Told in five chapters and across multiple storylines, Tost’s first feature is an admirably weird and engaging odyssey that’s like Tarantino meets The Sugarland Express (with a healthy dose of Smokey and the Bandit). It’s brimming with ideas and winning turns, in particular Sweeney and Hauser, whose romantic chemistry is terribly endearing, and McClarnon as the deadpan-hilarious face of anti-colonialist vengeance.

That this moody, woozy character study falls closer to the “masterpiece” side of the fence isn’t a surprise, considering it comes from Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams, one of the best filmmaker-actor duos of the last quarter century.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a thriller, but it’s not just a thriller. It’s also aiming to be a Gen Z radicalization manifesto in the same spirit as the book, if not with the same rigor.

All you’re left with is Wilson’s exquisitely left-of-center take on the master of friendly trees, which keeps creeping toward the sublime before Paint knocks it back into the middle of an undefined road.

A firecracker of a film exploring modern-day dating (and heartbreak) mores while providing witty commentary on the borderline-absurd ways in which millennials and zoomers have latched onto social media buzzword culture.

Come for the uplift of an underdog sports story centered around the guys who made you realize a shoe isn’t just a shoe, superstar foot or not. Stay for the film that Davis gives you when, standing unguarded, she’s suddenly passed the ball, effortlessly rolls it off her fingertips, and gets nothing but net.

As Nintendo’s first serious attempt at conquering filmmaking, it’s a lovingly crafted entry point with the potential for more.

Smoking Causes Coughing may or may not be designed as a straight parody of Power Rangers-style adventures and the sugar highs of such kid-friendly sci-fi/superhero entertainment. It most definitely is the sort of high-concept goof that, taken to such go-for-broke extremes, blurs the line between giggle-inducing absurdity and absolutely brilliant ridiculousness.

These are movies for those who find the Knives Out franchise too sophisticated and droll, red meat for the Sandler faithful. It’s a movie of small ambitions tailor-made for the small screen. It is exactly what you think it is.

Enys Men is for us. It’s a cult classic that didn’t feel the need to kill time in order to be called cult or classic.

So much of this drama about interrupted lives, unexpected detours, and attempts at (re)connection requires a deep reading between the lines. That’s a big part of its power.

You don’t blame Braff for wanting to craft a movie around [Pugh]. But you can blame him for the movie itself that surrounds that performance, as well as a seriously ludicrous climax — one of several — set in a Williamsburg house party and a coda so self-aggrandizingly lachrymose that you’ll have to resist the urge to scream.

We came into this series tickled by the element of surprise. And we leave Chapter 4 with the distinct feeling of satisfaction.

It may hint that the bad guy at the center of if all wasn’t the primary villain. But the movie does prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is its own worst enemy.

Fury of the Gods makes for dandy spectacle, its digitally rendered catastrophe the match of any such competing big-screen visions of doom. But it somehow marries the pending apocalypse to a blithe spirit, and the cognitive dissonance never gets drastic enough to ruin the good time.

Even an Oscar-nominated GOAT can’t escape something that seems so perfectly put together on the outside and is so flawed, easily trashed, and barely held together on the inside.

What Seligman, Sennott and Edebiri have given us is nothing less than a Heathers for this generation. It hits you, and it feels like a kiss.

Pine is the secret sauce that keeps this thing buoyant and fleet-footed, even when the plot turns start piling up. He’s the guy at the center of this ensemble who’s shining but not eclipsing everybody. More than the VFX and the grand-gesture spectacle, he’s the one making this movie fun. Like vintage summer-blockbuster kind of fun.

It’s not schlocky enough to be so-bad-it’s-good and nowhere near good enough to be taken even a tiny bit seriously.

The sixth time isn’t the charm here. And it’s certainly way, way less fun and clever than it thinks it is.

There are tiny glimpses of someone who has genuine chops behind the camera, almost but not quite enough to make you think that, given more time and focus, he could have made something out of these spare parts. Or maybe, just maybe, this whole botched Operation is designed to make his older, possibly lesser work look better.

Creed III is very much a boxing movie. But it’s got a gnarled, contingent conflict at its center that’s a little too knowing for the movie not to have a little more than usual on its mind.

Long before Palm Trees becomes an outright film about sex work, it establishes itself as a film about the dire social transaction that sex can be — an old story, tragic every time, and effective here.

There are movies that were never going to be good, no matter the effort, and then there are movies that decide upfront to be bad and have a much easier time asking us to go with it. Cocaine Bear is the latter. It gives us what we’re asking for. Turns out, that isn’t much.

The Quiet Girl is, quite simply, a genuine work of art by a genuinely empathetic artist, and one of the single most moving, heartfelt, and heartbreaking movies from any country in the last decade.

