Gianfranco Rosi’s long, languorous, often hushed snapshots of the area between Vesuvius and the Gulf of Naples conjure a sense of life here being suspended in time.

Paul Greengrass employs a peripatetic restlessness to the material, and while that brings an often thrilling sense of verisimilitude to the film, the cliché-stuffed screenplay too often plays against the intended solemnity of the project.

The film is a vivid meditation on human possibility in the face of fate and nature’s tumultuous might, ending in a fog of ambiguity that mirrors that characters’ bewilderment.

Its desire to resist easy storytelling paradigms around artists is admirable, but without punching up or down, the film feels like it’s pulling punches altogether.

This ferocious adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novella as a passion play about class solidarity.

Mike Figgis’s anthem of aspiration and struggle leaves no doubt about Francis Ford Coppola’s beliefs.

Cover-Up is a sweeping, if tempered, tribute to investigative journalism, attesting to its enduring importance at a time when resources for it have substantially declined.

As Noah Baumbach sells the sappiness in Jay Kelly with the same sincerity of his convictions as in his more acerbic works, the film holds together as a lightweight delight.

More broadly appealing than Kleber Mendonça Filho’s past films, The Secret Agent is still unmistakeably the work of an artist who’s deeply fascinated with the ways in which cinema, politics, and personal history co-mingle.

A story of hazy memories that’s also a city symphony, Dreams elegantly captures the disorienting rush of first love and the frustrations and anguish that stem from romantic fantasies colliding with reality.

The film bluntly puts its historical horrors on display, but it’s careful not to explicitly posit their causes.

The film is astutely aware of the physical and psychological scars that that result from living in a state of tyranny.

There’s a low-key warmth to Romvari’s painstaking portrait of quotidian family life, as her documentarian attention to detail creates an intoxicatingly vivid rendering of 1990s suburbia.

If there’s still anyone uncritically repeating Riefenstahl’s narrative of naïveté, they’ll find it hard to sustain by the end credits.

The film effortlessly melds its sadcom properties with more predictable rom-com traditions.

One small, shrewd decision after another allows Preparation for the Next Life to sustain its naturalism to the end.

The story’s boilerplate setup gets a noticeable lift thanks to Darren Aronofsky’s style and focus.

Love, Brooklyn, especially its loftier ideas, might have benefited from more of a satirical bite.

The War of the Roses, both the book and the Danny DeVito film, is an infamously brutal comedy of terrors, and The Roses is cuddly by comparison.

Pulled awkwardly in so many directions, this Toxic Avenger all but comes apart at the seams.

The film patiently illustrates how places imprint themselves upon us and guide our actions.

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass becomes a film about its own condition of being an outsider to its own time, lost as it is in the aesthetics of another time that it views with a kind of nostalgic disquiet.

Splitsville thrives on the unpredictability of this formal freedom before settling back into a familiar Hollywood narrative formula: the comedy of remarriage.

As the plot progresses, the film appears increasingly adrift, discordantly sliding between farce, satire, and murder mystery.

As Dracula wears on, its lack of focus starts to grate, while Radu Jude’s deployment of profane, disreputable dialogue and imagery starts to resemble a stylistic tic more than a genuine affront to his audience’s sensibilities.

The film is paced in such a languid, dreamy way that it’s hard to get a grasp on how each scene connects to the larger themes or the larger mystery until fairly late.

Behind the violence and gore, Nobody 2 only offers the skeleton of a narrative.

The film’s multi-layered structure supports a familiar but often profoundly affecting tale of intergenerational family conflict.

The more the film diverges from Kurosawa’s, the more confident and distinguished it becomes.

Some of the period action set pieces are spirited in their staging, while the film doesn’t lack for gruesome and elaborate kill sequences, which is almost enough to distract from the screenplay’s patchiness and insipid characterizations.

Samuel Van Grinsven’s Went Up the Hill is characterized by a starkly precise aesthetic and withholding approach to the ghost story.

The overriding suspense here is largely created by watching truth become negotiable, and through the small, plausible distortions of the truth that people come up with when survival instincts kick in.

The balls-out shock value doesn’t detract from the fact that Fixed is more square than its makers probably think it is.

