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.

A Cop Movie is artistic activism at its finest, carefully treading the line of fact and fiction in a manner that illuminates rather than obfuscates.

Luckily, Hewson’s grounded performance and Carney’s witty script largely succeed in keeping this treacly dramedy afloat.

Writer/director Minhal Baig’s ‘90s coming-of-age drama is one of realistic warmth, rumbling hopes and roadblocks jutting up in front of children whose very existence is defiant.

It’s a movie by a Black woman about a Black woman (that barely, blessedly avoided being directed by James Franco) that doesn’t just capture a nuanced and specific experience, but the rollicking and resonant digital audience that initially embraced it.

Fierce, fun, and steeped in youthful energy, it’s a film that’s willing to go to some truly dark places in its exploration of grief, death and what it means when we reach too far into the beyond, but it’s also never afraid to laugh along the way. That juxtaposition alone is enough to make it one of the year’s must-see horror films, an addictive thrill ride that never loses its own playful spin on some classic horror ideas.

Despite its overwhelming runtime, Occupied City is pressed forward by searing urgency. Anytime audiences are warmed by the serenity onscreen, they are promptly struck by the pain and chaos of each story. Sometimes the two coalesce in brilliant, unanticipated ways.

For Mercado, the real journey is not understanding himself on this mortal plane, but rather to prepare for the many riches that come with experiencing the cosmic afterlife.

Guided by Fabietto, the movie takes its time. It watches. It breathes. It captures life with a clarity even Sorrentino’s best efforts haven’t quite—which makes it his best effort to date.

Wonder Woman won’t reinvent the superhero franchise, or the origin story. But it does show how compelling they can still be, when someone is allowed to do them right.

While the script co-written by Kusijanovic and Frank Graziano is hardly revelatory, Murina is nonetheless a strong directorial effort from a first-time feature helmer.

Half mock-doc, half sci-fi two-hander, all bone-dry L.A. satire, Something in the Dirt takes a bemused look at those all too happy to exploit phenomena and each other—with the typical small-scale charm of an Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson project.

With its giddy and hypnotic mix of oil painting backgrounds and digital animation in service of a wonderfully inventive story surrounded by kooky, immediately lovable characters, Tito and the Birds is also one of the most original animated works of the year.

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is wry with a side of quirk, unblinking in facing its subject matter head-on while refusing to pull punches; it isn’t without mercy, either.

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.

For all its flaws, the film interrogates the limits of a biopic. And what better subject to do it with than the most beloved media fixation in recent history?

This could well be the old-man-yells-at-cloud meme in avant-garde cinematic form. Yet amid countless examples of pessimism both verbal and visual, Le Livre D’Image also occasionally ventures into hopefulness.

[A] triumphant narrative feature debut.

Regardless of whether or not Soderbergh once again made iPhone filmmaking look more visually elegant than most modern Hollywood blockbusters, No Sudden Move suffers from low stakes and a disconnect from the world of our characters.

Though director Reinaldo Marcus Green finds winning performances away from his lead, the milquetoast script serves the tennis patriarch a soft lob—one without potential to inspire or excite, and one that’s constantly reminding us that we already know how it ends.

Despite its important subject and impressive access, the surprisingly surface-level film doesn’t have much to say.

With such a fascinating “friendship” at work, Shirley could have spent less time on the impact of the husbands on the creative and personal endeavors of their wives, but it doesn’t.

Aronofsky can be a moving, almost disorienting stylist, but he’s all blunt force trauma here.

Despite stellar direction and cinematography, Holler’s pacing can feel gnawingly languid at times, due in no small part to Riegel’s inclination for brooding sequences with sparse dialogue over all else.

The frequently complicated relationship between mother and daughter has fostered plenty of cinematic investigation, but El Planeta easily distinguishes itself as a uniquely meta and universal addition to the canon.

Those unfamiliar with the director’s penchant for narrative opacity might find Music falling on deaf ears. For those up for the challenge, there are splendid moments of visual poise to soak in, but little to actually take away in terms of tangible storytelling.

The Woman King is confident of its indulgences—a few moments of melodrama, a natural but questionable romance subplot—because it earns them. It invests in its characters so that each new wrinkle feels meaningful. It may feel like an assemblage, but I could stand to sit longer in the beautiful space it cobbles together.