Frances O’Connor’s Emily, her directorial debut, takes a familiar literary biography and garnishes it with the right kind of creative liberties — the vibrant, suggestive kind.

Blood and Honey is a hundred-acre wasteland, a witless gory bore, and in the end, you’re just depressed that anyone spent time working on it.

Chou has said that the film isn’t autobiographical — nor, despite the fact that Park herself was born in Korea and raised in France, is this her story. Yet the two of them have made something that feels so intensely personal and infuses so much life into this young woman’s trek toward self-discovery.

Until some sort of creative second wind blows in, casual moviegoers and deeply invested fanatics may have to simply keep enduring overly familiar, frustrating placeholders like this. Quantumania revolves around a powerful villain who wants to control time. The movie itself is merely killing time.

Cut out the extra layers of nothingness piling up in the margins and you’ve got the kind of surreal tension that only romantic comedies, that dying but not dead genre, can offer: a case being made for romantic love, even when it doesn’t exist.

Even when it seems at risk of spinning its wheels into oblivion, there’s an urgent pleasure in watching it spin.

Tame is what Magic Mike’s Last Dance is — what it apparently wants to be, what it becomes in exchange for its new, cardboard-simple, ostensible pro-woman worldview. The movie’s pleasures mute themselves beneath its good intentions. It wants to be about what women want. But it feels like it never asked.

Full Time works because of, not despite, its cutting thrills. The anxiety we feel as we watch is very much the point. Julie is living on the edge. The movie marvels at her ability to keep her balance. And it laments the fact that her survival should depend on it.

Making a warm movie about friendship as a tribute to this weirdo is an impossible task.

One Fine Morning is yet more evidence of how far Mia Hansen-Løve can push her naturalistic style, using seemingly plain storytelling to advance intellectual ideas that rarely feel drawn from the mind because they are so in tune with felt experience: feelings and attractions, the passing of time, the sense of a life being lived. This movie is no different.

The fact that Shyamalan seems to be working out some issues onscreen doesn’t stop him from crafting a thriller, and one which goes about its job with steady determination in Cabin’s cryptic, superior first half.

The film can’t figure out if it wants to be a love story or social commentary, and ends up doing neither very well.

Eileen wants us to notice how the psychological brick house it’s been building all along explains the outcome. But the outcome almost doesn’t matter. The real joy is in the hungers we tasted along the way.

It fails as a character study because the murky inner workings of the character are all manifest, outwardly, in turns and attitudes that you can see from a mile away and are no wiser for being able to predict.

You can’t say that Cat Person is shy about taking the medium to task for selling a romantic ideal that’s more than a little curdled. If only it was this rigorous and incisive about the source material itself.

Guggenheim and his subject also want to show what it’s like to be Michael J. Fox right now, and that’s really where this documentary, which premiered at Sundance today, turns into something else entirely — something beyond praise or tragedy.

So often, you can feel filmmakers straining themselves to come up with more extreme ways of shocking and awing you. With this writer-director, you get the sensation that such hallucinogenic, nerve-scrambling sensationalism comes naturally. You wouldn’t say that his agent provocateur touch is subtle. But it is expert.

It’s far more effective as an indictment against media rapaciousness, as well as their treatment of the homeless and mentally unwell.

The film is moving. It’s also a bit reductive. The flaw is in the way that one enables the other.

Diop’s direction of Saint Omer is spare in style but dense in emotional intelligence, heavy with its own inquiries.

Whether the ideas they’re toying with here offer a booster shot of relevance to a modern slasher story is, frankly, debatable. What we can say is: congratulations on being both first out of the gate and an instant subgenre footnote.

Plane is, in essence, the Frontier Airlines of action films: It’s cut-rate to a fault, makes you endure a lot of unpleasantness on the way to its final destination, and still leaves you with the distinct feeling that you didn’t even get what you paid for.

Skinamarink isn’t scary because of what it depicts. It’s scary because it already knows that our imagination will do half of the work.

Simón refuses to allow Alcarràs to settle for being just one thing; she drifts between her characters’ moods with rare realism.

The Pale Blue Eye is heavy, and not always to its advantage. Its glumness, meant to come off as a good-looking take on American gothic, gets in the way of its juicier, freakier bits. The offense is that it does so in service of a mystery that barely matters.

One of the more fun things about M3GAN, besides the batshit megabitch AI in pop starlet’s form at the center of the movie, is that this is all, immediately, such a bad idea.

The disappointment is that the movie wields so much and achieves so relatively little.

There’s a sensitivity in even the most grand-gesture flourishes Polley and her editors Christopher Donaldson and Roslyn Kalloo throw in, but you also know there’s a voice behind this camera. And it belongs to an artist who definitely has something to say.

