The issue of racism sits nestled under both this sequence and the field of anthropology as a whole, giving Expedition Content a nakedly ontological dimension that interrogates how images are produced and who produces them.

Like most of this series’s best action, the big bombastic noise is often a distraction from something far more intimate, and in Day One’s case, something far more existentially beautiful.

The film oscillates between the playfully on the nose and the existentially profound with the confidence of a volcano chaser surfing on a river of lava.

The film’s sheer fun and invention counterbalance its main characters’ abject failure in their search for meaning and success.

The film is one of the more intrinsically frightening evocations of a traumatized mind since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.

2nd Chance a terrific American tall tale as well as a cautionary tale and a ripping good yarn.

With Descendant, filmmaker Margaret Brown finds poetry where most would see the opportunity for a polemic.

Writer-director Nikyatu Jusu’s film ultimately proposes that survival is the greatest form of resistance.

Brian Pestos’s flair for go-for-broke zaniness transmutes what might otherwise have been a lump of self-indulgent clichés into gold.

Shaunak Sen’s documentary is both otherworldly and humanizing, as if it were bridging a gap between different forms of existence.

Alex Pritz’s documentary provides an affecting look at indigenous lives at the frontline of deforestation in the Amazon.

Ikiru wows for its complicated interrogation (and innovation) of subjective, cinematic experiences of time and memory, but lulls in its commemoration of a wealthy, privileged man who finally decides to care after it’s absolutely confirmed he has no time left to live.

Taurus is in the business of self-aggrandizement, but this is a film that understands that stardom is inherently aggrandizing.

The film goes from biting satire to broad farce and back as Alain Guiraudie fills it with both social observation and ludicrous incident.

The film poignantly draws a straight line from the economic anxieties of the past straight to the present.

That Kind of Summer never quite resolves into any one stance on its subjects, an equanimity that’s to its credit.

Small, Slow But Steady is one of the first great pandemic movies because it reflects the lessons about mutual support and communal perseverance that we should be taking from very familiar pandemic struggles.

Apollo 10½ ultimately suggests that memory distorts and amplifies just as much as it preserves.

For all of its farcical overtones, the film contains many shrewd observations about the power games inherent in relationships.

Paul King again proves himself a masterful engineer of imaginary worlds, and it’s the meticulous attention to detail that makes Wonka so captivating.

Jonas Bak’s semi-autobiographical film is a gentle depiction of modern alienation.

The film recalls nothing less than Inherent Vice in its use of a threadbare detective narrative to explore both human interactions and grander ideas about the American society of its time.

The Fabelmans is a provocative investigation of the cinematic medium from one of its great masters.

The film is consistently delightful, offering up an unrelenting supply of shimmering, sun-dappled visuals and a sweet, strange story about a young girl making peace with her past.

David Cronenberg stares upon humanity’s need to evolve toward some kind of survival with a serene, godlike assurance.

Brett Morgen is less interested in factual biography than in eliciting a sense of the man as an artist and personality.

The film’s depiction of life impacted by urban transformation conjures a palpable aura of entrapment and helplessness.

The film goes to show that humanism and absurdism are often two expressions of the same face.

Despite the mystery of the home invasion becoming increasingly tangential, Human Factors remains a compelling puzzle-box.

Its bizarre melding of moral-panic melodrama with the filmmaker’s signature wrong-man theme is fascinating.

George Miller’s film is a passionate exploration of how image-making is inextricable from storytelling.

The film is a thorny exploration of how individuals’ personal ordeals can quickly merge into an impenetrable thicket of irreparable relationships.

Holy Spider trickily manages to bridge the gap between social realism and exploitation cinema in a way that hints at how both are rooted in a similar place of gritty authenticity.

Deftly, Showing Up leaves unresolved the familial, creative, professional, and interpersonal matters at its core, staying true to its vision of an artistic environment perpetually caught between modest comfort and precariousness.

Gradually, Crimes of the Future becomes a surprisingly thorough and anticipatory working draft of the prototypical Cronenberg body-horror film, dramatizing, with characteristically repulsed fascination, a series of biological mutations that usher in a micro-culture given to cannibalism, pedophilia, and other practices that indicate a looming erasure of personal identity.

