The film is a little repetitive in its observations, even at the very brief runtime of 73 minutes, yet I still feel I’ll fondly remember its subjects and the glances into their lives. Just reckoning with a world so sad and the people willing to keep a straight face throughout is inspiring in its own right.

If you can forgive its facile villains, The Beasts’ well-shaken cocktail of realism and naturalism offers as many sublime scenes as it does provocative questions.

It definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but those who get on its frequency should have a whale of a time.

Glowicki does a great job grounding things in the confused malaise of a woman suddenly devoid of ambition beyond finding that cat.

Inoue’s film is not just an effective youth melodrama––much as it is that––but a fully sensory action film that deeply understands the raw appeal of its subject beyond wide-angle shots from the bleachers.

Cage is having the time of his life playing the role––flippant, unhinged, oozing the confidence of a man with nothing to lose.

The notable disappointment of this always-big, deft-enough, equal-parts compelling and lumbering work is its programmatic portrait of an operation we’re bluntly told changed humankind forever.

It’s difficult to accept Barbie as a satire when the filmmakers’ earnest enjoyment of the cars, the houses, the outfits, and even the toy food feels much more indulged than any philosophical reckonings. We’ve never expected Barbie to be a real thinker––why start now?

Mutt isn’t perfect, but it is well-lived. The real-life experiences of the filmmakers bleed through the frames. One wishes for a fuller narrative (the third act peters out a bit) and a peppier pace while also acknowledging the many young people who will discover this coming-of-age narrative and relate to it in a deeply important way.

Gorgeous to watch, with enough sly comedy to maintain levity, Fremont is notable in its decision to be small and intimate. It finds romance in everyday interactions, and in the easy pleasure of opening up a cookie and reading one’s fortune.

There is a giant world out there, and Maltz’s first narrative feature is a rich and moving ode of the people we encounter along the way, as well as the roads not taken.

What could’ve been a modern update of Wim Wenders’ blistering industry takedown The State of Things for the age of “content” falls flat. Being the savvy crowd-pleasing hack he is, Hazanavicius can’t resist banking his story in a cheesy, maudlin father-daughter bonding arc over the love of moviemaking.

Mánver takes on the part with ferociousness, creating a portrait of womanhood that challenges dogmatic ideas about the limits of desire. With her delicious Mamacruz, she makes us realize not much separates religious and sexual ecstasy, both of which can often connect us to our higher selves.

While Duplass, of course, adds plenty as the primary source of levity, Brown emerges as the standout. This is an actor who can apparently do anything.

If not the pure adrenaline rush that much of Fallout was, this latest Mission continuously finds new ways to surprise, subvert, entertain.

At best, Desperate Souls suggests a series of passionate stories being told by a beloved family member, occasionally sprawling but never anything less than compelling. By the end there’s a sense of sadness that its shaggy pleasures are now in the past, rendering its faults comparatively minor.

If No Hard Feelings lacks outrageousness and transgression, it is surprisingly nuanced and sensitive.

The Stroll is ultimately a celebration of the colorful personalities that worked the streets and have a story to tell. It’s a history of multiple communities and an important contribution to New York lore; a story told from the perspective of someone who made history and is now in a position to write it.

Klondike stands as one of the stronger dramatizations of this crucial moment in recent history.

When the entire cast embraces the self-deprecating nature needed to lean into the stereotypes while also calling them out, it’s impossible not to climb onboard via comedy alone. If the twists and turns are hardly shocking, that bluntness is the point.

Ultimately, A Woman Escapes harkens vivid emotions to 2020 and yearns for the need to form a tight-knit community––abroad or nearby––in the name of loneliness.

No director of her genius would ever really make a bad film––if such a thing even exists––but we can be wary of a change in sensibilities here. Lazzaro‘s transcendental moments felt earned because his world was coarser to the touch. With Le Pupille and La Chimera, Rohrwacher is moving towards a cinema of fewer rough edges, and a poorer one for it.

Whereas I Saw the Devil was relentlessly violent and mean-spirited, Cobweb has a softer heart, and fixates on sloppier ensemble staging and to-the-hilt acting performances to the detriment of Kim’s considerable skills with the camera, and his ability to manipulate audience attention in a quasi-Hitchcockian manner.

Across the Spider-Verse comes with the same exhaustion point that hits during every comic book movie, where the stakes have to be undercut with “am I the guy who does the thing” soy banter despite all manner of plotting still somehow justifying 140 minutes of our time.

Above all else, Le Bon’s debut showcases a playful spirit behind the camera: one eager to blend opposing genres, to find something authentically heartfelt beneath the tropes and gothic artifice. It’s a small Lake that I hope makes a big splash.

One of the greatest mysteries behind Ceylan’s cinema is how his talk-heavy sprawls manage to escape the aloofness of the chamber dramas they so often unspool as. Grasses is another scintillating example of that paradox, a film in which chats do not unfurl so much as detonate.

The movie tries a great deal and ends up stretching itself thin.

Navigating the tumultuous process of making a film is hard and often comic, but The Book of Solutions is careful enough not to reduce it to caricature. On the contrary, it preserves the ineffable magic of creation, even if that comes at the expense of the formal rigor we’d usually associate with the resourceful French director.