It’s the star himself who, even more than the decor and the change of cultural scenery, lifts Living out of the realm of a remake and into something far more profound. It becomes another story of a man at long last learning how to embrace the world, yet one that is completely substantial and shattering and, yeah, even life-affirming on its own.

Corsage is not a great movie, but it’s good at detailing one woman’s circumstances. It doesn’t browbeat us with meaning, which it had every right to do, but instead attempts something humbler.

Baumbach overreaches in White Noise. The movie is unsuccessful because its various energies eventually begin to feel mismeasured.

You leave feeling like you’ve just seen a truly extraordinary late work produced by one of the era’s greatest working auteurs, quickly followed by the sense of experiencing a sucker punch when you remember that the man driving away from the scene of the crime onscreen isn’t able to go anywhere once that screen fades to black.

There’s a constant feeling that a lot of hands were wrestling for the steering wheel of this biopic behind the scenes, with various parties pushing the story this way and that, even with the united goal of collectively crafting the greatest love letter of all. Yet Ackie just keeps her eyes on — and her energy directed toward — delivering a screen-worthy Whitney, scaling the heights and earning her Hall of Fame status.

The movie is moving — the source material has been hanging around since 1883 for good reason — but del Toro’s better at the violence and the dark irony, better at revealing the ways in which this story was already sort of twisted.

How can a movie that seemingly does so little amount to so much? It’s because of the story lurking beyond it all — the psychological battle being waged, so quietly, under the surface of everything.

The Way of Water is like its predecessor: sincere to the point of being brash, wide-armed and open-hearted toward the world it loves and vengefully, comically violent toward the people who arrive to destroy that world. It’s a better movie than the first outing because Cameron lets things get weirder, wilder.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any movie starring Olivia Colman can’t be all bad, of course, and Empire of Light wisely knows how to play the ace tucked snugly up its sleeve.

The Whale knows it has a dynamo at its core, yet still keeps trying to prove to you it’s a substantial, significant statement. It can’t stop itself from being crushed under its own symbolic and sensationalist weight.

Emancipation is not better off for laying any claim to the actual man that it purports to be about. It is a historically dubious, morally incurious piece of genre fare that satisfies as entertainment and not much else. Pure Hollywood heroism.

For those who only think of Robert Downey Sr. as the father of the guy from the Marvel movies, Sr. is happy to fill in some blanks from here to paternity. And for those of us who already worship of the altar of the elder Downey, this Netflix doc — it drops on the streaming service this weekend — is a chance to see a true indie-movie O.G. potentially get the credit he deserves.

This is the sort of lazy, slapdash, self-impressed excuse for “edgy” entertainment that makes you enraged. It’s not even so-bad-it’s-good; this is so bad you’re tempted to kick those responsible for it right in the jingle bells.

Nanny starts as a movie about a reality that we’d rather not face — the plight of Black domestic workers, of immigrants, of the barebones fact of financial survival — and ends as a movie about reality that we cannot bear. That is the horror of it — and, in Jusu’s hands, the galvanizing thrill.

Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, a winding misadventure about a sweet-tempered donkey, inarguably qualifies as an animal’s-eye view of all that’s warm and cruel, comical and arbitrary about human nature.

There’s a good deal of fun in Glass Onion too, along with some sharp throwaway lines and the joy of watching actors dig into parts in which the option of going over the top has already been built in.

A movie that starts off as a scalpel-sharp satire, casually slides into becoming a skin-of-your-teeth horror film and ends as a flamebroiled screed in more ways than one, director Mark Mylod’s Grand Guignol take on the master-and-servant relationship of hospitality industries will not suit everyone’s palettes.

This is not a tale of a young man who can “pass” and, knowing that it may matter to his survival, toughens up, puts on a masculine drag. It’s a movie intent on showing us that this is all drag — it’s all put-on, all available to the play of identity.

This tender, gory trip through the guts of a nation is blessed with one of those magical instances of casting the right actor in the right part, and it’s impossible to think of someone else who could do justice to this young woman the way that Taylor Russell does.

She Said doesn’t pretend that wrongs have been righted once and for all. It just wants to pay tribute to two people stood up to a Goliath and took him down not with one good shot but a million tiny cuts and a lot of hard work.

Mitchell has an inside-scoop aptitude for titillating details and unexpectedly insightful connections, a gift for association and cool, collected storytelling that propels the documentary along at a fast, satisfying clip, overwhelming us the number of nods to stars, to movies — big and small — and to his own impressions.

No one would blame you if you prefer your gothic-lit tales straight with no meta-chaser. Yet, largely thanks to Pugh, Leilo’s semi-experimental attempt at blending an old-fashioned melodrama with Media Studies 101 commentary never makes you feel like you’re watching something created in a dorm-session smokeout.