Weird accordingly (or is it accordion-gly?) takes everything to new heights of glorious ridiculousness.

In Claire Denis’s film, sex is the great equalizer, or at least the act that allows people to defer taking a firm moral or ethical stance.

Smoking Causes Coughing isn’t just an anti-superhero superhero film, but, thanks to Tristram Shandy-like levels of discursivity, something akin to an anti-film.

Writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s boldly restive biopic imagines Empress Elisabeth of Austria as a deeply restless soul chafing against the social limitations of her day.

The film is a meditative, slow crescendo of wounded feelings and quiet epiphanies.

EO feels freed of plot, free of expectation, driven only by the need to honor its own internal, poetic drive.

Though its politics are still quite progressive, La Cage aux Folles is ultimately a work of classicism, crafted with precision and efficiently paced.

Léonor Serraille’s Mother and Son is a lovely film about feminine strength that also refuses to glorify motherhood.

Part of what makes The Worst Ones tick with a pace close to that of a thriller is its self-reflexive relationship to genre and knack for referentiality.

The film is a quietly gutting ode to Paris’s resilience in the post-Bataclan era.

The glue holding it all together is the same that gave the earlier Hunger Games films an edge over its YA brethren: the steadfast portrayal of the cynicism and emotional neglect required to regard other human beings as numbers and meat that have to be placated to be useful.

While it’s never didactic or heavy-handed about its messaging, Paddington in Peru also offers an idea of Britishness that’s multifaceted and modern.

Everything Smile is doing is familiar enough at this point to be considered old-fangled, but the striking precision of its craft sloughs away any sensations of déjà vu.

Jamila C. Gray lends credibility to Brianna Jackson, who happens to be searching for just that. She plays the damn role.

Plan 9 stands as a testament to sincerity run amok, and as a passionate display of artistic limitations, it’s as glorious as it is flabbergasting.

In the end, Fernando León de Aranoa’s film suggests that there may not be a lot of daylight between a good boss and a true villain.

Faced with oblivion, our third- and fourth-string MCU characters choose life, all while the film hammers home that there’s no reason why they should.

It’s to Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry’s credit that what lingers is their characters’ uncertainty.

This is a theatrical story told in a purposefully and self-consciously theatrical manner.

Throughout, Pennebaker’s camera moves in as close as it can to capture every moment of doubt, disappointment and rage in Stritch’s face. That even still viewers debate whether Stritch was playing up the drama of the moment for the cameras only underlines how deftly Pennebaker’s brief and unassuming film resides at the heart of the interplay between work, art, and performance.

It’s rather amazing how far the film is able to coast on its uniquely fascinating premise, even if it isn’t much of a stretch for its director: Campillo co-authored Laurent Cantet’s incredible Time Out, a different kind of zombie film about the deadening effects of too much work on the human psyche, and They Came Back is almost as impressive in its concern with the existential relationship between the physical and non-physical world.

A Couple ultimately constitutes not so much a footnote to Frederick Wiseman’s storied career as a beguiling little doodle in its margins.

The warm, rueful, and sometimes angry All the Beauty and the Bloodshed accomplishes the goal of any documentary worthy of its genre by shining an insightful light onto what informs an artist’s vision.

The film is honest and poignant in its kaleidoscopic refractions of the frustration inherent in a process that’s only just beginning.

Few films feel as excitingly jacked in to our current social climate as Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

Monica is an unsentimental exploration of its main character’s search for personal fulfillment through human connection.

Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul quickly blooms as a study in contrasts, sublimely juxtaposing character and culture.

Ashley McKenzie’s film blossoms into a moving story about two people trapped by the institutions that they’re beholden to.

Throughout The People’s Joker, Drew lampoons comedy institutions as freely as she does superhero hegemony, in effect mounting an impassioned argument for the vitality of art made at the margins regardless of classification.

The film takes advantage of the leeway for speculation afforded by its subject’s reclusive nature.

The emotional crux of Alice Darling is less the manner in which it lays out a roadmap for an exit from an abusive relationship and more its attentiveness to the profound ramifications of such relationships for the women in them.

The elegantly underplayed performances ensure that the film never succumbs to melodrama.

The film’s most authentic moments are those that leave its main character breathless, cutting her plans for making up for lost time short.

