Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, an exceptional historical fiction, doesn’t so much transport you to the past as it brings you to the edge of the translucent curtain that often obfuscates history from view.

I Want Your Sex may not ultimately have much to say, but its livewire comic scenarios yield the kind of raucous, sexually charged entertainment seldom seen in Hollywood of late.

The latest entry in the overcrowded genre is a sobering, well-made drama that is well worth seeing, titled Truth & Treason, about the youngest person ever executed by the Third Reich for his dedication to criticizing Adolf Hitler.

Panahi has crafted a moral quandary fit for Plato; yet unlike his past works—including 2022’s No Bears and 2018’s 3 Faces (both of which, like this film, were filmed without permission in Iran)—there’s nothing theoretical or metaphoric on display here.

Although simple in appearance, Father Mother Sister Brother beats with the wisdom of an artist in his early twilight.

Cooper’s latest is clearly the output of someone who has been through personal anguish, and like Alex Novak, he attempts to use his pain as the basis for not just something healing but something hilarious, albeit something deeply imperfect, too.

It’s filled with powerful ideas about the many ways that violence—of the body, of the state and of the soul—manifests in men, and the generational ripple effects therein, even if it doesn’t cohere enough to be consistently engaging.

It’s a film that seldom comes out and tells you exactly what’s happening, but its drama is so lucid that before any real tragedy unfolds (or is even hinted at), you feel it in your bones.

From its gentle introduction to its jarring final scene—a lifelike anticlimax that makes sense spiritually more than logistically—My Father’s Shadow acts as both a retrospective and a soulful reconstruction, breathing life into the past while distinguishing the personal and pragmatic details that inform the complexity of a person—even one who exists entirely in memory.

Few films this year have been as soulful or as quietly defiant.

It’s ultimately a very strange movie, and a far cry from what anyone expects from even the most idiosyncratic biopics. But it’s hard not to wonder if Franz is ahead of its time, much like Kafka was—which Holland depicts by tethering his consciousness to our fragile present, and constructing, in the process, a bridge to the past.

The unfolding action is never farcical enough to make the film satirical or outright funny, but it’s also never imbued with enough historical gravity to truly matter.

Megadoc is a mood piece and a process piece, shot up close with lo-fi video equipment, but it’s never allowed to probe deeply enough.

Will Tracy’s screenplay adapts the basic premise and parameters of Jang’s original, but director Yorgos Lanthimos puts his unique tonal spin on the material, turning in one of the most sardonic Hollywood comedy-dramas in recent memory.

Considering the rest of the summer’s flotsam, My Mother’s Wedding is hardly a waste of time. In an otherwise grim summer, it goes well with air-conditioning.

Sovereign is an ambitious, above-average action thriller with the extra bonus of being a thought-provoking civics lesson.

To miss it would be to overlook a rare and compassionate work of art, not to mention one of the most honest, heartfelt performances of this or any other year in motion picture history.

Even without its numerous rug-pulls, which occur early enough that the movie soon takes on an entirely different tone, Twinless is a masterful example of shifting cinematic POV.

Although it eventually loses staying power, Lynne Ramsay’s ferocious relationship drama Die, My Love quickly seeps beneath your skin, practically holding you hostage in its initial half.

By focusing on characters who can seldom put words to their experiences—whether the ravages of war and trauma, the jealousies of adolescence, or the desire to simply no longer exist—Sound of Falling marvelously tells a century’s worth of women’s stories by weaving together the psychological, the physical, and even the spiritual, resulting in a dramatic tour de force of mind, body, and soul.

It’s Deneuve’s movie from beginning to final frame, and she dominates every scene with a gorgeous and contagious charisma that is bewildering.

How refreshing it is when a small film with a big heart comes along unannounced and captures your affection.

Between its recreation of that Greenwich Village apartment, its use of archival audio recordings of telephone conversations and its fuzzed-out cutaways to vintage TV clips, One to One...often feels more like a museum installation than journalism. But its subject and its music would reward either.

Despite the danger of G-rated sentimentality, which everyone involved heroically avoids, The Penguin Lessons is a work of surprising depth and subtle, irresistible impact.

A carefully considered mix of humor and melancholy glows in the fragile sunshine that bathes an isolated Welsh coastline in The Ballad of Wallis Island, a wan yet affecting consideration of lost love, forgotten bands and the odd ways those entities manifest themselves in our hearts and on our turntables.

It’s self-reflexive at times, and occasionally pretentious in its high-brow approach. But writers and directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel have not only made the story accessible onscreen, they have infused it with a raw emotional life that was less easily attained in print.

Bob Trevino Likes It, the feature film debut from award-winning short film and web series director Tracie Laymon, wistfully and powerfully recaptures a more guileless era in our digital lives—which the Facebook interface and the lead character’s cracked second-gen iPhone put at around 2010.

Black Bag is light, unpretentious entertainment for grown-ups, a solid 90 minutes of pure, mostly bloodless fun.