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.