Whoever enlisted Jorma Taccone to direct this deserves a raise, given that the charter member of the Lonely Island understands how to consistently ramp things up to levels of high ridiculousness.

Erupcja knows what’s it’s working with, and how to tap into something bigger than itself.

A certain leap of faith is required. But for those believe that movies can get into your head and under your skin in ways that sometimes defy description, and tap into the same transcendent state that great pop music does — that sensation of temporarily floating into some other dizzying realm — this is for you. It isn’t the movie you think you’re walking into. Amen for that.

You enter this unlikely, but undeniably extraordinary take on a video game ready to be spooked. You exit it with the sensation that you’ve just witnessed a waking nightmare perfect for Tokyo commuters and Brooklyn sad dads alike.

Had The Christophers just been a cross-generational punch-up, the sort of flinty showdown designed to throw off pleasurable sparks, you’d still walk away content. It remains a conduit for two of the best performances you’ll see all year. But Soderbergh and his two stars want to concentrate on the embers, what fans them and what keeps them burning.

Yes is easily the most controversial film to hit theaters this year so far. It’s also, for all of the intoxicating rush of Lapid’s excessive style and cup-spilleth-over storytelling, one of the more sobering and vital ones as well.

The film’s title doubles as its own description. And the fact that they damn near pull it off is enough to make you feel you’ve also been awakened from a long, deep sleep in which you were forced to settle for large, loud, cine-extravaganzas that forgot there’s supposed to be a human factor in any of it. Rise and shine, folks. You’ve got something to actually see here.

It’s a devastating look at paternal love and resilience, which respectfully follows this grieving father (and several others like him) as he refuses to give up.

You can’t say that Gyllenhaal hasn’t gone for broke with The Bride!, and the more you watch the actors give life to the central idea of a meeting of scarred bodies and equal minds, the more you feel like you’re watching something not just perversely over-the-top but personal.

Anyone who’s ever wondered what a rom-com collab between Nora Ephron and Tom of Finland might look like now has a definitive answer to that question.

It’s moments of blunt, borderline-brutal honesty coming directly from the source that make this whole endeavor such a necessary counterpoint to all of the mythology that’s sprung up around Love ... [But t]here are a number of questionable choices that the doc makes in terms of aesthetics.

No tears go by on Marianne’s part as she reminisces, though you’re a stronger person than we are if you don’t choke up at the documentary’s closing number.

Seeds is, at the abundant heart of it all, a work of protest art and political activism through sheer poetry. Attention must be paid.

New director Nia DaCosta — the sort of filmmaker who can handle both a continuation of the racially charged Candyman mythology and a radical take on Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler — brings pints of fresh blood to the proceedings, as well as a keen eye for compositions and an inherent sense of how to sustain tension.

The movie isn’t just a paean to a pioneer spirit. It’s equally a testament to the actor playing her.

All of this is presented with Director Park’s usual eye for extraordinary compositions and the occasional baroque flourish — dig that shot from the bottom of a boilermaker, as it’s being consumed! — but rest assured his tongue is resting comfortably in his cheek.

Alex is neither an excuse for Arnett to crack jokes at will nor part of a tradition of funny people bending themselves into Bikram Yoga positions to be taken seriously. It’s merely a portrait of a guy trying to find his way back, one confessional free-form monologue at a time, to who he is after being adrift in a sea of existential ennui.

It’s the sort of performance that feels like early Pacino or Dustin Hoffman, all twitches and vibrations and seeming like he’s in a constant state of motion even when standing still. And it fuses so well with what we, the viewer, think we know about Chalamet that it begins to blur the boundary in the best possible way.

What initially seems like a series of cryptic aside soon turns into a bigger-picture revelation about what Filho has been chasing all along: the passage of time, and how it never really heals all wounds. That’s not really a secret. But it is a point that bears repeating, especially when its echoed in a movie as graceful and gratifying as this one.

