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.

In The Endless, Moorhead and Benson show how sustained paranoia and foreboding can keep an audience hooked as effectively as special effects.

The heist-adjacent film presents a mesmerizing vision of New York that relishes in the city’s more intimate details while painting an overarching picture of those who survive by scamming one feckless schmuck after another.

This may not be Assayas operating at the peak of his powers, but there’s no use in denying the thrilling efficiency that propels the overstuffed yet nimble two hours of Wasp Network.

At such a brisk pace, I Really Love My Husband makes its point with admirable swiftness and sharpness, becoming an often quite funny tragicomedy of romantic disaster, illustrative of what happens when two people with deeply unrealistic expectations collide and rely upon a lack of communication to avoid conflict.

Though the connective tissue keeping the film’s story together often requires its thin characters to improvise or otherwise overstretch themselves from sketch to sketch—emphasizing their relative shallowness as short story subjects—the medieval absurdity at the heart of the comedy always lands.

The movie is an incessant interrogation of what our young people are becoming, what they want and what the rules are to get it, yet its humor and humility make it stand out as one of the better recent satires.

The many great scenes in Janet Planet underscore the frustrations of its few bad ones: Even an emotionally tumultuous childhood can be a lot more absorbing than the indulgences of the adult world.

While China’s propaganda department made sure the film was imbued with a definitive moral, there’s a subtle pleasure in a spy story otherwise intoxicated with its own smokescreen.

Mank might not nearly live up to its subject’s crowning achievement, but it’s still a dense and enjoyable cinematic rant that would make its central lout proud.

El talks about designing that elusive “one of ones” sneaker, something so special it can’t be replicated. Sneakerella definitely isn’t that, but as a tween musical full of catchy songs, the shoe fits.

Through its colorful cuts of animation and superpowered antics, it’s a family-friendly film that hones in on the greatest battle of all: parenting.

Told through a series of metropolitan vignettes, documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Lo’s Stray deftly weaves together a sprawling narrative of human and canine vagabond life on Istanbul’s city streets.

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.

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

Don’t confuse Becky for a smart movie. It won’t teach audiences anything valuable, or even new, about the disease of white supremacist ideology. It won’t leave folks holding hands in solidarity against racism and prejudice at a time when solidarity is like oxygen. It will, however, provide a brief burst of catharsis through the brutal slaughter of white supremacist ideologues, for whatever that catharsis is worth.

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.

Fueled by Zellweger, Judy has the power to take you over the rainbow with Garland, past the bright lights, through the cold nights, and into the pure love between an icon and her audience.

For every nice small observation and delicately detailed bit of emotional truth, A Star Is Born is, in a larger sense, trapped by its own construction. Yes, it can be quite moving—but it’s moving precisely how you might imagine it would be.

The first film to grace the beloved franchise in a decade, Evil Dead Rise is everything you could ask for from an Evil Dead flick: It’s disgusting enough to make you physically recoil, it’s funny as hell and, perhaps most importantly, it might just wield more blood than I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Like RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Faya Dayi wanders lovely, liminal spaces between narrative and fairytale, between documentary film and something looser, something personally vérité.

Crafted with such delightful suspense that you can’t help but smile as you squirm, Brief History of a Family pulls from plenty of genre influences (its have/have-not friction and affluent apartment confines will be familiar to Parasite fans) to construct a tight dramatic metaphor encompassing Chinese parenting values and the end of a sociopolitical era.

As a piece of revisionist mythmaking, the film employs a staunchly feminist, Aboriginal liberationist lens, one perfectly molded for Purcell’s specific gaze.

No Man of God ultimately benefits from a woman helming a story about Bundy, as it provides nuance to even the ancillary female presence in the killer’s circle, particularly when he actually confessed to his deeply misogynistic crimes.

The Iron Claw focuses intimately on the Von Erich brothers, painting a tender and forlorn picture of their misfortunes, but it’s hard to call it unflinching.

In making its characters physically confront their heartbreak, Handling the Undead becomes one of the saddest, most contemplative zombie movies ever made.

In her debut theatrical performance, Cabello is charming and handles the script, particularly the throwaway lines that lovingly mock the genre, with aplomb.

Deep Sea‘s lavish visuals bring to life its fantastical aquatic daydream.