With all this at play, Matt and Mara conjures a very particular kind of magic: that of an emotional journey which is shared but never properly enunciated.

It’s a wonderfully inquisitive film, as searching as it is sincere.

It’s not that the film is so crazy that you have to see it (in fact, what’s crazy about it is that it isn’t); rather that few have ever had a platform like Philips and Joaquin Phoenix to fool with expectations of the masses so blatantly. How they did it is something worth seeing.

While Rebel Ridge hints at larger systemic issues that could be part of a million other small towns across the country, the film works best when solely anchored on Terry’s perspective. The experience is one of riveting twists, turns, and unnerving tension.

Perry’s film, one of his most accomplished and complete-feeling to date, exists in both a past and conditional tense. It gives a brilliant précis of one of indie music’s most influential artists: in its most conventional passages, it’s a visual and critical biography identifying the key features of their suburban and middle-American backgrounds, their initiation into “alt” culture and the art life as students, and their sometimes loving, often tentative rapport with the 90s’ big-money music industry.

Queer’s hollowness––its inability to fully flesh out its hero’s psyche––feels all the more conspicuous: a failure of the imagination.

Regardless of whether you’re approaching it as a satirical examination of true-crime fandoms or as a dark subversion of the typical serial-killer thriller, Red Rooms is an unsettling, uncompromising accomplishment.

Where other filmmakers fall flat with the same material, Kurzel nails every emotional beat, wrenches your gut more than a few times, and immerses you in a primal modern history you likely don’t know this well. He weds the cinematic elements to a relatively memorable whole that envisions the past with clarity and hyper-relevance as only film can.

On this occasion Salles has somehow failed to find the right cinematic framework for this biopic storytelling. The film feels uncalibrated, but not in the free-flowing, depth-exploring, liberated kind of way.

It’s succinct, light on its feet, totally earnest, and––in spite of some indulgent conversations on art and writing––never feels like it’s trying too hard.

The movie doesn’t have much to offer by way of score, composition, camera movement, sound design, style, lighting, production design, etc. At least there will be some narrative to discover, and a pleasure in lead performers still harmoniously attuned to one another despite the script’s hobbles.

The Brutalist is less-than-perfect (for all his charms, Guy Pearce is no Philip Seymour Hoffman or Daniel Day-Lewis) but it offers an all-too-rare reminder of how it feels when this artform is at its very best, and that has less to do with the scale of its ambitions than how effectively it combines movement, emotion, and sound.

A cold thriller with a dark, satirical edge that shows the master filmmaker at his leanest and meanest.

This is a film worth discovering, ideally after immersing yourself in the underrated novel.

What we have is a domestic thriller initially consigned to the domicile before the impact of its primary, female characters shatter those confines, taking it to the desert-like ex-urban outskirts and the hypothetical beyond.

Just over an hour long, Sleep #2 is one of the most demanding and static features I’ve seen in a while, with darkened, theatrical viewing conditions an imperative. And the old critical saw that it’s “more rewarding to think about than watch” also wandered into my mind, but sometimes you need to play through the pain, to let the impact and results the film seeks bloom in your head.

If Eight Postcards from Utopia is undoubtedly a compilation-essay, it’s an unusually crowd-pleasing one.

What one will remember from The Falling Star are small things. The way characters get into cars or attempt to fall asleep. The way they pour beer or run from gunfire. For this writer, the small things do not add up to quite enough. Yet when it’s funny, it is really funny.

Larraín keeps much of the film quiet, and as a result Maria can feel a little empty: a conceptual touch, perhaps, but one that leaves Knight’s script and Jolie’s performance (presence to burn, a bit limited for interiority) with a lot of heavy-lifting.

There is wit, some stinging humor, and a lot of arousal baked into Babygirl, but it all works so well as an exciting, sexy (yes, let’s reclaim this word!) whole because the film pays attention to sex. The mood, the boundaries, the mistakes, the ecstasy of it all feed into its melodramatic streaks.

Striking a sweet, often humous tone, Arlyck navigates aging gracefully with a keen awareness of how parent-child relationships morph as time proceeds.

Woefully underwritten, Ackie does just enough with her frequent close-ups to grant the slightest impression there might be more under the surface of her starstruck exterior. It’s an uphill battle Ackie fights admirably.

True to the title, it’s a long soak in a certain kind of soulful, middle-class malaise, not far removed from John Cassavetes’ more restrained films.

With its deep, bold dives into the nightmarish and the surreal, The Sparrow in the Chimney is that rare film that feels like a catharsis for protagonist and director both.

Though Wang never directly addresses the wider forces driving this manic industry––mass consumption, globalization, fast fashion, capitalism––they seem to linger just outside the frame. On the ground level, however, the director isn’t pulling any punches regarding the people responsible for all this struggle and strife.

With potent performances and a gorgeous, textured aesthetic, The King Tide proves a mesmerizing experience above and below its surface.

Lacking thematic subtlety or dimensionality outside of Rain and Andy, Alien: Romulus compensates with a killer instinct deployed with squirming glee.

Its pandemic setting proves effective, the class commentary engaging, and performances top-notch.