Zodiac Killer Project starts as an autopsy of a fail, and ends up dismantling the subgenre via a sort of cinematic jujitsu. You leave happy that Shackleton’s project ended up crashing and burning.

Sirāt...is not for everyone. But it is the sort of overwhelming cinematic experience and undeniable work of sound and vision that could be life-changing for those ready to receive it.

It’s a tribute to everyday people of another era that walks its own poetic path, content in the knowledge that one unremarkable person’s journey is remarkable enough to deserve such cinematic treatment.

For all of the multiplex-friendly fun Wright’s conjuring with this over-the-top spin on dystopian sci-fi blockbusters, the prevailing feeling here is dread. Most filmmakers would have diluted the grit and genuine sense of moral free-fall. Wright doubles the dosage. Every adrenaline rush comes with a chaser of low rage and simmering despair.

What makes Trier’s movies so rich, so exhilarating, so vital, is the way he and his longtime screenwriter Eskil Vogt pitch these stories somewhere between a saga and an anecdote, fit-to-burst with lifelike textures, details and detours.

Even those who think Die My Love courts indulgence and incoherence to its own detriment — there are times when the movie itself threatens to fall apart and blow up the devices projecting it as collateral damage — will gape in awe at how Lawrence makes them feel this person coming apart at the seams. This mother makes what the star did in the equally provocative Mother seem like child’s play. She’s completely unhinged and loving it.

It’s really a comedic road movie at heart, with as much yuks over a mismatched pair trying to get along as yucks involving the goopy innards of cosmic mastodons. Finally, the Predator cinematic-universe remake of Midnight Run that no one knew they, er, needed?

Nouvelle Vague is as much a testament to being young, idealistic and a cinephile — full of opinions, drunk on your own taste, and madly in love with the movies — as it is a making-of recounting.

What starts off as a tribute turns into an autopsy of a long marriage as seen by the kids who witnessed the best and worst of it, done with humor, anger, hindsight, and empathy. Then it makes a hard left and examines the way that legacies, even ones with the best intentions, have a way of shaping us and sometimes setting us back and always, always leaving us with lessons to repeat or refute.

You’re never sure which truth is out there, exactly, in Lanthimos’ caustic, chilling, and occasionally chuckle-inducing poke in the eye. You just acknowledge that no one seems to find one we can all agree on.

What Cooper has given audiences here is way more compelling than a live-action greatest-hits compilation.

There’s a whole other movie happening within Good Fortune‘s attempt to Aesop-fable its way to some moral about a modest life being a more fulfilling one even if you’re forced to live in your car. And when Reeves gives you a glimpse of that story, in which someone truly learns that humanity is both painful and blissful in equal measures, and anchors it all with a truly divine turn, well — you feel fortunate that get to witness that.

It’s during this last act that It Was Just an Accident becomes a truly remarkable parable about empathy, mercy, righteousness, regret, and unfulfilled rage.

Some might qualify If I Had Legs I’d Kick You as a comedy, albeit one brimming with barely contained rage, while others might describe as a horror movie. Either way, it’s the kind of film that makes you want to call your own mother and apologize.

It’s a movie that stumbles every so often, overplays its hand numerous time, and relies on an oddball true-story premise and 1000-watt star power to pave over some of the rougher spots. It would also give you its coat if you needed it without asking, and the big takeaway from Roofman, we’d argue, is its emphasis not on sympathy for the “devil” here but a palpable sense of empathy for everyone involved. Given the scarcity of this particular quality today, that’s no small feat.

Peck has long cratfed impeccable, politically charged fictions, docs, and docudramas, whether it’s his 2000 biopic on Patrice Lumumba or his peerless portrait of James Baldwin (the aforementioned I Am Not a Negro). With this latest magnum opus, the Haitian filmmaker has given us not just an invaluable, iris-out look at our present moment but the scariest movie of 2025 by a wide margin.

