In the end, you can’t help but wonder why the emotions of these characters don’t pack as much of a punch.

By acutely matching this fishing folktale’s uncertain vibe as a film not about ghosts but about madness, Turner and MacKay’s “Rose of Nevada” moves with a perfectionist control through unknowable waters.

Finnegan’s Foursome will deliver a few chuckles, but the most hearty laughs will be for anyone who knows the difference between a 7 iron and a 7 wood.

This is a rom-com with many themes and an acute (sometimes pink) eye for current dating woes, social media pitfalls, and misogyny.

It’s a special little film with a warmth that feels as natural as the passage of time.

Maddie’s Secret possesses a tenacious commitment to clichés and stylistic hyperbole, and while it is certainly a parody, it is undeniably delivered with reverence: an ode to the idolatry bestowed upon characters like Rory Gilmore.

Nawal’s womanhood, colored by the intersection of traditionalist society and internet enlightenment in which she exists, is the real meat of “Unidentified,” a film that shoots for the juicy bite and gets the gristle instead.

Shoot the People thrives on its visual storytelling, amplified by composer Nik Ammar’s score, which is string-forward, strumming our inner fire to help us fight harder for change.

Acknowledging its aggressively absurd, obnoxiously obscene tone from the jump, “Never Change!” is one of those deadpan-yet-deranged comedies where everyone acts like a foul-mouthed, damn-near-sociopathic lunatic… but in a supposedly funny way.

Bird and Clausen’s performances bring an elevated energy to the premise, and their chemistry causes the overall film to come across as more romantic than horrific.

I couldn’t help but be moved by the animated picture’s digestible message, which resonates not only with parents and children alike but also with those worried about a social media culture that values creating an impossible standard by prioritizing image over being yourself. We’re losing something uniquely human between tabs, under signal strength, and over social content. “Toy Story 5” hopes to claw us back to reality.

For once, a Robin Hood film has come along that challenges us to think about what redemption costs.

Stop! That! Train! is shooting for camp, a style that thrives on an overflowing cup, but as a viewer, our perspective leaves us seeing things as half empty.

That sense of community solidarity and immigrant resilience weaves through the fabric of Sehiri’s quiet, observational drama, which tells the story of a tight-knit group of Black immigrant women trying to survive and make ends meet amid Tunisia’s unwelcoming immigration environment.

There’s respect to be had for films that take big swings, potentially even risking offense to deliver their thesis with gusto, but “Find Your Friends” is a sloppy, party porn massacre of themes.

While some elements of the story may seem quaint to other parts of the country, the Sheas show us that Flag Day may be Three Oaks, but Three Oaks is us.

Other, better movies will inevitably come to mind as you watch “Kraken”—not because it’s so bad, but rather because it might have been as good as you hoped.

Written and directed by Madeleine Rotzler, the film is a general wash of generalized muted feeling, where nothing coheres because nothing sharpens into focus.

This is a whooping-and-hollering movie. It’s more than satisfying. It’s bloody heaven.

So much of the magic of “Soy Frankelda” is the sheer scale and skill with which they present the unreal, at times almost overloading the frame with their menagerie of monsters when the narrative calls for it.

A movie that reminds viewers that blockbusters can be morally and thematically complex while they’re entertaining the hell out of you.

In 2026, a “Scary Movie” making fun of “Scream” movies, which from the get-go were inside-joke takes on horror films, is like a Russian nesting doll of comedy, where the laughs get smaller with each reveal.

Herzi takes great interest in the moments when Fatima’s mask slips slightly, allowing these instances to reach for something so real that it delivers a palpable fright to her protagonist’s core.

In every category, this fails to come up with anything witty or imaginative.

Lotta sound and fury (not just the gunfire, but Mike Forst’s “I Heart Hans Zimmer” score), but not much signifying.

One could also imagine a version of “Carolina Caroline” told as an “homage” to crime-spree movie tropes, with all the style and no substance. We’ve all seen that movie a hundred times. Rehmeier, though, cares about individuality, and he has a sense of humor. He doesn’t force chemistry, but he leaves lots of space for it.

While Ripstein’s satirical approach lends an appealing bassline, his format fails to capture the victory’s emotional resonance.

