Femme acknowledges its tropes and clichés; the film never soft-shoes the important part they play in its structure. What it does with them, though, feels fresh. Revenge is often ill-advised, even nihilistic. Femme’s revenge is a stamped guarantee of self-destruction.

It’s (relatively) small, sincere and funny, and has more than your usual MCU allotment of post-credit bombshells.

With its impeccably framed wide compositions, immersive long takes, and a cross-cutting narrative style that touches on the work of Matthew Barney—or, in a considerably more mainstream vein, Christopher Nolan—The Challenge feels like avant-garde art more than anything else.

With Mona Lisa, Amirpour officially graduates from her position as an “up-and-coming” voice to a full-fledged genre auteur. However you title her, her hyper-stylized explorations of gender-based violence, punky female protagonists and obvious love for her craft make her one to keep watching.

It’s the most awkward family TV show you’ve ever seen, offset by a never-ending barrage of gags squeezed off with such a consistent rate of fire that keeping up is impossible. But there’s a silver lining: Each is hilarious.

Poe’s steady hand keeps the balance between realistic teen drama and the crime genre, allowing its examination of melodrama surrounding betrayal, rule-breaking and power-grabs to breathe true.

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’s a hagiography more than anything, one that does benefit from access to an intriguing library of behind-the-scenes footage, interviews and outtakes, but rarely does I Like Me know how to connect this material to any kind of deeper insight into John Candy’s psyche, with a few notable exceptions that ultimately aren’t enough.

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.

Though still a damning portrait of a country that has delivered its poor to the free market, The Old Oak is a comparatively gentle, reflective and even tentatively hopeful work.

While the informative aspects of The Deepest Breath are enthralling in their own right, the footage that McGann procures is nothing short of enchanting.

Well-acted and competently told, One Life arrives in the wake of two of the most formally and intellectually rigorous examples of cinema yet made on the Holocaust, and it can’t help but appear a little flimsy in comparison.

This is the most engaging and emotionally effective Moore doc since Bowling for Columbine.

Duvall dovetails the seasonal pap with her characters’ pain, treating it like ointment for their mellowing emotional stings. The message isn’t just about liking Christmas. The message is that everybody deserves a Christmas movie.

Wacky, smart, engaging and exciting, Get Duked! represents the next step in the Wright/Cornish school of 21st Century British comedy.

While the conceit is clever, these are not new storytelling techniques for documentary or fiction, and in Framing Agnes, they lack a certain follow-through.

With its crisply likable leads mixing it up with pleasingly chewy gangster stereotypes, it has the consistency of a good candy bar.

For the runtime of Cha Cha Real Smooth, Raiff’s clever script, affable characters and naturalistic direction makes it painless enough to sympathize with someone who can’t moonwalk, but will nevertheless skate on by.

It’s only in Dayveon’s final act that plot contrivances begin to wander away from Abbasi’s carefully calibrated realism.

Stewart and Erskine, on the other hand, are doing work so lived-in, so much more shaded than the nagging wife/girlfriend figures that typically orbit male immaturity narratives, that it’s hard not to wish the movie were about them instead.

As moving as the families’ recoveries can be, and as earnest as Greengrass is at trying to honor their stories, there is an undeniable waft of the familiar in his dramatization of their difficulties. Greengrass hasn’t found a new spin on this sort of material. You admire the resilience, but I’m not sure Greengrass makes you feel it.

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.

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.

The Pink Cloud explores the often reactionary nature of humans, especially when tasked with imagining a future completely uprooted from convention.

It’s worth watching at least once for the spectacle of the vibrant colors and great performances, and to be introduced to real historical characters, even if audiences must look far from the film to figure out what they were actually like.

The Sadness is incredibly gorey and gleefully embraces just about every documented taboo—but instead of an exhausting edgelord sensibility, it accurately depicts just how little convincing a crumbling society needs to obliterate itself.

Though it’s a slighter production, Oliveros’s film still has plenty to recommend it, with his smart direction and a raft of fun performances making for an engaging hour and half.