Despite or maybe because of its unusual, constant-reset rhythms, large swaths of the movie actually work. It helps that Derrickson has two genuine stars on his side in the form of Teller and Taylor-Joy who both, lacking an infrastructure for proper romantic comedies, channel that energy into an unusually convincing version of a romance that would normally be obligatory at best.

Fans of the series will likely bask in the warm feelings, particularly a handful of scenes following a one-year time jump toward the end, like Tolkien devotees reveling in final stretch of Return of the King; agnostics may regard this same section as if it’s, well, the final stretch of Return of the King, playing to the similarly unconverted.

Fortunately, Paddington in Peru retains much of what made the preceding two films such triumphs. The cheeky, whimsical humor is still here, and the childlike consideration of the world as a colorful place with endless potential for friendship and adventure remains intact.

Heart Eyes can’t help but swoon at the rich tradition of slashers serving as first-date fodder. It’s not especially scary, but it’s a thrill all the same.

Walter Salles’ latest, and most accomplished film, I’m Still Here, allows international audiences into this world of quiet resilience and powerful response to the whims of a dictatorial regime.

At times, Armand threatens to lose itself entirely in the fever dream it conjures, like the film itself is going to reach its combustion point and ignite, but it gets just enough of its disquieting atmosphere across to lodge in the memory all the same.

Grand Theft Hamlet puts the Bard’s work into a resourceful context, and thank God, because Hamlet is some of his dullest material. It’s a vehicle that Crane and Oosterveen first use to outmuscle isolation and boredom, only to watch it turn into a hilariously intimate source of camaraderie.

A dark, percolating family drama that eventually takes a stunning turn into the savagely metaphorical, writer-director Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill proved to be one of the most impressive overall features at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Though Quan and his supporting cast are often a delight, and the film’s fight scenes are worth strapping in for, this is a movie that makes a choppy mess of its brisk runtime, and wastes a lot of its potential with a molasses-slow, often baffling second act.

The Thing with Feathers can be a rich and somewhat bizarre experience about processing trauma, accepting death, and moving on.

Without a strong thesis, cohesive plot or narrative payoff, A24 thriller Opus struggles to communicate the filmmaker’s messy musings.

Despite an incredibly talented cast of top-tier comedy talent, the film fails to establish a cohesive comedic tone, becoming only more unmoored when it reaches for unearned emotional profundity later on.

For Zodiac Killer Project to work, it would have to be coming from a filmmaker who is fully ready to admit their own culpability in continuing to fuel the worst aspects of the genre they intended to exploit. That kind of brutal self-admission would have taken a great deal of courage, but Shackleton can’t quite get there, even if he comes close at times.

Most of the movie is colorfully antic; another fearsome villain is a dead fish voiced by Ricky Gervais (too easy), and at one point a bunch of buildings come to life and rampage like meta-kaiju. There is, however, surprisingly psychological depth afforded to Petey’s clone, Li’l Petey (Lucas Hopkins).

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is rife with chaos—a patient mysteriously vanishes, a rodent goes violently rogue, a tibia abruptly breaks through flesh—yet the film’s central fascination lies in the crushing call of the void.

Metrograph Pictures’ Gazer is effectively a neo-noir mystery, one with heavy 1980s and especially 1970s stylistic trappings, with elements of surrealistic horror dancing on the edges.

If you’ve bounced off Yamada’s output in the past, this flick will probably do little to convince you otherwise, but for fellow fans of this introspective style, her latest has that same deft touch.

Feverishly funny, gruesomely gross and unrelenting in its satirical critique of both beauty standards and the designation of a cinematic “protagonist,” director Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister is a film that will have jaws dropping at Sundance this year.

Flight Risk feels like a free-floating outlet for a little bit of rage and a little bit of shtick, both Mad Mel standbys that he seems unwilling to really examine, within these confines or elsewhere.

Companion becomes a gleefully silly, crowd-pleasing techno-romp, a Turing test valentine for those still learning to better love themselves.

This is a confidently directed and visualized debut with a strong central performance, albeit one not fully supported by its screenplay.

Back in Action functions modestly well as a welcome back to the screen for Cameron Diaz, who is still capable of being as charming today as she ever may have been. It even functions decently well as an action movie for the specific, too-narrow frames of time where Diaz and Foxx are thrashing wave after wave of nameless mooks–whoever the choreographer and stunt coordinators are here, they’ve done the heaviest lifting of anyone on the project. But the film feels absolutely threadbare in all other dimensions.

Jharrel Jerome gives his all, but without a screenplay to stand on, balance is impossible.

Wolf Man grasps the sobriety of how easily men are acculturated to violence by other men, but loosens its hold around the start of its final act: the insularity of its world becomes a crutch rather than an asset, and the plot reassigns the task of solving male abandon to its female characters.

