirable argument for the legitimacy of psychotherapy, especially for the time, played out in an affluent Chicago suburb.

Ramsay, whose Ratcatcher was noxiously obsessed with the miseries of life in a 1970s Glasgow housing complex, finds a locus in Morvern’s stunned grief. Morvern Callar is equally bleak, but to a purpose.

As The Death of Stalin goes on, its cleverness withers into something more wearying.

For all its silliness, the musical also taps into something existential, thanks to its ticking-clock structure. As the hours slip away and impending separation looms over every note, On the Town becomes a bittersweet reminder that all our days are numbered.

I defy anyone to resist the pair’s commitment to their bits, many of which involve hidden-camera work on the streets of Toronto—or above them.

Certainly the movie’s two nods toward the grim reality of warfare – the shooting of one prisoner and an offscreen mass execution at the end of the film – carry less weight than they should because of what surrounds them. Such glibness makes The Great Escape an enduring entertainment, not a classic.

Showing Up is an argument for valuing the artistic process over the art—and each other, above all else.

You’ll have to look for a spirited defense of the movie’s snowballing narrative, as well as the complicated character motivations driving it, elsewhere. I’m here to tell you to set much of that aside, breathe in the precious spice that has brought warring parties to the desert planet of Arrakis, and simply take the trip.

Those nightmares we’ve all had about being chased by some relentless, unstoppable monster? This is the movie adaptation.

Antebellum—if you stick with it—reveals itself to be a sharp consideration of the lasting legacy of American slavery, right down to the present day.

Campion’s camera captures the sort of things most costume dramas are too fussy to notice: mirrors and windows that bifurcate Isabel’s distressed face; the bleary darkness of her home with Osmond, where the doors close behind her like those of a tomb; a slide into slow motion when one character smells a flower that has been given to her and another character crucially notices.

Though nowhere near as ambitious an undertaking as his 1967 Playtime, this Monsieur Hulot outing is till a delightful example of the gentle satire of silent clown Jacques Tati.

A bit ham-fisted in its call to arms, Foreign Correspondent also fails in trying to force a romance between McCrea and Day. But there are plenty of signature Hitchcock sequences to recommend it.

I’ve liked certain Marvel films better than any of these three, but no MCU installment (by no fault of its own) can offer what Glass does: the experience of opening a comic book for the first time.

As for the actors, Weisz gets to showcase her skill for subterfuge, while Stone reveals new levels of manipulation and deceit. But it’s the lesser-known Colman, as Queen Anne, who ultimately wrests control of the film.

A paean to the nuclear family and the fertile soil where it ostensibly grows best—the American Midwest—Meet Me in St. Louis would feel a bit claustrophobic, if not cultish, if it weren’t for Vincente Minnelli’s elegant camerawork and Judy Garland’s spiky performance.

There’s a tactile quality to the film—the way softly glowing lamps float alongside characters in dark hallways or fabrics drape around them and flicker violently in the wind—that makes everything feel simultaneously graspable and out of this world.

Tell me that you have an expedition movie with clear objectives and unlikely odds, anchored by a compelling cast of characters, and you have my attention. Add dinosaurs and you have my money. Make it all work—especially within the context of the Jurassic franchise—and you have a miracle.

Hang in there with Together Together. What may seem at first like a slender character study eventually grows into a more expansive exploration of loneliness, before ending on a perfect, powerhouse final shot.

I was most drawn to the simpler, early sequences, where Roz finds meaning not in proving her worth through work, but in genuine relationship.

The movie’s best moments – especially those involving the futile acorn hunt of a squirrel/rat – are those in which [Wedge’s] wicked wit shines through.

It’s no small thing to move millions of hearts, over many years, with the story of a possible murderer (and, in Red’s case, a real one) who gets a second chance. The Shawshank Redemption managed a small miracle in doing just that.

Unfortunately, as nuanced as writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ script is about sibling relationships and impending morality, it never allows this cast to break out of these types that are established in the opening scene.

Ducournau’s insistence on taking this scenario to unimaginable extremes may occasionally distance us from the humanity she’s also clearly interested in, but there’s no denying that her handling of craft and form—particularly the way the reddish-pink glow of a fire-truck’s flashing light filters much of the imagery—is masterful.

I imagine Rosemary’s Baby purists will be upset with the various references and connections Apartment 7A makes to the first film, a few of which are clumsy, but nothing was egregious enough to trip me up—including the final sequence, once again involving dance, which I found to be rather brilliant.

