In Andrei Tarkovsky’s science-fiction masterpiece Solaris, a character observes that even in the depths of outer space, “we want a mirror.” Perhaps that’s why Ad Astra—starring Brad Pitt as an astronaut in the near future who travels to Neptune to find his missing scientist father—feels like the most visually arresting session of talk therapy you’ve ever experienced.

The Secret of Roan Inish is mostly a story about storytelling, and how folk tales and real life can intermingle.

You Hurt My Feelings bursts out of the gate with four or five big laughs, then only adds emotional layers and dramatic complications from there.

Unlike his last two films, Song to Song and Knight of Cups, which dithered in a metaphysical malaise, this thrums with a spiritual vigor.

A piercing dignity defines this infamous Tod Browning picture, in which a community of circus sideshow performers exact revenge on the trapeze beauty who exploits one of their own.

Crime may not pay, but The Public Enemy was one of the first pictures to recognize that it sure can be exciting to watch.

Bergman Island deftly interrogates the idolization of art and the lionization of artists, while also distinguishing between experiencing a place and sucking it for “inspiration.”

Put it all together, and it’s as if Gerwig had dumped all of her own complicated feelings about Barbie onto the screen. This Barbie isn’t a problem to solve, then, but an experience to share.

Strange and vaporous, The Eternal Daughter confirms Hogg as a filmmaker who knows how to transmute her most intimate ruminations in cinematically provocative ways.

The actor’s cadences and vocal register are different than the real Rogers (did I detect an illogical Southern accent here and there?), but he mostly embodies the lightness with which Rogers held the screen, the unhurried manner in which he spoke to people, and the way, while watching his show, the world stopped for a little while and you felt like someone deeply cared.

Witheringly funny and willing to explore her own (her character’s?) flaws, Blank brings a vibrant brand of comic honesty to the screen.

In this early feature, which he co-wrote and co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, Sean Baker displays a soon-to-be-familiar instinct and affection for characters existing on the edges of society. If his eye for casting and sense of narrative drive isn’t finely honed yet, you can still sense a unique cinematic perspective being brought to bear on an overlooked milieu.

Mostly a work of stop-motion, the movie boasts expansive, intricately detailed sets that the eye can’t help but want to explore, despite the horrors that take place among them.

As a storyteller adept at evoking both the mundane and the metaphysical, Nyoni is a talent to watch.

Deliverance is a harsh film asking harsh questions, less a thrilling adventure movie than an ecological, existential nightmare.

The Ross brothers—who handle the cinematography and editing in addition to directing duties—manage some indelible images, even as they stay as inconspicuous as possible.

Writer-director Paul Harrill stages a gripping early investigation sequence—in which Shelia wanders the home alone at night, asking any supernatural presence to make itself known—but otherwise the film largely consists of long conversation scenes that verge on the inert.

The movie wants us to see how the butter is made, nothing more and nothing less.

This is Mulligan’s show. Her risky, raw performance is the life force of an otherwise muted film.

Nasty stuff—of the sort, lord knows, that I’ve praised plenty in my time. But in this case the return on icky investment just isn’t there.

As a character study, Mankiewicz registers as something of a boozy cliche. As a political project, the film is erratic.

Unlike its protagonist, Babygirl is too easily satisfied.

The structure doesn’t work and the characters feel like screenplay concoctions (despite being drawn from a Larry McMurtry novel), but that hardly matters considering the three performances at the center of Terms of Endearment.

How thoroughly does Joan Crawford own Grand Hotel? She makes Greta Garbo superfluous. A star parade (and Best Picture winner), Grand Hotel unfairly encourages such comparisons.

Director Arthur Jones delivers a fascinating deep dive into meme culture, tracing how something like this can happen so quickly in our viral age.

To borrow a phrase from the movie itself, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a “terrible joy.”

This is a movie that’s honest about night coming on, but it also reminds us of the small things that will get you through that night, until the morning dawns.

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.