“Lost in the Night” functions as a study of absence — the absence of others, of talent, of answers, of peace, of love. By amalgamating all those lacks, Escalante reaches an unsurprising yet chillingly effective conclusion.

Unfortunately, Cailley’s conventional cinematic aesthetic is also often akin to a contemporary streaming movie (the first thirty minutes or seem like a television pilot) and while the visual effects are solid, there are few images that will stick with you hours after you’ve left the theater. What saves “The Animal Kingdom” is the genuine horror over this happening to anyone (Cailley gets that right, at least) and Kircher’s fantastic performance.

It is refreshing and endearing to watch as Gondry lets his protagonist, a version of himself, go to the end of his thoughts, even if they apparently lead nowhere.

Frustration is quickly diluted in service of reinforcing the central character’s enlightenment, a repeating arc that muddles the refined treatment of the film’s accompanying themes.

While this doc lacks a few crucial interviews, it nonetheless charts the course of one of ’60s television’s most recognizable stars. For fans of Mary Tyler Moore, James Adolphus’ doc is a must-watch.

Over the course of three and a half hours, Bang both refutes and affirms the criticisms over working conditions for these workers, many of whom are migrants, traveling hundreds of miles (or more) to make money for their families back home.

Its unflinching depiction of the brutal genocide of the Selk’nam people intermingles with pointed contempt for the egotistical yet pathetic colonists.

The couple’s pursuit of true, deep, sincere beauty in all things — in body and mind — despite these obstacles is infinitely touching.

Kubi is an outrageously exhilarating update of the samurai epic, dialing up the blood and guts and sprinkling in the sick humor to match.

While the filmmaker has a better grasp on conveying well-staged melodrama than many of his contemporaries half his age (Fabio Massimo Capogrosso’s score and Francesco Di Giacomo‘s cinematography assist), the heart of the story somehow still gets lost. Even a final scene that should capture the tragedy of this tale falls surprisingly flat.

There is a little bit of everything in A Brighter Tomorrow as it maneuvers through different narratives, jumping from the film production to Giovanni’s film to his domestic life. There are even moments when characters randomly break into song and dance, transforming it into a quasi-musical that doesn’t quite flow well.

In place of new, at least, we get to see Butler in his element as a man of compassion first and blazing guns second.

Despite Ben Hania sticking to her cinematic formula “Four Daughters” is genuinely hard to forget. It will linger with you for days afterward. That’s mostly due to Olfa’s heartbreaking perseverance to find her children and a wee bit of Ben Hania’s storytelling skill too.

Taken as a bone-dry satirical comedy, this would be a cruelly glib treatment of material sensitive enough to merit a trigger warning in bright yellow prior to the opening credits. But this agonizing tour through private agony deserves to be taken more seriously than that.

The use of body horror allegories in cinema to address the physical, physiological, and mental changes brought on by puberty could hardly be called original. However, by delightfully and intelligently remixing symbols and metaphors Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu refreshes the concept in her zesty debut feature Tiger Stripes.

The film never returns to the strength of its opening scene, and by the end, the spark is gone.

The minor problem of it all is while what Anderson is trying to say can be read across the sky like a beautifully glistening moonbeam; it does often lack the craterous depth of feeling we know he’s capable of when doing his best creative and emotional astrography.

Shot in a way reminiscent of classic ’70s cinema while commenting on the woes of the contemporary, Williams builds a timely film that still feels timeless, an expansive chronicling of a slice of America ripe for many a rewatch.

Its radical sweetness arises from a wellspring of empathy. Its radiant colors and lucid conception of vulnerability in the face of a largely inconsiderate world, sink deep beneath the skin in the liminal space between the soul and the heart that can make animation such a wondrous medium. Berger’s “Robot Dreams” is its stunning reality.

Writer-director Rodrigo Moreno methodically unfurls a genius tragicomedy on the elusive nature of freedom: an idealized state in which, in theory, one does as one pleases at all times.

Its interweaving of powerful performances and spiritual complexity, eventually melded with local folklore, is nothing short of beautiful.

By bringing to the screen a conversation painfully reserved to private spaces built upon the frail structures of shame and guilt without ever losing the type of loving lightness one can only get through unwavering support, Molly Manning-Walker confidently steps out of the gate right foot forward.