The film takes its time delving into its characters' headspaces, to the point that it becomes less of a thriller than an unorthodox character study, especially as its expertly deployed use of flashback slowly forms the emotional core of the story.

By the end of My Imaginary Country, Guzmán has still not moved past the trauma of history. Nor, he suggests, has Chile. Not yet. But he does leave open the possibility of a future not beholden to that trauma and a nation that might now be able to write a new history for itself.

The satire here isn’t quite as on point as that of its predecessors, but it helps that Boyega, Parris, and Foxx share the sort of chemistry that even the most secretive government lab couldn’t cook up.

Deadpool & Wolverine doesn’t flinch from speaking some measure of truth to power.

This beautiful presentation of Vittorio De Sica’s fantastical portrait of poverty and human fortitude helps make the argument that the film is more than just a curio in neorealist history.

Alexandre O. Philippe’s essay film is both dead-serious about its subjects and playfully exploratory.

Challengers is an intoxicating showcase for the beauty and excitement of bodies in motion.

The ambivalence with which the film treats its main character’s revelation proves rich with complication and offers a new intervention into a genre we thought we’d fully internalized.

The Train makes unmistakably clear to us that heroism isn’t always black and white—that sometimes it’s simply about doing what’s right even if you don’t understand why.

The film is a sensitive character study disguised as an unnerving exercise in body horror.

In essence, Truth or Dare is less of a concert film than an elaborately constructed exegesis on pop mythmaking and the construction of identity.

Bleak and unabashedly grubby, Dennis Donnelly’s The Toolbox Murders straddles the line between several intersecting genres.

Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary is a celebration of a profound, dying privilege.

Supposedly created as a showcase for Stratten (whose tragic death cast a pall over the film’s release), the picture instead offers a splendid ensemble, from Gazarra’s world-weary suavity and Ritter’s slapstick acuity to Hepburn’s autumnal grace and, above all, Colleen Camp’s marvelous blend of abrasion and snap. Indeed, the actress embodies the garrulous yet vulnerable charm of They All Laughed, which, for all the Hawksian ping-pong of the dialogue, is closer to the melodic élan of a Jacques Demy film, as wistful and fragile as a sand castle.

Philipp Stölzl craftily melds the genres of period drama and psychological thriller, not for the purposes of reheated nostalgia, but to shed a cold light on the recursions of historical trauma.

The sense that they don’t make mass entertainments like this anymore is palpable.

By turns wry and tragic, but never glib or mawkish, this is a visually rich and evocative drama about navigating the often treacherous path to adulthood.

Magazine Dreams melds the alluring and the horrific in an unsettling mixture suited to its account of the peril of pursuing physical perfection.

At its core, 20 Days in Mariupol is a testament to the citizens of Mariupol.

Chloe Domont has conjoined a familiar fantasy of the powerful hedge fund magnate with brutally familiar quotidian details of a relationship that’s about to undergo a profound stress test.

The film is an impressively complicated and compassionate drama about shame and desire.

The film deals forthrightly with the question of purpose and whether or not it can be found in a career.

Diverging from romances in which lovers are expected to move heaven, earth, and themselves in order to make a moment of love last forever, Past Lives asks us to embrace the changes that come with time.

Birth/Rebirth serves as a perverse correction, recalibrating decades of dilution to reemphasize the moral weight and emotional anguish at the heart of Shelley’s novel.

Shortcomings is a mostly comedic but fitfully insightful examination of a character type familiar to indie cinema: the solipsistic guy who fills the gap left by emotional underdevelopment with intense opinions delivered at bad times.

The film has a free-floating, nearly intangible sense of unease that greatly serves it.

Erica Tremblay’s granular attention to place makes sure that you take note of the root causes of the defeat felt by the Native characters.

The searing images of various gulags, public executions, and private beatings will not be easily forgotten.

With its determination to retrace the largely forgotten steps of a feminist trailblazer, The Disappearance of Shere Hite is an essential work of archival savvy, blending popular and academic conversations with ease and precision.

The film’s unique blend of deadpan and absurdist humor, and its tendency to occasionally push the boundaries of good taste, shows that Emma Seligman is comfortable working on both ends of the comic spectrum.