For every moment of electrifying horror, Whitest Kids U’ Know alum Zach Cregger cleanses the palette with equivalent comic relief.

The sum of its aesthetics, as in The Pianist, feels at once like a gritty window into history as it was and a haunting amber-trapped essence of the feeling of an age.

Where Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married completely immersed viewers in the sometimes messy intimacies of family, My Mother’s Wedding feels more like a stage production that forgot to include its first act.

The film is a resonant depiction of the gaping holes left by Jeff Buckley’s untimely death.

Julian Glander powerfully channeling the ennui of his characters with images of everything from vacant parking lots to empty swimming pools.

A Samurai in Time isn’t just having fun with fake swords and chonmage wigs, as it also provides a lot of gentle reflections about history, modernity, and our place in it all.

Nick Rowland’s film doesn’t seem to have faith in the story the novel tells.

The Naked Gun is of a piece with the “joke in every frame” approach that Zucker, Abrams, and Zucker brought to their best work.

Petty humiliations accumulate into a quietly blistering indictment of a culture that’s conditioned immigrants to hustle, wait endlessly, and smile through it all, as if their sanity weren’t constantly under strain.

That Together treats its body horror as just another wrinkle in the complexities of what it means to love someone else is writer-director Michael Shanks’s smartest move.

As The Home trudges along until its inevitable rug-pull, its obnoxiously loud and incessant score tries to convince us of the sinisterness at play at the retirement home. And by the time the rubber finally hits the road well into the third act, the twist is aggravating not only because it’s so patently absurd, but because so little in the previous hour feels remotely connected to what occurs in the homestretch. All of the horrific imagery and supposed clues that came before are revealed to be signposts signifying nothing. Even the outbursts of violence in the climax do nothing but remind us just how empty and cynical the whole charade has been.

It’s possible that a kind of objective moral ambiguity was the goal here, but given the sensitive nature of the material, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that the film’s vagueness is the calculated strategy of those unwilling to take a side.

In line with his protagonist’s ever-shifting whims, a spirit of restless reinvention characterizes director Giovanni Tortorici’s aesthetic approach.

This is a film that projects an unflinching sincerity and optimism, and the first in the MCU, a franchise that has brought much of Marvel Comics’s wildest flights of fancy to life, to really channel the spirit of Kirby’s creations and how that first endeared them to audiences.

After its opening act, the film gets silly fast, with a frankly stupid witchcraft subplot and narrative turns that are telegraphed with audience-insulting obviousness.

Uncertainty extends to the film’s mood, which fluctuates between dreamy ennui and slowly escalating dread.

Its pastiche of Into the Spider-Verse is revealed to be nothing more than window dressing.

Late in this reboot, a character states “Nostalgia is overrated,” and it feels like an indictment of the film we’ve been watching. Far from making a case for the original I Know What You Did Last Summer as one with its own identity and a legacy worth turning over, Robinson’s update is so cynically made and self-indulgent that it will at least leave you respecting the workmanlike scare-making that director Jim Gillespie brought to the 1997 film.

The film may be most powerful for how Reid Davenport subtly connects the experience of the disabled community with that of marginalized diaspora groups at large.

The film reveals—and urges on—a historical shift in how we relate to other living beings.

It seems unsure whether it wants to be a campy slice of macabre in the vein of Dexter and American Horror Story, where the religious imagery and bloodletting are played for both chills and thrills, or a genuine rumination on death, faith, and the morality of doing bad things to bad people.

Eddington is especially pointed in the way that it views our online connectedness as a social cancer rather than an engine for progress.

This film finally admits that Superman has been a mainstay for nearly a century precisely because he stands for things outside of faddish trends.

The film is at its best when it’s keyed to its main character’s breakneck energy.

The film adopts a diaristic, epistolary form that flattens its emotional topography.

Metaphysical implications about the nature of reality or the possibility of shared consciousness are left mostly unspoken, as the film spends more time developing a surface-level study of the desire for romantic possession and control.

There’s a grating meta-ness to Gareth Edwards’s Jurassic World Rebirth that speaks to the filmmakers’ knowledge that they’re at the mercy of pressures to bring something new to a franchise that’s now on its seventh installment.

