Though A Couple is [Wiseman's] first narrative feature in 20 years, the narrative structure documents history by fashioning Sophia’s diaries and letters as a performance.

It is a true artistic accomplishment that writer/director Mathieu Amalric was able to take Galea’s text, originally meant for the stage, and spin it into a vivid piece with such a uniquely lush cinematic language.

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.

A hushed, unassuming, intimate movie to remind audiences of the power of cinema by interrogating the definition of cinema itself.

She Dies Tomorrow is both the perfect film for this moment and also the worst viewing choice possible considering the circumstances.

Insightful, kind and exceptionally well-acted, Marte Um reminds its characters that they’ll find what they need if they just keep looking.

It is a deliciously amoral journey, the kind that has already secured Lanthimos ample praise over the course of his career. But this is perhaps the filmmaker’s most garish and confident endeavor, using Bella’s naive perspective to design a world so heightened that it exists somewhere between a nightmare and a dream.

Good Time features no shootouts or car chases—there isn’t a single explosion in the whole film. The Safdies and Pattinson don’t need any of that. Like Connie, they thrive on their wits and endless inventiveness—the thrill comes in marveling at how far it can take them.

So often the medium focuses on being flashy with quick cuts, long action sequences and epic characters who must save the world. But, not in On-Gaku: Our Sound. Here, Iwaisawa pushes the form in a new direction that ebbs and flows with the sound of music.

Pawlikowski leaves it to the viewer to determine for themselves the fate of his Cold War proxy parents, and to glean purpose from the film’s gaps in time, its reticence, and even its black-and-white palette. Married with the Academy ratio, the color scheme makes the film feel classic, but Pawlikowski’s desire to plumb his past makes it timeless.

Half musical and half drama, it finds balance in poetic stillness and exuberant motion.

More than anything, the script, by Prathi Srinivasan and Joshua Levy, is funny. And Plan B works due to Verma and Moroles’ authentic, lived-in performances. Their rapport is delightful. Their delivery spot-on.

As the argument expands, all of these men start to look less like icons and more like, well, men: Regular people with regular concerns and everyday flaws. They’re mortal and imperfect, and to witness their mortal imperfection is One Night in Miami’s greatest joy.

In many ways, Weapons is a topical ensemble drama; thrillingly, it has darker, more genre-driven ambitions beyond that. Cregger mixes all this despair, cynicism, and brutality into an impressively wicked and heady brew—and a ferociously entertaining horror movie, besides.

The Sparks Brothers is a thorough and charming assessment and appreciation of an idiosyncratic band, and the highest praise you could give it is that it shares a sensibility with its inimitable musicians.

Marvel’s rambunctious entry into the space opera genre—and the cornerstone of its “Cosmic Marvel” roster of characters and storylines—so perfectly embodies what the preceding months of hype and hope foretold that even its weak points (and it has its share) feel almost like unavoidable imperfections—broken eggs for a pretty satisfying omelet.

While never didactic or patronizing, the movie should expand the horizons of some viewers and be validating for others who may see themselves on screen. But to be successful, the movie also has to be entertaining. And Anything’s Possible is.

This is neither a pleasant movie nor a pleasing movie, but it is made with high aesthetic value to offset its unrelenting pitilessness: It’s fastidiously constructed, as one should expect from a director of Kent’s talent, and ferociously acted by her leading trio of Aisling Franciosi, Baykali Ganambarr and Sam Claflin.

The blend of artistry and genre is breezy and dense at the same time, a film worth enjoying for its surface charms and studied for its deeply personal reflections on intimacy. You may delight in its lively, buoyant filmmaking, but you’ll be awed by the breadth of its insight.

A joyous, resonant snapshot of growing into one’s own, and challenging even your own expectations of who you thought you could be.

Loach knows there are heavy restraints on art to affect meaningful change in the world. But he’s also aware of the kinship between art and activism: How art can educate people, and agitate them, and perhaps lead them to make more responsible choices in their personal lives.

Above all else, Birdman is tender, raucously funny and deeply tragic.

It’s a gorgeous, shattering film. It’s an unapologetically real film about a number of very real subjects, plot-agnostic but driven by character, consequence and compassion.

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.

The road trip always has to end, but the excellent Hit the Road introduces an exciting filmmaker whose journey is just beginning.

For those with the patience, and for those who simply love the way a fascinatingly unique film can so fully convey and shape a point of view, Under the Skin will reward the time spent in the theater.

Excoriating and exhilarating in equal measure, it is the first truly great movie to deal explicitly with the unique madness and malice that the global pandemic revealed, a kind of touchstone for a time and place that with only a few years remove feels at once as fictional and otherworldly as a sci-fi novel, and at the same time the very real-world harbinger of the political shifts that proceeded.

It takes a deft hand and a rare talent to make tyranny and state sanctioned torture so funny.