It mixes the comfort and reliability of a greatest hits album with the bold visionary direction of a thrilling, experimental album from an artist at the peak of their powers. If The Boy and the Heron is really the end of Miyazaki’s career, he’s gone out with a triumph.

Both understands our private relations as enigmas to those on the outside, as well as wields that mystery for a subtle, striking examination of the imaginative means by which we fill in personal and collective blanks.

The most surprising aspect of Rotting in the Sun isn’t how many hard dicks are knocking together at any one moment, but that it’s genuinely a blast despite all of that. It’s a sexy, searing satire of influencer culture and gay misanthropy, as well as a pseudo-murder mystery in one abrasive package (pun intended). This is the sleaziest fun you’ll have all year.

Sitting in Bars with Cake is exactly what you think it is from the name alone: a happy-go-lucky coming-of-age movie about people who sit in bars with cake. It is sweet but, like a good cake, never too sugary and indigestible.

It may be messy, but then, what child’s story isn’t?

A stinging political, social, and media critique made from digitally altered bits and pieces of entertainment favorites, at once hilarious, enraged, and as zonked out of its mind as many viewers will prefer to be while watching it.

Choose Love wants to be an exciting Choose Your Own Adventure special; but really, the film is too lazy to actually come up with any fun, creative storylines.

The outrage elicited by Scouts Honor over that situation is compounded by the agonizing commentary of victims.

A stylishly pessimistic portrait of one man’s villainy and, just as stingingly, the way in which it infected all that he touched—as if through the very blood.

As self-contained as any episode of the television show upon which it’s based. It’s also as efficient and straightforward as that predecessor, if not quite as disposable, thanks to its peerless star.

Proof that Sandler still has the capacity to spearhead (as opposed to just for-hire headline) a competent movie—including one featuring those closest to him.

A damning portrait of an unrepentant cheat and the unregulated system—and unsuspecting people—he bamboozled for his own gain.

Prepare to bang your head and raise your horns to what is surely the most epically metal release of 2023—and a satisfying conclusion to a gonzo parody par excellence.

Any grown-up’s desire for such material will be swiftly neutered by [the film], which despite boasting the participation of genuinely funny people like Will Ferrell, Jaime Foxx, Isla Fisher, and Randall Park is a mirthless mutt of a movie.

Arguably the most derivative offering the tired genre has yet to offer, borrowing elements from so many forebearers that it plays like a conventional pastiche.

Habitually shooting her characters through narrow doorways and windows, the better to convey their isolation as well as their squeezed-by-circumstance states, the director fashions a sinister atmosphere, aided by intermittent pregnancy and corpse imagery.

A testament to the vitality and fragility of memory that itself serves as an act of preservation—of a prized past, a fraught present and an everlasting devotion.

The movie has a tighter, more out-there scope than its contemporaries, but its ideas about aging and companionship are universal. Bolstered by a terrific core cast of older actors, Jules is a warm film that proves senior cinema doesn’t have to be the same fluff, repackaged several times over.

Heart of Stone plays like reheated leftovers, its flavor familiar but diluted.