Being Eddie is not the all-access, honest recounting of a star’s rise that some fans would no doubt like for it to be, and it may well be intended to mostly serve as a table setting for the stand-up return that Netflix will presumably announce one of these days. But despite its shortcomings, the sharp-eyed viewer will still glean some interesting tidbits about the comedy legend from what is left unsaid.

Wright’s flair for freakazoids remains undeniable, but his focus on rebellion obscures the cruel machinery that incites it. That reluctance to linger too long in the muck of this world—to give perceptible shape to the apathy that creates this level of soulless greed—leaves Ben fighting an abstraction. It’s a devil we’re familiar with, just not one this film is willing to face head-on.

Trap House manages to be fitfully thrilling, pulling off a villain reveal at one point that amusingly but derivatively cribs from Spider-Man: Homecoming in particular, but it stumbles to some degree in its clumsy and tonally scattershot portrayal of American law enforcement.

It deserves a big screen if possible, though; Bentley and Kwedar have made an enveloping movie, one that might more closely echo its obvious influences from the comfort of home. This is a movie that belongs out in the beautiful, terrible world.

Caterpillar is a stunning piece of documentary work, both for its incredible degree of access to both its central character and his journey, and its unconventional style of presentation, which skirts the boundaries of documentary and narrative feature.

The movie works in its moment. It seems to know that an obvious, crowd-pleasing helping of franchise nonsense at least needs to have some kind of meat, however synthetic it may secretly be.

Die My Love is a powerful primal scream, only undercut by the question of whether it’s in love with the sound it’s making.

What Jan Komasa’s film gets right is how so much right-wing radicalization, especially in upper classes, stems from status-based grievances.

In a field full of would-be auteurs flailing against cliche and artistic malaise, Powell somehow manages to take a deeply familiar outline and breathe enough life and verve into it to truly stand out.

There’s no doubt that The Voice of Hind Rajab is a devastating and groundbreaking piece of cinema that achieves its goal of raising awareness about the plight of Palestinian children living under siege. But after years of documentaries that have captured the brutality of life under occupation without the farce of drama, and in the face of relentless bombardment from an Israeli state that refuses to abide by the terms of a ceasefire, raising awareness just doesn’t feel like enough.

Hedda is DaCosta’s most direct and purposeful adaptation yet, but like her other films, it’s missing some ineffable push past its beginnings into more expressive territory. The process of adaptation feels more confident than the conclusion.

River of Grass is perhaps best described as lightly informative in its tribute to Florida’s vast Everglades and the influence of pioneering ecologist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, more influenced instead by a desire to stir the viewer emotionally and soulfully, to invite them into the bewitching, intoxicatingly thick air of a place where life teems in every direction you could think to look.

Bugonia is ripe with tension and oftentimes hilarious, but its comedy is derived in an easy way.

It’s not a straightforward and overly simplistic critique of sports, but a genuine, rigorous inquiry that ends up using short-distance sprinting as a means of exploring how we derive meaning from not only running or competition, but from basically anything.

For much of its runtime, Good Fortune sustains a kind of witty, neo-Capra sensibility. When it comes time to bring that sensibility up to date, Ansari politely skips out.

Cooper isn’t reinventing comfort food, but he is cooking it well. You may not remember it in a few months, but it goes down easy and leaves you feeling surprisingly full—and in a world of stiff, larger-than-life, emotionally vacant Oscar-bait any day, sometimes that can be enough.

The movie illustrates the gambler’s lifestyle almost too clearly; it’s a great example of how big, splashy victories can still feel like too little, too late.

What [Gandbhir] presents is stark, horrifying, and infuriating on multiple levels.

The story unravels at a steady clip, inviting more voices and frenetic emotions with every furtive location change, the possibility of righteous violence looking more likely and less inevitable at any given moment.

Park is a virtuoso of tone, and for a while, No Other Choice hums with delirious energy: the precision of a thriller and the absurdity of farce. But once the machine reveals itself, its designs become clearer and more repetitive.

This latest Kiss of the Spider Woman is nearly as ramshackle as its fictional namesake; it’s not the powerhouse it should be. But it comes together. And for Lopez, its artifice looks more like a form of honesty.

Urchin more than occasionally looks like and has the immediate feel of a Ken Loach film, with its long lens scenes of Dillane interacting in real locations with figures who, as in the best of Loach, could be either non-actors or performers convincingly masquerading as them.

Though the threat of tragedy hangs over Fairyland, it never diminishes the film’s emotional weight. As a viewer, you carry a heavy heart that knows where the story is likely heading, yet some part of you still hopes a miracle might intervene.