It’s the work of a young filmmaker. But it’s also very much the work of a genuine filmmaker, bursting with creativity and refining their vision in real time. To quote another member of this cineaste’s clan: Attention must be paid.

In its sprawling attempt to partially wrap its arms around the Great-Step-Backward Age we find ourselves in, One Battle After Another shares a slight kinship with another shoot-the-moon auteur work of recent vintage: Eddington. Ari Aster’s film stared directly into the abyss and, shuddering, worried about how we could or should fight back. Anderson’s humanistic masterpiece of a movie says: You fight it with love. That’s the end game. That’s how you retain your decency and sanity. That’s the only way you protect the future, and change it. That’s how you live to battle another day.

It’s neither del Toro’s best nor his worst, but this feels like the movie he was born to make, and the one he would have died trying to get done.

Everyone seems to be having a blast, and the filmmaker knows how to take both the ensemble he’s assembled and his congregation of Knives Out fans — call us Blanc-heads — to church, literally and figuratively.

Hamnet has managed to make the lines “goodnight, sweet prince” somehow sting more than ever, but it leaves you in a state of emotional bliss.

Is this moving-picture love letter overly sentimental, sloppy to a fault, and slightly more affectionate toward its posthumous subject than a basket of puppies high on laughing gas? Yes. Does that mean that, in its own way, it perfectly mirrors Candy’s own tendency to overdo it and still make you like him, really, really like him? Also yes.

Any argument that one doesn’t need a new spin on the Douglas-Turner black comedy is rendered more or less moot by the way [McNamara] sets up Cumberbatch and Colman with such gleefully profane, razor-sharp barbs.

A portrait of a sycophant as a pure, unbridled sociopath, Lurker understands the relationship between fame and fandom all too well.

You’ll still spend close to two hours wondering whether Splitsville wants you to walk away thinking that you’ve seen something semi-sweet or almost irredeemably sour. The key is recognizing how satisfying things feel when they somehow manage to split the difference.

It’s one of the best films of the year, full stop. But now it’s both invaluable and something of a warning for many of us on the shape of things to come.

The universal rule of sequels dictates that you give viewers another helping of the same thing yet somehow make it different, the sort of koan that only makes sense to lifelong Zen masters and studio suits. Yet, against the odds, the creators of this continuation have managed to do more than just produce a carbon copy with a new number after the title.

If you feel like catching up with the Colemans and revisiting some early aughts magic, Freakier Friday is a good choice.

This is a tale that’s carefully crafted as much as told, with hints hiding in plain sight and surreal touches that add more to the vibe than the momentum. But you never feel like you’re in the hands of someone who doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.

It’s bone-chilling romantic cringe-comedy, in the form of a public nightmare. And for a split second, a movie so dedicated to getting under horror fans’ skin truly succeeds in making you want to crawl out of yours.

For the first half hour, Neeson’s reboot of The Naked Gun series is easily one of the most hilarious things to hit theaters in ages.

The rule for sequels is: give them the same, only different. Happy Gilmore 2 adheres to this concept beautifully, along with doling out enough blatant fan service to choke a one-eyed alligator. (R.I.P., Morris.)

It’s faint praise, even in the post-MCU era of the genre, to say that Superman is a solid superhero film; the caveat is hiding in plain sight. What Gunn has pulled off is something more complicated, more interesting, and far tougher: He’s given us a Superman movie that actually feels like a living, breathing comic book.

Deadwyler is what makes 40 Acres feel like there’s something special happening here. The script has brains. Her Hailey has heart and soul. She gives us the postapocalyptic hero we deserve.

Sorry, Baby is a movie with a trauma at its center, but it’s not a trauma drama. It’s about living with such things and still going on with your life. And the manner in which Victor presents this narrative, with such verve and confidence and tenderness and pitch-black humor, defies easy description. It’s simply an amazing display of someone knowing how to get their voice and vision across.

It’s Pixar’s E.T., played out in reverse.