American Symphony itself is at its most mundane when focused on the professional life of the rousing, youthful musical multihyphenate. And, because it builds its structure around the creation and premiere of his first symphony, much of the film bundles that mundanity into the kind of behind-the-scenes footage accompanying a concert doc.

Asteroid City may be a minor work by this artist, but it’s still a magical one.

What makes How to Blow Up a Pipeline great, is that it so deftly wins us to its cause anyway. It’s absolutely electric filmmaking.

One could argue that the fairly straightforward biographical approach is meant to act as a primer for those have never once tuned into Turner Classic Movies; on the other hand, rapid-fire references to Godard’s contemporaries, including petty feuds and clashing reputations, are calibrated so that cinephilic savants can pat themselves on the back for getting the reference.

While West’s sleazy ‘70s slasher remains one of my champion horror titles of 2022, Pearl is more like giddily deranged add-on downloadable content that makes for an unexpected bite-sized treat. Kudos to the accomplishment, and it’s an ax-swinging slice of bad-vibes hoedown kookiness, but there’s a particular substance missing that X oozes.

The luminescent cityscape of Paris is captured through an honest, loving gaze in Paris, 13th District, a melancholy yet tender-hearted exploration of millennial romance.

What remains so compelling about O’Connor is that she actually used her popularity to challenge powerful institutions well before anyone else was even remotely comfortable with doing so.

The noir thriller takes us on a contemplative tour of a thoughtfully considered future, where traveling between Lunar and Martian colonies is as easy as flight today.

The hateful stance that property is more valuable than certain people’s lives, for example, is still very much with us. And Final Account demonstrates that it takes all levels of cooperation—including the most passive—for tyranny to thrive.

Yes, Ali & Ava is messy, and overly stuffed, and not quite as satisfying as it could have been—but if anything, that makes it feel all the more true to life.

While Plaza continues to make her case as a versatile A-lister capable of leading the more complex version of this kind of heist film, Emily the Criminal is a little like an initiation that never needed to happen. Her bonafides are proven. But it still stands as another showcase for her, as she shines even through its uninspired racket.

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

The Order is a fine police thriller in an escapist sense, but it also illustrates the cancer of hate at the heart of an increasing number of those in America.

Labaki’s filmmaking suggests uncertainty at best and lack of confidence at worst. She layers on the suffering too thick.

Although Morales is an improv queen, the overriding gravitas of Hausmann-Stokes’ direction makes most of the intended comedy wither and land with a dull thud. However, there are some solid performances from the whole cast, and the opportunity to platform this topic is a plus, and in some cases, likely vital to veterans who will watch it.

As in all of Petzold’s films, Undine builds a world of liminal spaces—of lives in transition, always moving—of his characters shifting between realities, never quite sure where one ends and another begins.

What makes the movie such a welcome surprise is Bonello’s creativity: Digging back nearly 60 years to trace an arc of trauma inherited through French colonialism takes as much chutzpah as imagination, the latter seen here mostly in the form of atmospheric horror homage.

There’s something to be said about humbly funded productions that achieve high aesthetic standards despite a relative lack of dough: When I Consume You packs an emotional wallop and looks stunning while spending peanuts compared to the average studio horror product.

Though it opens with a strong and colorful idea, by trying to touch on too many complex ideas at once, the final impression left by Stamped from the Beginning remains smudged and unclear.

Free Time, writer/director Ryan Martin Brown’s debut feature film, is so funny precisely because we all know this guy, and on some level, we can identify with his directionless struggle.

The film becomes a wry showcase for the director’s evolution as a creative who has been refining an unparalleled style for over two decades, with a sharper humor but without the more deeply felt pulse of films like The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox or most recently, and most effectively, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

The carnal Catholicism which permeates the film is at this point to be expected from the 83-year-old Dutch filmmaker—but equally so is the film’s ability to utilize eroticism as a vehicle to examine pain, paranoia and power.

As the film takes a turn into what it’s really about, A Wounded Fawn reveals that there’s something much darker and stranger than a by-the-numbers killer-in-the-house tale at work here, and what starts as familiar quickly becomes one of the most memorable horror films of the year.