Mostly, though, the movie’s cartoonishness feels pitched just right, a heightened silliness that the characters’ circumstances keep bringing back to earth.

The Prosecutor is often at odds with itself, but is saved by the sheer, bravura intensity of its superior action thriller side.

If Gudegast is indeed aiming for Michael Mann, as some contemplative shots and a synth-y score suggest, he’s arguably missed the mark wider than ever. If he’s hoping to chart his own territory, well, Pantera spends a lot of time in the wilderness – before teasing another sequel, of course, where surprise will be even harder to come by.

Extremely Unique Dynamic is stream-of-consciousness comedy, feeling every bit like something that was filmed over the course of five days, as was reportedly the shooting schedule.

The results are diverse, intimate, harrowing, and deeply moving, while the existence of the anthology itself feels nothing short of miraculous.

Don’t Die offers an engrossing window into the mania of a unique individual, one with the outlandish resources to do something that no normal person would even be able to dream about attempting.

All in all, Vengeance Most Fowl casts a wide net–calculated as a return to the franchise that is clever enough for adults and charming and broad enough for kids, regardless of whether they have any familiarity at all with its characters.

In the end, A Complete Unknown neither meaningfully conveys Dylan’s mythology nor exposes him as human. There’s more fulfillment to be gained from listening to “The Very Best of Bob Dylan.”

Even for the uninitiated the tunes prove to be well presented and peppered in ways that drive the narrative forward, and everything from grand dance sequences to moments cuddling on a couch are done in convincing and effective ways.

The result is a movie that seems more interested in instruction and reassurance than pushing at or playing with sexual kinks. In other words, it’s ultimately about as sexy and unpredictable as a corporate performance review.

Jenkins brings a little more color and variety to the proceedings, and even a smidgen of royal-family bitchiness in the early dynamics of Mufasa’s adopted family – though the lion who would be Scar, through no fault of Harrison’s, doesn’t exactly give us access to the fullness of his emotional journey.

At once Coppola’s most coherent and least interesting film to date, The Last Showgirl feels designed for pre-release award body screenings, where its most unique elements – a worthy, game ensemble cast! An arresting lead performance! A careful, loving attention to showgirl decor and costuming! – can be itemized and lauded on a voting ballot, rather than them adding to a complex and effective film.

The Damned gets by more than well enough via the elemental strength of its moral dilemma and the pristine beauty and unrelenting inhospitality of the Icelandic wilderness that is its scene-stealing star.

Carry-On is good for a chuckle in fits and starts, primarily when dealing with the easily imagined workday horrors of dealing with irrational holiday travelers in a packed American airport, or the behind-the-scenes camaraderie of the TSA with their bingo cards for items such as confiscated drugs, weapons or embarrassing sex toys. There’s also a few well-executed action sequences.

Regardless of how you approach it, The Girl with the Needle remains an absolutely harrowing piece of historical horror, with an atmosphere of coldness and all-too-real misanthropy that captures a searing sense of truth.

By telling a decidedly bare-bones version of a story known for its scale and excess, The Return’s harsh landscape, stark costume choices, and violent undertones highlight the all-too-human struggles at its center in ways that make its ancient source material feel brand new.

As ruthless as some of the deaths can be, and tongue-in-cheek as the movie’s heightened reality becomes, Y2K remains affectionate toward its characters; it has a surprising amount of warmth and sweetness for what’s essentially a comedy about teens trying to get laid that pivots to a comedy about teens getting hacked to death by robots.

The film chooses to excise almost all of the original’s supernatural elements, opting instead to tell a gritty tale about war and trauma that manages to feel surprisingly modern for all its spears and loincloths.

Nosferatu is a hell of a picture. If Eggers often appears to be reaching as far back as possible for his cinematic influences, riffing on a silent movie allows him – forces him, even – to reveal his more modern sensibilities, where men are repped by the contorted, strangled scream face of Hoult and the ineffectual Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose wife Anna (Emma Corrin) is this story’s version of Lucy from Dracula. In a plague-ridden town, it’s Ellen’s visionary, full-tilt fever that allows her to more closely commune with the evil around her, maybe even finding a hint of sick ecstasy. Nosferatu, in its enveloping-shadow way, finds more than a hint.

All in all, Get Away becomes surprisingly effective by the time all is said and done, bleakly satirical, bloody and a far cry better than the trite parody of director Steffen Haars other 2024 collaboration with Nick Frost, Krazy House.

The missing ingredient here is no doubt Lin-Manuel Miranda, who lent his now iconic style to the first film (fret not, you can hear his work in the upcoming Disney film Mufasa: The Lion King).

At the end of the day, Sweethearts just feels wan and inconsequential as a result of its lack of focus.

A visually sumptuous and evocative, but uneven feature.