Penetrating as it is, Irresistible exists not to score political points, but to call for a renewal of the American political process.

If Starman works at all, it’s because of the way Allen gazes at Bridges, as if his mystery is her answer. We believe she’d seriously fall for this doppelganger because we understand how badly she’s hurting.

Plummer, so good in Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete (another horse movie of a sort), shines here, especially in one of those final shots that holds on an actor’s face and asks them to seal the movie’s deal. Plummer does, with flying colors.

Now, Voyager may not have the fine balance of some of Davis’ best films—Jezebel is probably the place to go for that—but it’s still, in its stronger moments, a fine showcase for an iconic actress.

Death Becomes Her doesn’t really work on a story or character level at all, but the central idea is too tantalizing and the cast is having too much fun for that to matter much.

There are certainly laughs and clever gags along the way, but there’s also considerable effort, without commensurate payoff.

There’s an intriguing idea and an incredible sequence in Scream VI—which is just enough to justify this follow-up to 2022’s Scream (which itself was just clever enough to justify reheating the series 11 years after Scream 4).

Still a fantasy, though a less mealymouthed one than The Devil Wears Prada, this follow-up to the 2006 Meryl Streep-Anne Hathaway buddy fashion comedy nods to the real world in interesting ways—fast fashion, corporate restructuring, the implosion of journalism—while still remaining charmingly light on its Gucci-clad feet.

It would be too dismissive to call Babylon—Damien Chazelle’s incessantly bravura period piece set during Hollywood’s transition to the sound era—a “giant swing at mediocrity” (to borrow a phrase the silent star played by Brad Pitt uses to describe one of his films). Babylon is better than that. But the swing still registers more strongly than the results.

If Knock at the Cabin is mid-tier Shyamalan, at best, it may be because I was more taken with these formal choices than the story, which riffs on the Book of Revelation in ways that feel fairly perfunctory. I did appreciate the final moments, though, which resist any sort of Shyamalan twist and instead rely on an emotional, diegetic needle drop that I won’t spoil here.

The Ugly Stepsister has macabre fun with what some women will do to make a shoe fit. It’s The Substance by way of the Brothers Grimm.

Given Kikuchi’s purposefully distanced performance, Zellner’s tendency to give scenes four lungs full of breathing space, and the often jarring musical choices, it’s almost as if the movie is daring you not to like it.

Gun Crazy is a burst of movie id all its own, a confluence of sex, sexism and violence.

If you’re on their wavelength (like Kumiko, Damsel is driven by a dry sense of humor, with the studied pacing to match), you won’t mind. But if you’re not able to completely buy in, the movie’s second half might feel a bit like the long stretching out of the same, sly joke.

It all goes down easy enough. And while never pushing the feminist angle too hard, Ocean’s 8 does ultimately become about the ways these women exploit the sexist expectations of men.

If the overall project of the Craig pictures was to domesticate 007, No Time to Die accomplishes its mission. But it was a bit of a slog to get there.

It becomes more interesting as it goes along (and gets slightly darker), even if it never entirely works as a cohesive project.

In the lead, Mbatha-Raw delivers a shaken, exposed performance that hints at the more familiar stories of domestic trauma (drug use, suicide, having to give up a child) that this otherwise super story might stand in for.

You can feel the ungainly attempts to force that material into tidy little narratives.

It’s at once deeply formulaic and—in terms of the faces and places we usually see on movie screens in the West—refreshingly unfamiliar.

Black Widow certainly suffers from MCU bloat—dutiful references to other installments in the franchise, an overly convoluted plot leading to a two-hour-plus runtime, an endlessly explosive action finale that takes place mostly in front of green screens—yet a strong cast and emphasis on character ultimately overcome much of those grievances.

If not a cohesive whole, then, Evil Does Not Exist still has its captivating moments as a modestly scaled eco-parable.

The possession scenes are the calling card for the Philippous as filmmakers, whose 360-degree camera captures both the unsettling otherworldliness of the ritual and the giddy naivete of the teens.

As things go very, very dark in the last third, the tone control starts to slip, eventually sliding away in the final moments, when what had been a sly critique of toxic masculinity turns preachy.

Medicine for Melancholy is one of those feature debuts that equally hints at the filmmaker’s influences and the idiosyncratic direction they will eventually head on their own.

Like Hereditary, Midsommar functions as an outlandish imagining of the effects of personal trauma, especially for someone who already struggles with an unsteady mind. Yet the psychology and the horror aren’t quite as holistically handled this time around.