The movie takes some risks near the end that underline the story’s central themes while also undercutting them. But Tully is at its best when it’s simply moving intuitively from one negotiated respite to the next.

Swedish director Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure, however, isn’t afraid to delve into the behind-the-scenes reality of creating mass-marketed porn—all without pivoting into a long-winded metaphor or cautionary screed. As such, the writer/director’s observations are unvarnished and exact, detailing the nuances of one of America’s greatest cultural tenets while adhering to an admittedly familiar cinematic premise of a rising star in a tumultuous career.

It’s a beautiful thing, Wright’s film, an act of historical tension made with the grandest of ambitions tempered by the most careful of portrayals—precise in its bloat and fearless in its fantasy—a reminder today of what makes for actual leadership in a world exhausted by flummoxed white men with sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nimona is a legend for the freaks and the queers, a story told in figures, archetypes and tropes. Nimona understands that villains are often made villainous for their bodies and identities. Nimona embraces queer coding and turns it into a subversive power fantasy.

Experiencing Branagh come full circle with Belfast is like getting an invitation to observe an artist come to terms with his roots. There’s the expected nostalgia, but also the graceful observation of the wisdom and clarity acquired with the power of hindsight.

Even if that’s the film’s real raison d’être—much of the screentime is given to aerial training, aerial romance, aerial battles—the result is fun and thrilling, and plenty of snappy jokes and sight gags will keep audiences of all ages entertained.

A fresh take on how our hyper-connected world observes catastrophe would rightly pick at this scab. But Alex Garland approaches this modern hopelessness with impersonal detachment, dreaming up an empty war filmed for no one.

Unsurprisingly, the substance of a movie genre is again enriched with his latest, masterfully spare and confident effort.

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off is a reckoning of passion told by those who best understand the price of that love story: Hawk, his loved ones and his peers on the board.

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.

The way in which Captain America: Civil War brings together a dozen or so heroes, sorts them into not one but two teams and then flings them at each other is its own special delight for comic book fans long accustomed to such things on the printed or digital page. And it must be pretty exciting for non-fans, too.

Even Dafoe, seemingly incapable of a false note or forced delivery, ultimately must fall in line with the movie’s broad-arc predictability.

While it’s admittedly beguiling to gain access to Kahlo’s innermost thoughts and genuine feelings, her diary has long been available to peruse, making Gutiérrez’s approach safe and somewhat stale.

Phillips simply tries to do too much.

For every overgeneralization Macdonald leans into or too-obvious historic parallels he lets fly, there is a corresponding performance, ebullient and transcendent—a purity Macdonald, and his viewers for that matter, can’t help but sour.

Singer threads the needle with such apparent effortlessness in stitching it all together, the seams are practically invisible. It may not be as showy as telekinesis or plasma-laser eyes, but it’s an uncanny gift nevertheless.

Playing in the stylish, piss-taking space of Gurinder Chadha and Edgar Wright, Manzoor’s feature debut attacks adolescent fears—failing to achieve your dreams, settling for less, fading from loved ones—with spin-kicks, fake mustaches and evil plots so absurdly sinister that even the most jaded, monosyllabic teens will have to crack a smile.

A sobering, beautiful movie that’ll haunt you for weeks after watching it.

The Bob’s Burgers Movie is a family recipe that warms the heart, griddle and soul.

There is a better film somewhere in Bring Her Back, but it has instead been formatted into an unrewarding and unrelenting exercise in unpleasantness.

House suggests that the nitrous-oxide hyperdrive of Japanese pop culture—as vivid now as ever in entertainments like Takashi Miike’s Yatterman, for instance—is a brilliantly imagined, if not in fact transcendental brand of therapy.

Kandhari’s film emerges as an off-kilter treatise on identity, and what cultural, social, and physiological elements can shape it, even well into adulthood.

Undoubtedly, filmmakers like O’Connor wish to honor their subjects instead of idly speculating. Emily performs that complicated maneuver with casual ease, proving that for the right kind of movies, actors make the best kind of directors.

DuVernay has already documented history with projects like Selma and 13th, but Origin is her most daring feat yet.