In 82 compact minutes, the writer-director navigates this brilliant idea with ease, ridiculing the ridiculous right-wing moral panic called “the bathroom scare” by showing its actual silliness at face value.

Signal One is modestly scaled and independently made, and seemingly has little in the way of a promotional budget, but it’s the kind of work that should have very long legs based solely on its merits.

Another World may not check off all of your boxes, but it largely succeeds on its own terms.

It wants to be the crowd-pleasing, audience-nudging, Easter-Egg-having ode to the toy line that Mattel clearly desires, while also avoiding accusations of taking the whole thing too seriously. In so doing, it’s a film that tries to serve two masters, and doesn’t have the power to really honor either.

These sorts of movies do more damage to the culture than any bloody horror flick you can name, because they make the unforgivable adorable.

With its effective visual language and strongly directed performances, “Backrooms” is more promising than anything else, a sign of what could be built within this subgenre and what its creator could make in the future.

Throughout “Renoir,” a film of morbid whimsy by director Chie Hayakawa, Fuki’s imagination fabricates moments that, in context, are fantastical but, at face value, appear relatively grounded. It’s magical realism that feels more plausible than otherworldly, which makes for a disorienting experience.

Tight and taut, “Forastera” is a major discovery, handling grief with alluring stylistic choices that enhance the already remarkable narrative. If ghosts exist, Aleñar Iglesias has learned the cinematic sorcery to house them. It’s a luminous, spellbinding movie.

Time and Water is very much a project trying to capture memory, time, and history, even as it melts before your eyes.

Mumenthaler’s oblique off-center approach makes “Currents” a strangely mesmerizing work, and up until almost the very end, its mysteries remain intact.

Not only is it one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time, but its every barb, every declaration, every insult changes dramatically once you and its characters know everything they fought and failed to conceal. It’s a film that changes every time you, the viewer, lose the chance to be fully present for someone you love.

While this undercurrent of death courses through the whole film, by contrasting it with scenes like the one described above, Aljafari crafts a film about resilience and about love. A film that centers on community and family, finding strength in this communion despite all the horrors that must be endured.

This is a serious film in the best sense of the term, a thoughtful film about people facing the direst problems with honor, intelligence, and courage that goes beyond the physical to include fearlessness about pursuing the truth.

Maybe back in the ‘80s this premise would have seemed fresh; at this point, it’s practically reactionary.

Corporate Retreat might be the worst movie of the year, not because it’s unpleasant, cliched, and gory, too, but because its filmmakers seem to have as little regard for their audience as they do for their craft.

There’s enough death and dismay to make that question surprising, but Victorian Psycho often feels too much like a comedy, one of those movies that nudge-nudges you with a “can you believe this” tone to the filmmaking without giving us enough to believe in.

A sharp, engaging thriller with a novel premise, “Tuner” puts the viewer into a world where to hear is to feel excruciating pain.

Saccharine proves that in a great horror movie, fear and helplessness work hand in hand. And James is expertly in control of it all.

Stolen Kingdom still sits comfortably alongside other very capable docs about the kind of vaguely criminal youth countercultures that spun off in the 21st century, intended to stick it to the man: “Secret Mall Apartment” and the upcoming “Santacon.”

Passenger is a fairly solid bit of genre craftwork that is a lot more impressive than its desultory release might suggest.

Instead of assessing, it observes and assumes the audience is as enraptured with the subject’s insouciance as the filmmakers are.

During the course of the film, which is directed by Andrew Bernstein in a visually unmemorable, by-the-book manner characteristic of many big-budget action shows, Greer muses on the line separating civilization from savagery and where he stands in relation to it.

In a sense, this is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood,” one of the other Kurosawa’s unequivocal masterpieces, and it earns that comparison in every way.

Mungiu keeps Fjord riveting by letting it unfold as a moral and social quandary more than a mystery.

There’s no reason for anything in this movie except the wish to make even more money.

Say what you will about Refn’s worst work, he often felt like a visionary instead of a replicator. Maybe Hell is discovering that there’s nothing new to say.

It’s bold, provocative, and assured filmmaking that oscillates between moments of breathtaking cinematic prowess and satirical characterizations, whose coy rendering turns a mirror toward those who unconsciously lap up hollow action heroes when the far more intriguing story exists in plain sight.