At its best moments, the extremely straightforward construction of Cédric Kahn’s The Goldman Case allows for fascinating dynamics and images to occur apparently unforced, as if by themselves, for the viewer to seize on their own.

For a movie that seeks to establish the ferocious fire within the great, shunned Catherine Parr, it doesn’t take long for the flame to fizzle out.

Magic is something that children of all ages desire to experience, and The Little Mermaid has magic to share because Halle typifies that enchantment.

Black Flies offers plenty of nihilistic entertainment. But don’t be too tempted to look for any depth in a film far too comfortable in the formulaic confines.

Triet’s breathtakingly intelligent and subtly perverse masterpiece takes the long way through the cold and the snow to address, in nuanced but never ambiguous terms, the ineffable and irreducible mystery at the heart of deep relationships — between two partners, between parents and their children, between words and the world.

While the Turkish director seems ever-fascinated with gloomy, nihilistic anti-heroes, he does vest more hope in human relationships than usual.

Just because something’s make-believe, whether a creative rendering or the quotidian detail of a marriage, that doesn’t mean it’s any less real. With his masterly manipulation of tone and perspective, Haynes ensures that we can feel that much even as the characters can’t bear to accept it.

We’re implored to never forget through a format that makes particulars prohibitively hard to remember.

The Killers of the Flower Moon, a visceral epic, is the story of the wreckage of a people, the evil in white men’s hearts and the poison they spread, and the erasure that occurs when their stain touches you. It’s powerful, even when you’re left wondering if someone else could’ve spread the gospel.

This is a film you can dissect for hours. A movie full of details and creative choices that will spur debate and passion. Another work of Glazer’s full of images that may haunt you for weeks. And well worth almost the decade it took to get here.

At every turn director James Mangold desperately wants to recapture the glory of old-school Hollywood filmmaking, but turns, painstakingly to the worn-out tools of present-day tentpole moviemaking.

Taking a mental note of every loose thread “Monster” introduces is a demanding task that may confuse some viewers, but it’s an immensely satisfying and emotionally resonant watch to see how the pieces fit together.

Central to the success of Butterfly Vision, however, is Burkovska: she embodies Lilia with silent rage, her poise broken in fleeting moments, the steely facade dropped for mere seconds at a time.

Perhaps worst of all, the movie is light on the laughs meant to come from trash-talking; the comedy just doesn’t have the crispiness it needs.

If it wasn’t for the highly-publicized scandals that envelop “Jeanne du Barry,” it is likely the film would make a swift turn from the red carpet into ostracism, and while the hubbub certainly delays the process, it will do little to prevent Maïwenn’s dire latest from the merciless hands of oblivion.

Fast X is what it is, and that is an absurdly fun popcorn movie. That is nothing to be ashamed of. If you’re down with that, that’s great. If not, why are you here?

It’s all too passive, and lacking in incisiveness cleverness for its own good, barely served by Day’s nostalgia for better films and voluminous silent stars.

Unfortunately [Lopez's] hampered by a character that is simultaneously overwritten and underwritten, while trapped in a film that never gives any of its characters room for the type of nuance a performance at that register requires.

Everyone knows what a Disney+ movie like this can and can’t do with its young characters, but Alvarez and team push the limits just enough, giving “Crater” a sense of gravity that might just surprise viewers of all ages.

In digging up what seems to be his own personal history, Honoré doesn’t trust the audience fully to fill in those silences.

This is a controlled and impressive debut from Le Bon that hints at talent to come and offers a warm, if not always unique, approach to the growing pains of young love.

Above all, I Used to Be Funny is a fine showcase for Sennott’s considerable gifts.

The puzzling thing about Italian director Gabriele Mainetti’s feature set in 1943 in German-occupied Rome is that, rather than embracing tastelessness a la John Waters, it guns for earnestness despite not having a thoughtful bone in its body.

Wigon’s sleek, seductive drama — as contained and actor-driven as a stage play, though shot so expressively that it could only be cinema — breaks down this pairing just to build it back up from scratch, testing the viability of a connection rooted in guarded performance as it crawls on all fours toward a more open, authentic intimacy.

Hypnotic features a well-crafted suspense sequence or two, a couple of clever twists – but also some wildly stupid ones, and a bone-headed over-explainer ending that treats the entire audience like dopes. [Work in Progress SXSW 2023]

Sisu communicates the basics without glossing over the record, and best of all without taking up time better spent liquifying bad guys.