Rebuilding is a reminder that It’s a noble thing to want to make movies about everyday people. Their stories are worth telling. However, a key part to making that endeavor work is being curious about the people you’re depicting, and letting that curiosity — rather than an assumption that you already know everything there is to know — drive the storytelling.

By denying us the terror thrills of this no-win situation, leaning into shock and eschewing awe, Bigelow leaves us trundling out of the theater with only the dull ache of impending doom to keep us company. I could have listened to NPR for that.

To the end, Okja is as endearing, chaotic and awkward as its title creature. Sometimes, the movie requires the same loving embrace Mija provides for Okja—even though, unlike that portly pig, Okja often lets you down.

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.

Titane is not just 108 bloody minutes of bodily mutilation and perversion, but of blazing chaos inherent in our human need for acceptance. Ducournau has wrapped up this simple conceit in a narrative that only serves to establish her voice as one which demands our attention, even as we feel compelled to look away.

Considering the constant glut of mid-tier horror, it’s refreshing to encounter a film that’s rooted in traditional genre filmmaking without buckling under the weight of its influences.

The sweetness of the film finds an amusing complement in its strange eroticism, itself part of the queerness of its genre mixing.

Though Dupieux’s films have never shied away from violence and destruction, Mandibles preserves the filmmaker’s penchant for perplexity while asserting that life is a glorious thing—even in its distasteful weirdness.

The Monk and the Gun, the sophomore effort from Pawo Choyning Dorji, is centered on people feeling the full brunt of this experience for the first time. Set against the backdrop of 2006 Bhutan, The Monk and the Gun is a light but well-delivered political satire about the country’s first democratic elections following their king’s abdication.

On a scene-by-scene basis, though, They Cloned Tyrone is well-crafted entertainment, buoyed by its three major performances.

Porcelain War‘s questions around how we cope, and what’s worth fighting for, are as vital as ever with the world still full of ignored pandemics, government-sponsored genocide and ongoing invasions.

It’s well-intended, it’s heartfelt and in its small-scale fashion it’s surprisingly ambitious, but it’s also content to cheat its own premise and withhold its genre pleasures, which effectively undermines Barbara’s journey.

Seventy-five years after its original release, Key Largo proves that there’s a timelessness to great acting, a visceral thrill to watching legends go toe-to-toe that doesn’t dull with age.

Strawberry Mansion boldly depicts our society’s obsession with bureaucracy and profit in order to dismantle the tandem threat of boredom and violence that ascribing to these social structures entails.

With the help of Sennott, who co-wrote the script, Seligman squeezes every ounce of humor out of each of the film’s thoughtfully-crafted scenarios—for better or worse.

A delightful new-school deconstruction of old-school Romantic adventure that never compromises on the lushness of setting, color and emotion inherent in the latter, The Sea Beast rises to the front of Netflix’s animated offerings like a high tide.

A splendid showcase for Tran, a lead duo of inventive and endearing original characters, and a big final swing make Disney’s tour through Kumandra one worth taking even if it’s shy of a tour de force. Raya and the Last Dragon is an admirably mature tale in a rich and vibrant world that parents and kids alike won’t mind trekking across over and over again.

Wasted is super optimistic, full of fantastic food-porn, and oftentimes hilarious. I was getting itchy myself before it was over, not because I was uncomfortable or bored but because I was excited to remember it might not be too late to plant winter crops in my small suburban backyard.

As-is, Scarlet is a beautiful loll, content with its self-made magic.

By only brushing up against the factors that make its case fascinatingly, timelessly American, The Burial stays soft, a trial by pillow-fight—but that’s how you please a crowd.

After half a decade focusing on high-concept silliness, like the giant-fly tragicomedy Mandibles and the leather-jacket thriller Deerskin, Dupieux follows his more ridiculous impulses by letting the midnight horror anthology stay up until Saturday morning, blending gore and guffaws in an amiable, breezy comedy.

If Catherine Called Birdy falters at any point, it’s during the film’s conclusion.

We all look for magic in the world around us, and when we do the world routinely lets us down. Movies like this remind us that there’s magic, and life, in art—and perhaps especially in animation.