Another example of a tasteful but passionless festival film, Saim Sadiq’s feature debut Joyland errs on the side of arch family drama when its most interesting aspects remain almost in the periphery, promising a much better film.

The film’s structure allows us to spend time both together and individually with each character, veering off with them for a day at the office, school, dance club, or park. It is simultaneously a slice of life and a film about the bigger picture.

Only touching on something interesting formally in the hum of factory machines and the depressing deadness of low-rent diners, it feels like the kind of work where one uses the descriptor “well-made” as a backhanded compliment. The director pulls off his “vision,” but frankly it doesn’t seem that hard to think up.

Is That Black Enough For You?!? proves a warm, wise, personal celebration of raw creative energy.

If often more ambitious, Wakanda Forever is also, in its lumbering narrative, a more awkward film than its predecessor.

Cervera’s feature debut is an accordingly powerful depiction of motherhood’s oft-overlooked cost.

Green and Fonacier are both fantastic within this evolving dynamic, their inevitable end a mutually brutal sacrifice meant to close a broken loop rather than continue some damaging cycle. Their characters are so complex that their best moments are those subtle shimmers revealing true natures beneath old façades.

The worlds of contemporary geopolitics and narrative independent filmmaking collide in You Resemble Me, a movie that shape-shifts from a first act coming-of-age tale into something searing and provocative, and ripped straight from the headlines.

The low-budget nature of the production does help emphasize Ryder’s ability to create elusive, attention-grabbing visuals on a shoestring, but everything stands at such a remove it’s hard to want to get lost in the frame. Inland ultimately struggles to convince he can offer anything more than replicating another filmmaker’s well-worn style.

Kramer and Riseborough are clearly on the same wavelength, both understanding that though the representation in Please, Baby, Please is important, it is most vital the film be entertaining. In both respects they find success.

There’s a tug-of-war between plot and characters that always seems won by the former to the latter’s detriment. If not unforgivable, it is frustrating. Thankfully, the style has a way of distracting from those shortcomings.

Feste’s script does nothing to establish its world. While first appearing to be tethered to reality, Run Sweetheart Run soon recontextualizes itself as supernatural without telegraphing or even justifying its decisions.

Above all, the film shows what an emotional catalyst the Calendar Girls are for everyone who participates. This fantasia in sparkles and patriotic leotards is a phenomenon worthy of ethnographic study, and though it doesn’t dig too deeply into its subjects beliefs, the film is a highly watchable, admiring snapshot of girls who just want to have fun.

Johansen is a force despite this film’s flaws, undeniable in both charms and quirks. His talent remains emphatic, and his stage presence is enough for the camera to sit back and appreciate him. Being enigmatic yet accessible, Scorsese and Tedeschi must capture his substantial coolness. They succeed in spades.

With a work like Scarlet, so gossamer-airy and enchanting that it could almost be family-adjacent viewing like Petite Maman, we are witnessing Marcello in a mercurial, mid-career stage, watching his sensibility truly take shape.

Pretty Problems explores several interesting themes but never quite knows what to make of Jack and Lindsay, their new friends, or the help that enables them. It feels conceived from within its own bubble, where money can in fact buy you almost anything you want except for a sense of fulfillment if you don’t know exactly what’s desired.

It’s nothing short of heroic and heartbreaking and important—both because of how laws in her name are still being planned to go before the US legislature and because audiences need to remember that victims of domestic abuse deserve to be given as much benefit of the doubt as their abusers. Being an addict shouldn’t disqualify you from receiving life-saving protection.

With remarkably immediate cinematography and an intimate understanding of its subjects, Descendant becomes an essential ideal of how to tell a community’s story: not through distant talking heads, but capturing moving bodies through land and history, giving a voice to those that can often feel powerless.

Sr. is sweet and tender, never playing as a dolled-up version of this relationship; it instead depicts a trueness in this bond, a warmth that has existed all of their lives. The sounds that echo after the film ends are the Downeys laughing together––about dumb stuff, about film references, about the past, about their present, about anything and everything.

The ultimate impression is that of a theoretical atemporal relationship existing between these locations separated by thousands of miles, that the discourses on love, war, and collective consciousness throughout the film pertain not to where exactly each individual scene or angle is shot but to a grander, seemingly cosmic notion of global human connection, an idea aided by the film’s unique approach to performance and characterization.

There’s a promise of freedom and rehabilitation that, in reality, is more like exile and ostracization.

It gives time, credence, and a stage to Mamie, a woman immortalized through her motherhood and 50 years of advocacy overlooked that has become overlooked. It’s a timely, essential piece of filmmaking.

“Can I quote you?” As it did throughout Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey’s intrepid investigative journalism for the New York Times, that question reverberates in Maria Schrader’s She Said, an understated, polished procedural that chronicles the way two reporters exposed Hollywood mega-producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual abuse and assault.

The (un)reality of what’s happening beneath the surface is hardly unique or secretive, but the way Veach writes its revelations and McKee films its visual labyrinth spanning past, present, and purgatory ensure the drama unfolding is never without intrigue.

Unfortunately Halloween Ends can’t stick the landing of its bizarre twist.

Chavez and Rodriguez deliver authentic performances in first-time roles that shine a light on harrowing circumstances, but the script they’re beholden to won’t let us embrace them outside the construct that all professionals are irrefutably out to prey upon the less fortunate.

The Eternal Daughter buries us in the apprehension and frustration of writing and self-discovery as if they were one act, inextricable necessities. It’s spectral; much of what’s going on or being said doesn’t actually connect, but feels like it should. In a world of ghosts, somehow it does—a phantom connection that hovers brilliantly over everything.

My Father’s Dragon is another beautifully animated effort from Cartoon Saloon, but the story fails to hit the heights of their previous work—a familiar children’s fable that hasn’t been given the necessary modern makeover.