The film’s a lot of fun, but it’s more empty than it needs to be, and even the piercing intensity of Leto (who also serves as one of the film’s producers) doesn’t allow one to take this nearly as seriously as it takes itself.

The craftsmanship, framing, pacing, and droll humor are admirable, and yet the film is never quite subtle enough to hit home the way it needs to.

Even with a bit of a dip in “Kidprint,” V/H/S/Halloween registers as one of the series’ strongest recent efforts, buoyed by the joyfully demented humor and explosive bloodletting of “Diet Phantasma,” “Fun Size” and “Home Haunt” in particular.

Yes; it stars a dog–but it’s also one of the year’s most potently unnerving and emotionally resonant horror films at the same time.

[Black] hands us a frenzied combination of action, comedy and criminal caper, patently absurd but well served by knowingly silly performances and solid jokes.

There are hints of The Life Aquatic, which Baumbach co-wrote with Wes Anderson, with its absentee father who may not be a great artist either, as well as Anderson’s train-set Darjeeling Limited. Gorgeous as Jay Kelly is, and as funny as it is in moments, it can’t help but feel a little minor by comparison – a little easy, even, on its man-who-wasn’t-there protagonist.

It’s not as sordid as it plays at, but Bone Lake is wickedly entertaining nonetheless.

It speaks to Anderson’s skill as an architect of distended narratives that One Battle After Another’s parenting motif functions as a concrete pylon for action and political intrigue and rank human cruelty; it’s the beacon the film comes back to time and again.

Day-Lewis, as expected, is utterly convincing inhabiting this space, with two very different showstopping monologues, one grossly comic and one filling in a defining event in his past. It’s easy to forget, given his legendary status and reluctance to play the game, how much fun it can be to watch Day-Lewis at work.

The movie evokes retro genre coziness and unease in equal measure, one creeping up from beneath the other.

For roughly the length of a TV episode, it floats above its ugly franchise architecture in a dreamlike state of divine ridiculousness.

Kirk’s film is a surprisingly lyrical and quite gritty, intimate thriller, one that makes the best of its unorthodox choice of performers to tell a story that is equal parts tender and savage.

Adulthood makes the occasional odd choice, setting up elements that seem like Chekhov’s gun-type instances that never get around to paying off, and it’s never quite as tense as Winter probably envisioned it would be, even when it builds up a head of steam. But there are enough moments of either well-calculated gallows humor or generational commentary to keep things moving briskly along, and both Gad and Scodelario find room to have a new definition of maturity thrust upon them.

Although the premise teeters on being twee, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey mostly works because its self-awareness keeps it from devolving into cliche … until it doesn’t.

Where Predators becomes fascinating as a documentary is not in its rise-and-fall accounting of the titular series, however, but in the way it examines the evolution of empathy or vindictiveness in those who have been touched by abuse and tragedy.

Fuller is in fine form with Dust Bunny, and with its goofy tone, and its unabashedly maximalist elements navigating between more subtle character beats, there’s a plenty to admire about this feature film debut from a well-established storyteller.

The Smashing Machine is sensitive, texturally rich, and technically strong. But the melodrama of Mark Kerr—the real one—was somehow more potent when we saw it unfiltered.

Heartfelt, gently humorous and possessing a keen understanding of the passage from juvenile to adult thinking, it’s a thoughtful and solemnly beautiful feature debut.

The Long Walk reaches for something profound and disturbing, while at the same time wary of risking a bad stretch.

Del Toro’s fables are always beautiful but sometimes irregular in connecting their artistry to fully cogent characters and themes. With Frankenstein, he has the freedom to reconstruct a story and motifs he knows by heart into a movie that’s intimately familiar with the soul of the original material, but reaches the conclusions on its own terms.

Destined to be divisive, it’s a piece of modestly indulgent arthouse horror that is equal parts bewitching and belabored, but at least it has the good instinct to trim itself to a short runtime that doesn’t allow it to become genuinely grating.

Somnium is an odd bird, a film that is difficult to predict because it’s clearly quite personal and clearly rather uninterested in the genre trappings it has used to dress itself up.

Graceful and honest in its assessment of the frayed bonds of marriage and extended family, A Little Prayer thrives on a duo of beautifully rendered performances from David Strathairn and Jane Levy, brought together as two people seemingly meant to be in each other’s proximity–not as romantic partners, but as confidants of a nature that is almost more intimate in its own way.

The ways in which Caught Stealing could be a more substantial, thematically complex outing are readily apparent, and you can almost feel the movie straining to be just a little smarter, a little more character-driven than it is. The result is a movie that’s very fun, but weirdly unambitious for Aronofsky.