Lohan’s most distinguished quality as a star is that glowing goodness, a real, unshakeable joy that can only barely be imitated, let alone replicated, and which feels perfectly at home in the bright, buoyant, only glancingly ironic realm of happy-go-lucky comedy.

The movie isn’t always on such sure footing. But that’s almost appropriate: a messier movie trying to reckon with a messier range of feelings.

Ultimately, Something in the Dirt doesn’t quite convince as a genuine mystery — and it doesn’t seem to be meant to. Having fun with the artifice of it all — the loose “documentary” format, the well-played and visibly signaled “clues” scattered throughout — seems far more to the point.

If anything, Good Night Oppy could be nerdier, a little more in the weeds of the science that makes all of this possible. That’d prove a little less lightly entertaining, for some. But it’d also be true to what the movie is already about.

A horror movie that hides its monsters in plain sight, Soft & Quiet is meant to disquiet you from the very beginning, forcing you to ride shotgun with these “jus’ folks” who mix matchmaking suggestions for single members with toxic comments about immigrants and minorities.

There is no all-caps ACTING here. Instead, Lawrence dials in to an uncomfortable numbness that tamps everything about Lynsey down, and thus keeps the performance at a recognizably human, rather than headline-friendly social-drama level.

With a single shot, Descendant ceases to be a story about the recovery of a ship. It rapidly morphs into something broader: a story about the land. Who owned it back in the 1800s, who owns it now, and what all of this means for everyone else.

All That Breathes favors a poetic, almost dreamy style, filled with the kinds of ugly-beautiful images and thoughtfully dispatched voiceovers that can strip a narrative of outright propulsion in favor of mesmerizing us with ebbing ideas and moments of wonder. It occasionally strains. But the basic conflict at play, between the selflessness of these medics, the growing need for their work, and the utter folly of this mission — it can feel a little like standing in front of a moving train — gives it all an urgent undercurrent.

Armageddon Time isn’t a movie about bad people or good people. It’s more shocking because it’s more banal: It’s a movie about people. It doesn’t excuse peoples’ choices. But it knows that it cannot change them.

Co-written by Selick and Peele, Wendell & Wild has a nagging tendency to throw a lot at you and simply cross its slender, skeleton-ish fingers that even a little of it coheres and sticks.

Chukwu’s script, co-written with Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp, is interesting for all of the predicaments it stares down and quietly works its way through.

While Barbarian‘s unexpected popularity outside of die-hard genre circles can be attributed to old-fashioned, organic word of mouth, it’s also a first-rate horror movie, full stop.

McDonagh also wants to give his actors a hell of a showcase, too, and it’s the two stars butting brows at the center of The Banshees of Inisherin that make this a masterpiece of men behaving very feckin’ badly.

Aftersun, which Wells also wrote, is for the most part a thorough depiction of a brief period in these two peoples’ lives. But its emotional canvas is far more encompassing than this implies.

If Tom experiences profound inner conflict about his dual life, or feels as if he’s being unfair to his lovers by stringing both of them along in different ways, it’s not reflected in Styles’ performance, which rarely goes beyond trading cocky ease (a state of being he seems comfortable with) for awkward silence (a state that he does not).

While no one could accuse Ticket to Paradise of being a “great” movie, or even a “very good” one, there’s something about watching Clooney and Roberts butt up against each other in front of a screen-saver background that scratches a long-dormant itch.

Viewed as a light star vehicle with a lot of VFX — a soft Rock movie — it’s simply ho-hum. The issue is with everything else happening onscreen around him. Even by the DCEU’s dodgy standards, it’s a mess in a cape.

Carlota Pereda's debut feature, Piggy, takes horror’s revenge trope and twists it just so. It isn’t so simple as a much-abused underdog getting a freakish chance to get her payback and painting the landscape with her enemies’ dispatched blood and guts, though in this case, as in many cases, you might forgive her if she did.

We expect cinematic fireworks with a stylist like [Park]. It’s his sense of restraint and his substance, however, that makes what could have just been a clever check-out-these-moves exercise feel like a genuinely emotional showstopper.

Halloween Ends is a curious and mostly effective mix of slasher antics and dramatically straight-faced themes. It’s a good enough slasher to provoke laughter in some of its grimmer moments, because the deaths are that ridiculous and the targets are sometimes, unfortunately, a little deserving.

The actors try their best, but Östlund’s insistent conceptual droning overtakes them.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Tár is that it is far more than a mere vehicle for one showboating performance. And even if it were, with a performance like this, who would mind?

Russell, to his everlasting credit, has made a film in which having cockeyed optimism, at this moment in the world, somehow feels like a radical act. For a movie that is all over the place, it’s determination to get back to a bygone moment isn’t just wishful thinking. It suggests, in own roundabout way, that a return to the past can also signal the beginning of a fresh start.