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.

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

Radu Jude’s literalized mouthful Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World depicts, perhaps, the most accurate representation of the dystopia we live in, and the supposed impending dystopia that we’re in the process of arriving at.

Even when you might want more from its plot, and even when it’s sticking to quiet character drama over all-out monster assaults, The Boogeyman thrives on the implied thing that’s lurking in every corner, which makes it a very effective, intimate creepshow.

Throughout its near two-hour runtime, the film broaches many weighty subjects.... And to its credit, Genocidal Organ manages to juggle all of these hefty concepts rather capably.

Though Peele routinely prods at the Hollywood machine and its spectacles, here he unlades it all: Image-making as brutality, catharsis, posterity, surveillance, homage, indulgence.

He’s not really reinventing or subverting a genre. Rather, Haynes is applying the same smarts and curiosity he always does, openly questioning why a kids’ film can’t be as absorbing and thoughtful as any other kind.

What could have easily been a hairball of half-digested nostalgia is transformed into a mature and cat-ivating story that positively purrs.

In exposing the horrifying reality of giving birth while Black—and providing tangible alternatives for increasingly dangerous hospital births—Aftershock might very well save lives. Most importantly, the film immortalizes two mothers whose deaths never should have occurred, giving space for the innumerable victims of this crisis to similarly take action and memorialize those they’ve lost to senseless medical racism.

There are times during João Pedro Rodrigues’s newest film, The Ornithologist, wherein you can’t tell if it’s all a big sexy joke or if it’s an earnest, religious and intellectual inquiry into the boundaries of spiritual and physical adventure. There’s enough evidence in the film...to argue that it’s both.

Arachnophobes beware: Infested is the best spider-centric horror movie since Arachnophobia.

If you assent, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is endlessly rewarding, a tactile sense-memory tapestry of all the things that matter.

In depicting the rapid escalation from closeted bigotry to outright hate crime, Soft & Quiet communicates the urgency of identifying and standing up to similarly hateful groups in our own communities, which are never as “secret” as they wish to be.

After one of the toughest years that many people will ever experience and with debates raging on about how much the pandemic has ruined any progress for women in the workplace, it’s still nice to spend roughly ninety minutes watching how a tiny woman from Brooklyn helped break down obstacles for us bit by bit.

A perfect balance between sexualized/gross-out humor and sincere admiration for one of the wildest emotional periods of a human being’s life, Booksmart screens like a love letter to that best friend who was closer to a life partner than a school chum.

As video games and action movies parabolically draw closer and closer to one another, John Wick 3 may be the first of its kind to figure out how to keep that comparison from being a point of shame.

A delightful, refreshing dose of hope. ... Gondry maintains his well-documented individual, idiosyncratic style (plenty of cute little animations abound), but The Book of Solutions marks a significant shift. This is the work of a man who has stared straight into his own dark abyss of personal demons, and came out the other side better for it.

The world of Sugar Rush itself merits some mention, too. Deliriously inventive and pulsing with life, it almost seems a shame a real video game wasn’t developed from its blueprints; it’s a world in which one wants to linger.

Catch the Fair One is a grim and powerful watch. Its taut thriller structure keeps the story moving along.

While the doc is ostensibly yet another pop star chronicle in an era of constant pop star chronicles, it emerges as a surprisingly universal study in being a creator of any kind in the digital era—watching in horror as your ambitious self-imposed deadline approaches, navigating how generous you should be with your audience, saying unkind things to yourself for no real reason, and so on.

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.

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.

McQuarrie’s sense of building a scene on the barest of elements, communicating the most empirical of information, is so breathlessly impeccable, the plot barely seems to matter aside from creating easily understood stakes and giving Ethan Hunt a reason to keep, in the parlance of the film, figuring it out.

If you’re lucky enough to feel the presence built by this film, you’ll find one of the most rewarding and impressive genre films of the year so far, and proof that Geoghegan has plenty more to offer us as a horror storyteller.

With this deconstruction firmly in place almost from the beginning, and through wonderful central performances by Victoria Moroles and Segan himself, Blood Relatives isn’t just a very good first feature, but a deeply endearing horror-comedy that’s one of the best genre films of 2022.

It never hurts to be reminded of how powerful storytelling actually is.

The Taste of Things is, in basic terms, a very nice and sweet movie, although Dodin’s grief as the paramours suffer tragedy in their autumn years is emotionally punishing. But there’s not necessarily anything wrong with a movie being “very nice and sweet,” especially one as lovingly crafted as this.

Personality Crisis: One Night Only retains the impish mystery surrounding one of rock’s most underrated frontmen while building a beautiful and slightly abstracted portrait of a man in a constant state of transformation.