Directed by Georgia Bernstein, the perverse Night Nurse doesn’t quite qualify as a psychosexual thriller, despite underlying erotic tension; there is something more seductive and sinister under the surface.

Murthy’s relationship with her father is sweet and open, filling the movie with a rare warmth that comes from sincerity and a willingness to share vulnerable moments. If the immigrant experience says anything about the fabric of this country, it is found in those moments of exposure, where the country feels open to opportunity but is hiding many webs and many spiders.

This is a story-first project utilizing everything at its disposal to enchant, entertain, and inspire with catchy songs, three-dimensional characters, and impeccable craft.

Not since Richard Lester’s underrated Robin and Marian has there been a more clear-eyed, metatextual investigation into the stories that comprise the legend.

Disclosure Day is another Spielberg blockbuster triumph, a welcome return to the genre he’s always been best at, and a genuinely spine-tingling, soul-searching experience that leaves us wondering less about aliens and more about how we can learn to listen to, understand, and have empathy for each other.

With an ending that aims to conventionally convey a shared feeling of connection between every living thing on the planet, there’s the sense Underland has juggled a lot of ideas without ever landing on the precise form to convey them.

Suzuki’s film does more to suggest a promise of great things to come. But the vision is still there to impress, even when one feels certain pieces are missing.

The emotions run the gamut, and Melliti imbues an authenticity to each one as her world spins between the dueling halves of her character’s identity.

Forastera is thus very much a coming-of-age story, despite its unconventional trigger through the sorrow of death.

To call With Hasan in Gaza a personal work would be an understatement, but its message is as clear as it is universal.

Time and Water often feels like a celebration, a reminder of what’s right in front of us. Whether it be glaciers or grandmas or flowers or children, there is love somewhere nearby. In lesser hands, this all may play a bit cloying. Luckily, Dosa is deft in her ability.

It’s a movie in awe of the expansive bizarro universe it’s created out of the mundane everyday, and that alone proves infectious.

Pressure is an interesting, entertaining thriller that harkens back to a kind of studio picture that is now only made by mid-majors like Focus Features.

This whole world aesthetically presents itself like an R-rated, multi-cultural Zootopia (without the one-dimensional race allegory) that shifts between English, French, and Arabic. Rather than have a specific rhyme or reason for which characters are which, I imagine this stylistic choice was made to create a remove from reality while also playing with the notion of children’s stories using animals as a teaching tool. It probably also helped cajole friends and family to participate by voicing “themselves.”

These characters stay alive within the moment and within us, exuding a life-affirming quality akin to García Lorca’s lines so often uttered in this sensational film.

Director Marie Clémentine Dusabejambo’s film isn’t challenging for its harrowing, explicit descriptions of violence from victims, but for the way her screenplay (co-written with Delphine Agut) offers no clear resolution to inter-community tensions even decades removed from crimes.

This is a film that lingers in the bloodstream, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning achieves something very few films of its kind can: introducing and sustaining a group protagonist while paying the necessary attention to the individuals who form it.

John Lennon: The Last Interview is a minor work in the canon of both Soderbergh and John/Yoko, but it’s a niche wellspring of hyper-detailed information for Beatles purists.

More than a well-crafted thriller, Victorian Psycho proves a rousing comedy, its trio of great actors never missing the mark with a stoic line delivery.

A funny and formally adventurous adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway set in modern-day Nigeria.

In retrospect, there’s a kind of audacity to the film’s oscillating sprawl. Zvyagintsev is making space for a bourgeois love triangle against the backdrop of a war that’s blotted out everything else, and where domestic stories of such scale, in some fundamental sense, hardly matter. It is this cognitive dissonance that makes Minotaur such a fascinating oddity.

Intent and execution might not always align, but it’s an entertainment ride nonetheless.

The Man I Love is not the “musical” that promotional materials have suggested, but it’s more than worth seeing just the same.

Nemes’ directorial tendencies are on point, but they aren’t as enigmatic or unforgettable as they’ve been in the past.

Reminiscent of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, this film promises less and then gives more than one would have expected—yet another vivisection of family animosities and the importance of art in their lives.

It’s not pleasurable to watch Garance get drunk and potentially waste her entire life, yet the way Exarchopoulos imitates both drunkenness and the act of alcohol withdrawal, full of reappearing panic attacks, rings hypnotic.

With a wafer-thin plot and essentially non-existent characters, however, the one-time enfant terrible’s first feature in a decade has little to defend itself against the creeping sense of perfume-advert vapidity—or, worse still, AI slop. The extent to which you agree with that will come down to each viewer’s taste and sensibilities, of course, but I must say that after ten years away from the world’s biggest screens, I was hoping for a little more.