Kelson ushers in a more meditative tone for this entry, which reveals that it is, among other things, a coming-of-age story. Yet this swerve into more emotional territory doesn’t dampen the tension or the terror that Boyle remains an expert at conjuring up; if anything, it acts as a countermelody to the genre aspects.

Come for the most impressive, lustrous car that a gajillion-dollar budget can buy. The reason to stay, however, is the driver.

This may be the first film in which mutual attraction is commodified by cold, hard business talk.

Imagine a feature-length episode of Succession that treated the final season’s villain, GoJo CEO Lukas Matsson, as its main character and then multiplied him by four, and you’d have something like Mountainhead, Jesse Armstrong‘s caustic, corrosive satire of Silicon Valley mega-royalty run amuck.

The filmmakers want to jolt folks, for sure. But they also want to bring you to a place where the emotional after effects of that juddering linger long after the jump scares have faded away.

You leave impressed that Anderson can still manage to do what his does best without succumbing to self-parody here. The blueprint may be familiar. But it’s still a pretty foolproof plan.

The impression is that you’ve just seen a great New York movie, with a great star turn at the core of it, and yet still feels like something’s missing. It’s ultimately an excuse to watch Washington go HAM.

If there is personal expression abound in Stewart’s debut, there’s also precious little ego. Nor are the tics that too often prick or sink the work of actors feeling out what it’s like to call the shots.

The overall lack of subtlety suits the age Aster is taking to task, though it also makes everything feel slightly wobbly on its feet. The viewpoint is both-sides misanthropy. Jonathan Swift has some notes.

On paper, the endeavor sounds like the equivalent of a B-sides and rarities compilation. On screen, it plays like a sucker-punch masterpiece.

The primary goal of this entry is to establish a new team of heroes. The secondary aim is to stop what’s undeniably been a downward spiral. It succeeds in that respect at the very least. Don’t call it a return to form so much as a much-needed, extremely welcome return to a winning formula.

If Sinners is messy, it’s sometimes pretty glorious, too. Coogler is swinging wide and far beyond the boundaries of franchise fare.

The Shrouds is, for all of its hallucinatory imagery and airport-read twists and turns, a blatantly personal film — arguably Cronenberg’s most personal since 1986’s The Fly.

As with Landon’s equally ludicrous Happy Death Day 2U (2019), the fun comes from seeing exactly how deftly and stylishly the director can pull these things off; it’s like watching a magician successfully perform a trick that you know isn’t a real illusion so much as an act of misdirection, extreme co-ordination and a specific set of well-honed skills.

The only agenda in Warfare, in other words, is to give you a sense of not just what happened but how everything felt while it was happening. A tall order, to be sure, but one that Garland, Mendoza, their cast and the crew pull off shockingly well.

Like a particularly concise, purposefully elliptical short story, The Woman in the Yard quickly milks this beguiling, WTF-is-going-on-here? scenario for all the dread it’s worth, while not necessarily being in a hurry to fill folks in on the full 411 regarding this sticky situation.

[Siegel and McGehee] get that this isn’t just a story about a woman bonding with a dog — it’s a tale of loss and sorrow that inherently knows such heavy feelings aren’t confined to a single species.

It’s a great espionage thriller, and an even better scenes-from-a-marriage drama. Ian Fleming would love this. So would Ingmar Bergman.

There are surreal and absurdist touches throughout Nyoni’s second feature, and like the Zambian filmmaker’s awe-inspiring debut, I Am Not a Witch (2017), it proves she has a perfect sense of how to blend no-nonsense realism with its more magical counterpart.

There is no single category that you can slot Rankin’s mix of a wink, a nudge and an embrace into, so we guess “lo-fi masterpiece” will have to do until a better option comes along.

Paddington in Peru sticks to its franchise’s overarching script, delivering exactly the kind of affection, silliness and gentle heartstring-plucking you now expect from the series.