A meta reading of “Propeller” is more interesting than the film itself, which is tragically hampered by a distinct lack of ambition and performances that never quite find the right tone. It’s a gift that Travolta made for himself and his family, something he likely wanted to leave as a part of his legacy. That doesn’t make it a good movie.

Interestingly, “Is God Is” is centered on the complexity of Black women, but one of the main motifs is rooted in the consequences of a Black man’s oversaturated masculinity, specifically in how he leaves scars long after he moves on.

Forge isn’t perfect, and some of the storylines don’t stick the landing, but Ng has created a space where all of these ideas are at play simultaneously, where we see characters we haven’t seen before, operating in new and surprising contexts.

Though the surrealism and playfulness of the short film have been streamlined for a narrative feature, “Decorado” still feels like a fully fleshed-out, focused work in its own right.

Director Bobby Farrelly’s “Driver’s Ed” may not reinvent the wheel, but by playing squarely to its middle-of-the-road strengths with a young cast clearly aware of the type of movie they’re in (it embodies the spirit of those early 2000s “friends hang out and go on an adventure” films), it’s still a trip worth taking.

It may feel like damning with faint praise, but “LifeHack” is easily one of the more tolerable screenlife thrillers of recent vintage.

[Aselton's] excellent playing Erin, despite scenes of questionable worth concocted by the screenwriters. But it’s not enough to save a collection of ideas that never quite cohere.

Obsession’s biggest blind spot is its inability to reckon with the sexual and psychological violence being inflicted on Nikki during her possession: By telling the story from the perspective of someone who sees her more as a prize to be won than a full human being, the film itself risks sidelining her ordeal. Navarrette’s powerhouse performance helps mitigate this by puncturing Nikki’s bipolar outbursts with moments of heartbreaking clarity, reminding us of the human being trapped inside of this misogynistic caricature.

Guy Ritchie‘s In the Grey offers what fans expect from the director: relentless but nimble editing; breathtaking locations (Spain, Saudi Arabia, the Canary Islands); clothes, shoes, and hair to die for; the self-mocking machismo and playful insults of male bonding; and a character’s verbal summary of a plan intercut with shots of the actions being performed.

The picture sometimes plays as an amalgam of Soderbergh’s “Che” and Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” only—and this is the crucial point—with the volume turned down from 10, or 11 for that matter, to about 4.

Our favorite slasher movies are often a little rough around the edges, a little unhinged, and a little inconsistent. And very few of them are this wildly entertaining.

Trees, like people, are deeply connected to the world around them. We, like they, pick up on signals, receive and interpret them, and respond in kind. “Silent Friend” offers the gentlest of those signals to us, in the form of its own hypnotic, mesmeric filmmaking. Pick up on those signals, let them rattle around in your head, and you’ll be richly rewarded.

While it’s a bit disheartening to see such a unique performer given such a traditional bio-doc, what comes through in “Life is Short” is the affection for its subject from pretty much everyone he’s ever worked with.

The movie expects you to just roll with all this stuff. Or slither. Sometimes you can’t. But when the film escapes the confinement tank of its numerous hand-me-down cliches, you’re happy to follow the water trail to see where it leads.

The movie is a lot of fun and masters a pleasingly detached yet sardonic tone early on, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have a lot more to offer after that, aside from a growing human menagerie of admittedly lively characters and a philosophical through line that’s pretty worn out—something like, “Humans are the real monsters.”

As a metaphor for the soft coercion of traditional gender roles, it works, although the theme is secondary to the twists in writer-director BT Meza’s sci-fi/horror hybrid.

Blue Film, through its many frank observations, stands as a vulnerable work about one’s past colliding with one’s present, in a bid to make peace with one’s true self.

The circumstances of “Couples Weekend” are simply too convenient. Its simplicity hinders absorption, shielding viewers from taking in its vulnerability or lessons to heart. And with its similar struggle to elicit its intended laughs, Kirkpatrick’s film is a flat rendering of its jagged proposal.

Throughout her career, Goodman has found a way to keep her eye on the prize, focusing on what matters, cutting through the fat, and making sure to platform the very stories that might otherwise be overlooked. Though didactic, “Steal This Story, Please!” serves as an invitation to embody these values in your own life and work.