It’s true, the specifics of The Thursday Murder Club’s story aren’t anything special, but the film is fairly remarkable in the way it centers and uplifts older characters, giving them stories that don’t revolve around distant family, precocious grandkids, or the bleak prospect of their impending deaths. Yes, the club’s members are all pushing eighty, but they’re each vibrant, fully realized characters who still have things they want out of life.

In pure plot mechanics and interpersonal dynamics, Splitsville resembles any number of Woody Allen movies, double-hinged on the capriciousness and endurance of love.

A squirmy delight with real insight into both celebrity culture and exploitative relationships, it stands out as one of 2025’s most promising debuts.

What makes Devo worth seeing is its account of how fluidly the band switched from an art project designed to turn people off to a band seeking a record contract.

Like a lot of Coen movies, it’s not exactly an outright spoof, but it takes place in its own little stylized pocket universe. Unlike a lot of Coen movies, Honey Don’t! doesn’t quite come together as a mystery.

Beyond the brutal violence and clever quips there’s a specific call-back to a type of film that flourished in the decades past, one that recognized fully that the specific joy of watching people get punched in the face doesn’t need to be wrapped in a dour or overly complex narrative.

It somehow manages to lack both the true moral murk of a great noir, while also eschewing the elemental drama of a great Western. It’s pretty good at both, though, and Tost seems like he knows it, without letting the movie’s solid craft go to his head.

It’s a movie that sometimes feels obsessed with music, and sometimes feels like an old man flipping back to his preferred, familiar playlist.

Deeply silly but more narratively ambitious than one would likely expect, it’s bursting (honestly overstuffed) with ideas and cinematic verve, taking advantage of a slightly longer runtime to really venture into increasingly bonkers metaphysical territory as it draws on and creates new cinematic tropes for movies about witches.

It’s an impressive recreation of a familiar format–but at the same time, Strange Harvest ultimately struggles a bit to maintain the chilling atmosphere that at first seems effortless.

Handsomely odd and yet evocative of universal adolescent experiences, Boys Go to Jupiter trades in familiar coming-of-age sentiment, but looks like no other film you’ve ever seen in doing it.

In many ways, Weapons is a topical ensemble drama; thrillingly, it has darker, more genre-driven ambitions beyond that. Cregger mixes all this despair, cynicism, and brutality into an impressively wicked and heady brew—and a ferociously entertaining horror movie, besides.

Curtis and Lohan haven’t missed a beat in their comic chemistry, and they’re now joined by the winning Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons. Rather than an attempt at some lofty reinvention (it’s Freaky Friday, for God’s sake), Ganatra’s take is more of a reunion tour where we bop our heads along to the familiar tunes.

With a silly genre premise that could easily have been rendered as either an Asylum-esque B movie or a four minute SNL sequence, Sketch instead stands out as a triumph of movie-making chutzpah, an impressively confident and well-executed combination of family comedy, adventure, fantasy and even the occasional twist of horror and suspense.

Cop-supremacy pulp may be hard to revive with a straight face; the laugh-a-minute spoof, though, is momentarily and gloriously back.

Together doesn’t succumb to the dreaded “metaphorror” effect, where every plot point and character serves a clearly coded metaphorical purpose. It’s often grimly funny, with the actors (and their talented physical doubles) throwing themselves into their roles.

More than a solid MCU entry, First Steps is among the most vivid, peculiar, and emotionally present superhero films of the past decade.

At its best, Folktales paints a grounded, nuanced picture of what it means to be a young person.

Thanks to some excellent FX work and steady performances from its two leads, the film is free to deliver on the monster gore front in a way that is particularly easy for fans of practical FX to admire. Clearly the product of a filmmaker who knew how to work within his limitations and highlight the project’s strongest selling points, it manages to get every bit of meat off those bare bones.

As a thriller, Cloud is half of a fascinating, disquieting, grimly amusing satire of online chicanery. As an action movie, it’s chaotic and vague, grasping to voice a critique of our digitally warped capitalistic age.

González-Nasser offers glimpses of what might make the work rewarding enough to stick with, and, with it, how elusive those feelings must be.

More than anything, it functions as a powerful encapsulation of the death of innocence in youth; a distillation of the moments when we come to terms with the realization that our parents may not be the valorous outlines we’ve built them up to be.

Whether you’re couchbound or attending a midnight screening, Ziam delivers just enough comforting genre delight to surpass the B-movie median–and for streaming horror geeks, that’s all we ultimately need to hear.

For all of its craft, 40 Acres feels fenced in.

The film only skims here and there the personal elements of how Ramsey’s obsession has shaped her mindset, instead working hard to seemingly unearth juicier “controversy” around the woman where little of it honestly exists in any way that is consequential.

In its fusion of Edwards’ craft with characters who aren’t thunderously stupid or unlikable, this is the best Jurassic movie in ages – in part because it works so comfortably as an ooh/ahh/run/scream monster movie.