What gives this pulpy creation such a savory flavor and lasting bite isn’t just the puncturing of romantic clichés cemented 24 frames per second over decades, or the low-hanging-fruit pokes at society’s reliance on technology taken to extremes. It’s the way it makes you suddenly start questioning the whole notion of finding your soulmate if, given the opportunity, you can just purchase them and pay on installment.

Directed by Sundance veteran Ira Sachs, Peter Hujar’s Day takes an extended conversation between talented, creative friends and elevates it to the realm of both first-rate voyeurism and the second-hand high of reliving a lost era.

Buckley hasn’t had a million portraits sketched of him, much less to this degree. The singularity of It’s Never Over, along with the access and the candor, makes up for a lot here.

It’s a music doc that takes its music-doc responsibilities seriously.

What’s remarkable is how [Torres] never overplays anything, or goes for easy histrionics and rending of garments even when the movie itself becomes heavy-handed in the back half.

Leigh and all of his cast are so on-point here, so dedicated to breathing life into these everyday people, that every time he cuts away from Pansy and allows us unfettered glimpses into their lives outside her sphere of influence, you want to follow them into their own two-hour movies.

It’s all a very by-the-books music biopic, which the sole exception of which species is singing about manufacturing miracles and angels contemplating his fate.

It’s not just that Kidman shows you this woman’s sexual fulfillment — it’s the way she gives you everything happening around it, in the most intimate and telling of ways. And that’s why this feels like the most naked performance this A-list star has ever given, with the physical exposure being the least vulnerable aspect of it all.

While there’s a fine line between loving a movie and being slavishly devoted to it, Eggers thankfully never crosses it. Rather, he molds the man-meets-vampire, things-go-awry story into his own rigorous type of horror filmmaking, and comes up with something stylish but not slick, feral but not overly fussy in its attempts to channel that old-fashioned folkloric feeling.

What the true legacy of Jenkins’ addition to the catalog may end up being, however, is a template for honoring the past while still managing to move things a few steps ahead. The circle of life, indeed.

What the filmmaker and his collaborators have given us is something truly special: a radical work of art that channels a tsunami of radical empathy. And it couldn’t feel more necessary or vital at this moment in time.

It’s not as gamechanging as that snare drum that opens “Like a Rolling Stone.” But it still feels damn near electric.

There is a sense that it could have gone farther out and pushed even more boundaries, especially before tying everything back up with a “happy” ending that feels mostly but not quite completely earned. But there’s still a bark and a bite here in the way that its allowing a specific strain of too-often stifled female rage to really bloom.

At it’s core, however, The Order is really a horror film, made all the more frightening because the monsters who live on these Everytown, USA, Maple Streets seem way too prevalent at the present moment.

What the Beatles did in 1964 alone continues to change the world—and Beatles ’64 is testimony to that ongoing story.

You will not necessarily be enlightened, empowered, or enthralled by all of Gladiator II. But you will almost assuredly be entertained.

For many of us staring down the next four years, the idea that a community can come together to take on the rising tides couldn’t be more welcome or needed.

Fans have been patiently waiting for the screen version of Wicked for decades now, and it’s safe to say that their faith will be rewarded. It’s also obvious that as much as this is still a tale of two witches, each blessed with equally beautiful voices, there’s a very clear standout here that’s lifting this occasionally leaden jazz-hands-extravaganza up to higher ground.

Kapadia, as masterful a filmmaker as they come, is happy to let viewers wonder where these stories will intersect, and how they’ll collide into or off of each other.

To say that this horror movie hits all of the marks it needs to hit would be just south of blasphemous. The manner in which Grant both grounds the material and lobs it into over-the-top territory, however, is simply divine.

Bird may be the most divisive movie of Andrea Arnold’s career, and we’re including the gloriously feral 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But like everything else she’s done to date, it’s also rewarding in unexpected ways — the sort of film that taps into endless reservoir of empathy as much as it shocks you with extremities.

It’s not Blitz’s sensory-overload sturm und drang that leaves you gasping for breath. It’s the sneak attack.