The Piano Lesson is an adaptation, and a directorial debut that absolutely has me excited for what he attempts next.

It’s directed and edited in totally competent fashion. But none of that justifies taking the time to watch an often tedious reworking of a story you’ve already seen so many times before.

This film is as good as this project could ever hope to be, and it bodes well that Part Two will live up to everything that’s been set up here. When granted the chance to see them back-to-back, we just may, as the song goes, all be changed for the better. After this first act, it’s already safe to claim that Wicked is frickin’ Oz-some.

Street Trash is having a blast as it turns most of its characters into puddles of goo, and that’s all you can really ask of it.

At the very least, it manages to remind us of how miraculous the commitment of human ingenuity can be, when it comes to making a new life possible.

All We Imagine as Light is both admirably restrained and deliberately poetic, painting its constrained women with nuance and empathy, before they light up a narrow path out of liminality.

If only Red One had a bit more respect for its audience. We can all use a reaffirming message this holiday season, but this stuffs stockings with little more than hot air. I’d have preferred some coal. There’s at least a use for that.

It’s to the film’s credit that its writer-director resists pretty much every one of those conventional impulses, steering his breezy but meandering story in unexpected directions, letting it simply develop into a character portrait of two emotionally polarized individuals.

Credited to being “based on an original idea” from star Daisy Ridley, Magpie works in fits and starts as a portrait of an unbelievably, almost comically toxic marriage, but never aspires to really plumb the psyches of its characters or present them with anything but the most obvious and unchallenged choices.

Enjoyable as it is, Scott’s movie is adrift in a closed system, a massive warship floating around a coliseum.

Despite the amateurish lack of comic or dramatic timing, Christmas Pageant does have some old-fashioned charm.

There’s something rattling around, somewhere in Heretic, dealing with the power and limitations of belief, a movie that aspires to the deviousness of something like Barbarian, to which its setting bears the mildest of superficial resemblance. At some point, it escapes into the night without much trace.

Ultimately, the ambiguousness of the conclusion can’t really dim the engrossing and nigh-mystical sense of enrapturement that Meanwhile on Earth can project when it’s really firing on all cylinders.

With a heartbreaking lead performance from Jean-Baptiste at its center, Leigh has crafted one of the most sincere slice-of-life films to come out of British cinema in recent years.

Eastwood, still so earnestly attuned to the mechanics of personal guilt and faltering systems, finds timelessness in that growing unease.

Like an unstable particle of antimatter–which beyond all reason becomes a major plot point, if you can believe that–Time Cut begins to rapidly deteriorate in legibility in its third act, before spinning totally out of control.

Through this adaptation, Mielants mourns the lives lost to these institutions while simultaneously providing a timely reminder of the danger of passive complicity.

Don’t Move’s protagonist may be rendered inert, but the film retains just enough energy and menace to spare.

The traditional, closed-door design of the election invites an inherent layer of mystery and conspiracy, and the staggered voting process – the tallies of each vote are announced in front of the cardinals, giving them a brief recess to reconsider who is worth throwing their weight behind before having another go – provides an attractive structure for drama.

As the final level in this game of go-along, Venom: The Last Dance is still figuring out what a Venom movie needs to be, a tricky juggling of tone and spectacle that will be amusing enough for those tuned into this series’ squishy, uncomplicated rhythms and a numbing headache for folks bewildered by the chaotic and often rudderless existence of a Venom trilogy.

Perhaps the film works better as a run-of-the-mill horror comedy about a woman who regrets sacrificing her career to start a family, but as a so-called revolutionary take on motherhood, Nightbitch is stagnant and spends too much time chasing its own tail to an unsatisfying conclusion.

[Keaton] has the kind of presence that makes you sit up and pay a little more attention to whatever he’s saying, and his restless, punchy manner is unsentimental enough to sell sappy material, even as he appears to sidestep it. Goodrich ultimately requires more sidestepping than one man can handle.

Smile 2 ultimately seems struck dumb by its own possibilities, and gets stuck franchising hopelessness.

On the whole, for a filmmaker at the start of her career, The Balconettes is a rather impressive display of Merlant’s talents. It balances its more serious subject matter with dark humor to navigate a modern world where it feels as though women are more at risk than ever before, and it does so with stylistic flair.

It’s no wonder why Schrader, an older artist whose life and career have been defined by a seemingly limitless series of controversies, took to bringing to the screen the story of Leonard Fife.

Blitz might be a story of a war-torn metropolis and its inhabitants, but even so it feels bogged down by its ever-mounting tragedies.

Where Burroughs achieved the profound in the brevity of the novella, Guadagnino punishes you with longwindedness, ending after (non-final) ending souring the film into a clock-watching endurance test.

For a touch-and-go exercise in hoping the audience will fill in not just the narrative blanks but the emotional ones, there’s We Live in Time.