The Sheep Detectives brims with charm, wit, and a twisty murder mystery that can only be solved by the most endearing set of farm animals since Farmer Hoggett said “That’ll do” to Babe the pig.

The combo of Eilish’s stagecraft and Cameron’s filmmaking tools makes for a simply electrifying concert experience.

Sure, Mortal Kombat II has enough fight scenes and gore to deliver exactly what fans of the games expect from these movies. Then again, the makers of this new franchise-booster don’t seem to know how to fill the rest of their movie’s 116-minute runtime. They tie up loose ends from the last movie whenever they’re not nudging their new protagonists through the motions of another patchwork action-fantasy that’s too hip to be sincere and too hacky to be moving.

Structural quibbles aside, “Nuestra Tierra” is a powerful work of reclamation and advocacy for native peoples who have long been disenfranchised and dehumanized by systemic forces in colonial Argentina.

The problem with “Deep Water” is not that it is a bad movie (which it is), but it’s a gratingly familiar one that doesn’t have a single point of interest to call its own. Instead, it prefers to spend two hours rehashing elements that even newbies to shark-based cinema will find devoid of any real inspiration.

Orwell did not intend “Animal Farm” as light entertainment.

Thankfully, some climactic fight scenes, featuring strong action choreography and a clear overall presentation, give “One Spoon of Chocolate” the great emotional release it needs after so much dramatic buildup.

Two Pianos is a melodrama, and damned proud to be one.

An existential story that is a less bleak and more scenic version of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, a psychological journey about connection, regret, memory, and meaning.

What this Netflix original lacks in narrative originality, it makes up for through a game voice cast, a wonderfully realized world, and a surprisingly dark spin on its story.

You can’t help but wish that this edition of the story was a bit more… groundbreaking.

I found it compelling for its depiction of the mechanics of the current athletic scene and the triumphs and tragedies that occur along the way. It may not leave you cheering in the end, but it will give you something to think about the next time the Olympics come around.

At minimum, “A Blind Bargain” will keep you scratching your head throughout, if not to ask yourself what it’s all about, then to wonder if maybe the filmmakers will eventually arrive somewhere unexpected. You can probably guess the answers to both questions, but maybe seeing for yourself will change your mind.

The ignorant and deeply painful misrepresentation of [Davidson's] condition at the BAFTAs shows just how much this film will do to make all of us think twice before judging someone.

It takes a special screen actor to play a character who appears in almost every scene of a movie; is anxious, sad, or irritable in most of them; never talks about his feelings; and makes choices so upsetting that certain viewers might want to quit watching, but somehow leaves you thinking he’s not that bad of a guy. John Magaro is such an actor.

When combined, the diametric halves form a charming diptych whose thematic and emotional profundity make for Miyake’s most accomplished work yet.

Most of the best portions of “Ricky” are hard-earned enough to look past moments of inconsistent tone and approach. Because when this character study hits, it can often feel divine.

In addition to serving up heaping helpings of suspense and action, “Fuze” abounds in twists.

Because Apex is only interested in surface-level backstory about the characters, the pursuit between the duo can feel repetitive on occasion. Then again, prioritizing white-knuckle thrills over excessive emotion and explaining is one of the most refreshing qualities of this gorgeously shot picture about survival and fortitude.

Antoine Fuqua might’ve had some cameras and microphones on hand to produce moving images and sound for this estate-approved King of Pop biopic. But make no mistake about it: “Michael” isn’t a movie. It’s a filmed playlist in search of a story.

This is an exhilarating debut that courses with an all-enveloping urgency and life, even if you may occasionally want to look away.

This devastating drama is an act of remembrance for its filmmaker, who has been open about how much of this story is her own. It’s also a reminder of the power of filmmaking to turn the deeply personal into relatable art, and an announcement of a major talent, one who has made the best film of the year to date.

It is a relentlessly brutal movie, one that too quickly becomes monotonous in its cruelty, numbing instead of thrilling viewers.

It’s a film whose tranquility and humility sometimes work against it, even in those moments where it overcorrects with didacticism.

If the movie’s conclusion is more along the lines of Voltaire than it is to, say, Costa-Gavras’ “Z,” the hair-raising route it takes to get George to a spot of tentative complacency is memorable and eye-opening.