The overall structure of the movie is just race, break for argument, race, occasional montage, race some more; it gets a steady rhythm going but it’s not exactly white-knuckle suspense, either.

It’s a little too pre-programmed and self-conscious to be truly witty, yet the tone it strikes and the genre space it carves out feels undeniably itself: part comedy, part sci-fi mayhem, with remnant notes of shlocky horror.

As sobering as the film gets, it remains, as a work of art and expression of Victor’s thoughtful voice, a real joy.

As a story about children finding a place to belong, discovering their true sense of self and realizing that parents and parental figures love you even when they don’t always understand you, Elio is a lovely, if not particularly original story.

It is a film attuned to decline, not just to the pain it can cause, but to how it refracts memory, presence, and touch. Above all else, it’s a film acutely aware of memory’s place in a person’s sense of identity, how it can unfairly slip through hands desperate to hold on.

As with the first film, the look of 28 Years Later is key to its effectiveness.

The opening of the movie has some perfectly timed visually-delivered laughs, like an early car scene involving an accidental failure to reverse, and the bottle-episode staginess of later scenes limits the visual invention. Still, by this point you’ve boarded the ride, and Oh, Hi! keeps you captive in a way that Iris only dreams of: by sheer force of Gordon’s personality.

It’s not often that a rom com/dramedy works so hard to not be the very thing it purports to be until it feels earned. But Song labors with purpose, executing skilled character work and intimate, honest conversations to earn her swoon-worthy Materialists climax and resolution.

An occasionally inscrutable and tonally unpredictable look at family, (lack of) empathy, self-centeredness and societal (and generational) rot, the film veers wildly between the genuinely disturbing and cynically comedic as it indicts Japanese society’s particular ennui toward happiness, satisfaction and aging.

Sweeney’s film, his second high-achieving, high-wire act in a row, lives on the line between yearning and helpless fixation.

A paranoid thriller that sneaks in its character study so stealthily that it takes a while to realize who is actually being studied.

Visually, the film can be a bit rough around the edges, but at its heart it is built from the kind of pulpy sci-fi goodness that longtime series fans have likely been craving.

If nothing else, The Life of Chuck proves that Flanagan’s control of tone and pacing extends to more than just ghost stories, infecting the rhythms of everyday drama with a haunting, heartfelt doom.

It’s fascinating and enlivening to watch how the fusion of two intensely familiar subgenres–serial killer thriller and shark-starring B-movie–can result in a work that is somehow brimming with life and verve.

The Italy-set farce can boast 96 minutes of smooth comedic chemistry, but struggles to organically integrate its believable characters with the madcap situation it’s building around them, ultimately feeling like it’s missing some final push into more subversive territory.

Mountainhead promises and delivers a takedown of those tech bros who now rule our society, although there are few genuinely schadenfreude-derived smiles to be had in the exercise.

It’s arguably led astray by an imperative to swing in the direction of pulpier (and sellable) revenge story, backloading its genre goods so deeply that when they finally arrive late in the game, they derail the more contemplative mood that has been established. Tornado is left stranded between tones, set adrift without a rudder.

It is a solidly sweet and corny live-action children’s film at a time when kids are mostly being sold live-action remakes of perennial streaming-service rewatch faves.

Friendship feels custom calibrated to give Robinson the best possible debut as a cinematic leading man. It’s not just a vehicle for one comedian, though; it’s a timely commentary that, in its own way, slightly deflates the pop sociology notion of the male loneliness epidemic—an idea that basically excuses the anti-social behavior of men who won’t or can’t try to make friends with each other.

Thanks to Trier’s visual flourishes, and the carefully constructed script co-written with frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt, the many metaphors of the handsome edifice connect brilliantly to the emotional turmoil of its occasional inhabitants.

The obsession of Alpha’s mother with her daughter’s health is never played for shock, but presented with conflict both internal and external, a trial encountered as a result of genuine love.

Lilo & Stitch is not only incredibly well cast, it also brings the movie into 2025 with some smart changes and thoughtful additions.

Gorgeously shot and intellectually/emotionally provoking, the film tantalizes with transcendent revelations but is simultaneously unbalanced in how it approaches its characters and minimalist storytelling.

Excoriating and exhilarating in equal measure, it is the first truly great movie to deal explicitly with the unique madness and malice that the global pandemic revealed, a kind of touchstone for a time and place that with only a few years remove feels at once as fictional and otherworldly as a sci-fi novel, and at the same time the very real-world harbinger of the political shifts that proceeded.

It’s a film that’s filled with so many wonderful moments that it’s a joy to behold, and even at its darkest it unfolds with a sense of radical frivolity.