The meta irony is that even as Scream 2022 is telling certain fans to back off and calm down, it’s also wooing a new generation. Luckily the film is clever enough to earn such … well, let’s call it appreciation, rather than allegiance. It’s just a movie, after all.

Murphy is committed, bringing back the same low-key charm he showcased in the original, while also undercutting Akeem by showing how he has come to represent the repressive Zamundan traditions he once rebelled against.

With a more streamlined narrative, it would have been stunning. As is, the movie certainly marks Diallo as promising.

You have a literally commanding Duvall at the center of it, wearing that uniform like a second skin. He’s more than willing to play Meechum as a monster of a father, while also giving hints, in small moments, that this is a man who has had tenderness of any kind ground out of him by a macho, mercenary system.

At its best, the movie is a destabilizing look at family as a big con. Yet the chemistry between Rodriguez and Wood never sings, which becomes a problem as the movie shifts to focus more on their relationship.

Blue Moon is a portrait of a man on the precipice of an artistic and personal cliff (we learn in the opening sequence that Hart would die within the year, at the age of 48). Mostly, though, the movie is about Hawke talking.

Rustin is a dutiful history-lesson movie of the type that usually fails to stir me, yet in recent years I’ve come to put more value on such efforts. If any acknowledgment of the difficult, “inconvenient” periods of America’s past are going to be banned from libraries and schools, then let art do what it can to fill in the gaps.

The style is arresting and the leads are strong, but the story runs out of steam.

Wendy, director Benh Zeitlin’s follow-up film, works too—but just barely.

Cat People is a lot talkier and less evocative than its reputation would suggest, yet it’s still a startling, psychosexual horror picture – especially for its time.

Gazer owes an enormous debt to a few obvious influences, but the movie has just enough vision and atmosphere of its own for the makings of an unnerving, lo-fi, neo-noir.

The clarity and imagination of the world-building carried me through, as well as the fountain of charm that is Paul Rudd.

It’s a welcome return to Luhrmann maximalism, if you’re a fan of his style. And it’s anchored by a wild, possessed performance by Austin Butler, who gets Presley’s singing voice and—more importantly—gyrations exactly right.

At its best, Eric LaRue interrogates the rush to healing and forgiveness that can sometimes follow tragedy in Christian communities.

Unlike Daze and those other predecessors, Selah and the Spades never convincingly establishes its own stylized universe, resting somewhat uncomfortably between the real world and a fully realized, believably hermetic place.

Writer-director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan) does more veering that navigating, but stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson (the latter nominated for Best Actress) connect on such a genuinely exhilarating level in the music scenes (especially the early ones, where they’re refining their act) that you end up rooting for them and, by default, their movie.

We’re largely left with an arresting return to the sort of wild work Cronenberg delivered in the 1980s and 1990s, if one where the shock is ironically missing.

This prequel—drawn from the novel by series creator Suzanne Collins—retains the hard edge that made most of those movies register as piercing satires of our reality-television age, rather than hypocritical exploitation flicks.

Skull Island circles around a number of intriguing ideas—about American arrogance and the post-war military-industrial complex, to name just two—but never quite coheres into anything particularly incisive. The movie gives good Kong though.

Rye Lane may verge on corny at times in much of its humor and certainly its ending, but thanks to Jonsson and Oparah, you’re rooting for these two in every moment.

This is scruffy around the edges, especially with the awkward insertion of its politics, but there is no denying the movie’s potency as a metaphor for alcoholism.

Formally straightforward and heavily reliant on the perspective of the oldest sister, Jaclyn, Bad Axe (whose title comes from the name of the town) nevertheless serves as a reminder of how ugly things got during that crucial year—and how the American dream is an unjustly contingent one.

I had no trouble believing all of the fantastic imagery that The Creator puts up on the screen; it’s the story I couldn’t quite invest in.

What’s missing from Johnson can be found in abundance in two brief, supporting turns. Zoe Winters, as one of Lucy’s clients, and Louisa Jacobson, as a skittish bride, knock out their slim scenes by bringing a unique verve and vitality to every second. Their characters pop as interesting, complicated, compelling humans, whose stories we want to hear. If Song had cast one of them in the lead, Materialists might have really been something.

This is largely an obligatory Marvel Cinematic Universe installment until it becomes possessed, quite literally, by a horrific spirit.

Suspense mechanics and psychological horror don’t meld quite as seamlessly here as they do in the best Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, but The Wrong Man has more than its share of masterful moments.

Cheadle is wonderful—weary and gravelly as an underestimated ex-con playing everyone’s assumptions about him to his advantage.