40 Acres continually finds clever ways to either subvert familiar story beats or to make them land with extra impact.

Alex Ross Perry doesn’t insert himself into something he views as bigger than himself, and that sense of reverence lends an emotional anchor to even the driest, disaffected parts of Videoheaven.

Kill the Jockey’s originality consists not just in taking the clichéd metaphor of rebirth literally, but in casually ratcheting that literalness to ever more fantastical degrees.

Imagine John Waters at the helm of a Terminator 2 remake and you have an inkling of just how wild a pivot M3GAN 2.0 is from its predecessor.

Some accuse the director of succumbing to sentimentality, but he’s never less sublime than when he reaches for ridiculous, grandiose highs in romance, coincidence, and naked emotion.

In the absence of any overt commentary, the film’s more open-ended choices in editing and music take on added significance.

The film’s conception of the future, perceptively, looks back to humankind’s primeval past.

The film’s best trait is the one that permeates every truly great first-contact story—not just the hope that our first meeting with the strangest of strangers is benevolent, or that the universe is too vast to determine they all wish good or ill on us, but that connecting with humanity still has value.

F1 succeeds for many of the same reasons that Top Gun: Maverick does: for elevating familiar material with old-school filmmaking swagger.

The film limply gestures at ideas around women’s rights and athlete boycotts.

Christian Swegal’s feature-length directorial debut is like staring into a national wound.

The human struggles at play are too dire and relatable for us to say that these people don’t deserve that level of grace, but making the audience generally sympathize with them doesn’t make spending time with them particularly pleasant either.

Set to the rhythms of a pulsing, ultramodern New York milieu, the film, at its best, wrings real tension and excitement out of the simple exchanging of clandestine messages and sensitive information.

As heartwarming as this story remains at its core, it’s hard to shake that you already know how it will play out.

As its second half begins to focus more on Lucy’s dating dilemma, and how she’s forced to confront her firmly established beliefs and rules about dating, the film hews increasingly close to the narrative expectations of the traditional rom-com.

The film’s microcosm of dysfunction is convincing for how it depicts an ongoing, even never-ending, struggle to define oneself.

The film is comic yet vicious and cynically bleak in its portraiture of Japan’s silent plague.

Rithy Panh’s film is hard-hitting yet illusive, much like the story its characters are hunting.

A story that might have been benefited by being allowed to breathe over a six-episode arc instead feels rushed and schematic rather than lived-in.

Charles Williams’s feature-length directorial debut, Inside, centers on a trio of dangerous men who are forced into each other’s orbit, leading to an outcome that’s both violently chaotic and tragically predictable.

Killer of Killers only gives us just enough to get by, get invested, and get to the goods.

Sans a mythology of its own, or any substantive ties into where the John Wick films go chronologically after this, Ballerina is just another 87Eleven joint.

Like any number of Exorcist wannabes, David Midell’s film is a special kind of hell.

This film essay grapples with the ethical and political considerations raised in the effort to retrieve Césaire from oblivion.

Mike Flanagan’s film doesn’t escape the mires of unpersuasive pop psychology.

Tornado’s winking theatricality, thematic fixations with myth and avarice, and pared-down plotting add up to a heady concoction, but it’s more conducive to reflection than engagement.

Jonathan Millet’s film is unconvincing and unnaturally contorted into its shape.

The raw emotion underlying The Phoenician Scheme peeks out at unexpected times.

If there’s a moral here, it might be that the only thing worse than a competitive billionaire is a bored one.

Like its predecessors, the film is an often awkward mix of YA drama and R-rated gore.

Here, “ohana” doesn’t just mean family but community, and the film does moving and spirited work in showcasing how crucial it is for us to lift each other up.

The film has a white-hot nerve of pain running inside it that burns right through the screen.

The film desperately tries to convince us that it’s peeling back the layers of the Weeknd’s persona in order to show you what’s really going on inside his head. But, in defiance of Anima’s wishes, Hurry Up Tomorrow lacks the honesty to confront what’s there.

The film is so welded to its main character’s perspective that it, too, shies away from understanding, tragic and frustrating in equal measure.

The film is a showcase for preposterous (and mostly practical) action and an unabashed sentimentality that Ethan feels for the makeshift family of spies he’s assembled over the course of the series.

Bloodlines finds frights and fun alike in a string of gory kills.