In the end, The Apprentice is a story whose central character wouldn’t really justify the telling of said story in normal circumstances, except for the fact that he eventually became a ruinous president of the United States.

The Shrouds might not be Cronenberg’s most accessible or cohesive film, but it’s just as muddled as the process of coping with mortality in a world where we are pulled steadily further from what makes us human.

Though Nickel Boys is at least in part about Black oppression and the suffering that comes along with it, Ross uses the movie’s point of view to avoid making a movie that turns that suffering into a marquee attraction or an endurance test.

With his careful attention to the controlled emoting from both Swinton and Moore, so free of showy tearjerking or breakdowns, Almodóvar humanely and pointedly avoids turning The Room Next Door into an issue movie dedicated to assisted suicide. Then the movie backs into feeling like one anyway.

Rarely does it ever genuinely feel like a horror movie at all, in fact. Instead, it’s more like a halfhearted feminist kitchen drama, with the occasional “scary” beat inserted under protest, a horror film via technicality of labeling and marketing rather than any particular intent. It wants to be just about anything but.

The promise of more music keeps the movie on life support when its drama threatens to flatline. When these sequences gradually recede from the movie, it feels as if someone should call an ambulance, but it’s also too late. What’s left are shadows of what might have been Saldaña and Gomez’s best on-screen performances, or Gascón’s breakthrough.

This is a sequel that literally puts on trial not simply its protagonist, but the very storyline that preceded it, making mockery of the simplistic readings that it engendered, while at the same time engaging in the kind of hoarish courtroom antics that make the musical sequences feel almost vérité in stylistic contrast.

The history baked into Maria is fascinating, one of the film’s greatest strengths.

Who we really are versus who we hope we are is a source of phenomenal dramatic tension in any genre. Throw in some horror concepts and some scary atmosphere and you’ve got what’s (hopefully) a compelling concoction about the fear of facing your true self, and the fear of learning those closest to you aren’t who you thought they were.

The “Eephus” pitch is an apt characterization for the film that now shares its name, an odd, surprising story about a baseball game with seemingly little to no stakes, that continues on for long after it should’ve already ended.

The strong results of segments like “Stork,” “Live and Let Dive” and “Stowaway” buy the series a brief reprieve for now, but the yearly releases feel increasingly like a beast that will never be satiated.

For every beat of affecting brutalism, there is an equally affecting beat of brutality.

Baker obviously loves most of his characters, and while Anora doesn’t necessarily give off warmth, spending so much of time in the visceral chill of a Coney Island winter, it regards the entire situation with nonjudgmental good humor and a touch of melancholy.

A discarded made-for-TV sequel to Rosemary’s Baby in the ‘70s is now just what most mainstream American filmmaking is, summed by prequel Apartment 7A: something stupid, easy and familiar to watch in the comfort of one’s home, confined to the medium that had once threatened to overtake cinema and is now doing so again all these years later.

Built from the same little monster framework as stuff like the Gremlins and Critters series, Frankie Freako is an unapologetically weird, esoteric ride through a very particular kind of ’80s movie, complete with what feels like an absolute suspension of the rules of reality. That makes it, at minimum, refreshing, and at its best, wildly entertaining.

At times, The Wild Robot feels almost elegiac – or is that just what happens when DreamWorks drops their worst habits and dedicates themselves to serving as a genuine creative competitor to their old rivals at Disney.

Hard Times is just as unflinching as Spring in its repetitive nature, but the second installment adds a dynamic approach to the material that was lacking in Spring.

Kuras avoids fashioning Lee as a generic war biopic by using Miller’s life story as a means through which to explore the myriad experiences of women during war.

It’s a star vehicle intent on dulling its leads’ shine, a slick blockbuster relying on narrative and visual restrictions, a cynical movie about the power of friendship. And yet, even as Wolfs undermines itself, it’s a charmingly prickly (or charming, despite its prickliness) mess.

Not only does the film successfully advocate for, and humanize, a populace that has been routinely silenced in popular culture, but it demonstrates that the destruction of these cultures has been emblematic of humanity’s extended downfall.

Look, as far as toy ads go, Transformers One is tolerable. It’s a little more fully imagined and rounded out than the jankier weirdness of its 1986 spiritual predecessor. The difference is that in 2024, a Transformers cartoon isn’t just selling toys to kids; it’s selling its own sketchy credibility to fans of all ages.

An overuse of stale horror conventions in an already predictable plot—combined with decades-old, thoroughly unchallenging ideas about women’s relationships to their bodies—leads to a film that claims to support its protagonist, while treating her like the butt of the joke at every turn.

The movie’s lack of a clearly defined villain might alienate some genre fans; so might the lack of an easily trackable metaphor. Others will find it a relief. Never Let Go is a horror movie more interested in what it can evoke than what it can state or even imply.