It’s playful but serious at the right moments and wistful, without being on the nose, about how growing up is the greatest adventure. Just like a bedtime story, Peter Pan & Wendy is poignant and fanciful, and it soars through its 103 minutes as if it can make time stand still.

Sentimentality, earnestness, and the ability to tap into naked vulnerability—normally [Gunn's] great qualities—get the best of him, turning ‘Vol 3’ into a largely maudlin, overwrought, overstuffed, and melodramatic mess that only works in fits and starts.

As it is, the enormity of these feelings is trapped, lingering unexplored with nowhere to go, and the frustration felt as a viewer eventually gives way to disengagement.

Twilight suggests the futility of trying to solve some labyrinthian plot and that, instead, one should train their lens away from the facts and onto the people affected.

It’s incredibly soulless, disposable, and as generic as they come.

Are You There? God It’s, Margaret does an admirable job of honoring a beloved touchstone in the lives of so many young women. Frank yet warm, charming yet brutally honest, Craig’s film pays its due diligence to Blume and her cherished novel.

The Covenant is so self-assured in its noble filmmaking values and beliefs. It makes a knowing nod between two men— and the heroically punishing sacrifices they risked for one another— one of the most moving moments on screen this year.

If giving the public more of what they want is the real game here, that could certainly be accomplished without all the puffed-up verbiage. Peedom’s greatest asset is her treasure trove of eye-popping nature photography — true reverence for the sacred rivers means allowing them to speak for themselves.

Legislation has passed to fix Japan’s “aging problem,” and temper hate crimes against the elderly: anyone over the age of seventy-five can apply for government-funded assisted suicide. From this bleak premise, Chie Hayakawa’s beautifully humanist Plan 75 takes flight.

Ultimately, Aster just unleashes his inner freak and vomits it all on the screen, with anxious flop sweat, jittery bodily fluids, squishy terror, paranoia, and some gut-busting laughs that prove this writer is deeply troubled in the best and most complicated odd way possible.

Paint is a truly strange film that is never the full-on comedy that one might expect, but it also never commits to the despair that seems to be lingering right under the surface. Despite a truly unhinged final twist that almost makes the entire film worth it, “Paint” is more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny.

The film is in fact so busy introducing characters and churning through plot points that there’s not really even time to let animation powerhouse Illumination give it a spin of inspired silliness that made the “Despicable Me” franchise such an unexpected hit.

It really is a celebration of Judy Blume. There are tough subjects they cover, but you ultimately leave the movie feeling really touched by her work and the compassion she has for her readers and fans, even if you’ve never read her novels.

You can see the conflicts and dramatic beats coming from a mile away, and the corniness of the ending is absolutely immeasurable. It’s an inoffensive and even likable picture, but not a particularly compelling one.

With its uncompromising and full-frontal depiction of the elements that give us life, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” tests our levels of comfort in accepting we are essentially all decaying entities made of organic material. It also makes us reconsider our relationship with medicine.

Even if we don’t overly connect with the personal growth stories of either Renfield or Rebecca, thanks to Cage, “Renfield” is the rare horror-comedy to find the balance between respect and playful irreverence.

Like its lazy title, Murder Mystery 2 settles for the lowest version of itself.

Taking tropes and toying with them, carefully and creatively hitting social and cultural beats and concepts, there is a refinement at play that contemporizes and enriches the classic presentation of middle America and those who live there. The creative refresh of Americana adds much-needed light and shade to a familiar narrative making it feel unique.

While Kim’s encyclopedic dive may not offer much revelatory information, it nevertheless acts as an insightful and streamlined primer into Paik and his work, allowing fellow artists and critics the time and space to speak about Paik and the radical shift towards video art.

Great actors and inspired performances can only help a film so much. And in the case of “A Good Person,” Zach Braff presents another competent movie that checks all of the dramatic boxes but does so in a way that feels like ChatGPT has already invaded Hollywood.

As a sports movie, “Air” is competent in all the right ways — good performances, strong dialogue, and a nice focus on 1980s production design and world-building — landing in the upper echelons of the Dad Movie lexicon.

Sometimes, you have to be really smart to be really stupid, and “Joy Ride” threads that needle with aplomb.

It’s about as well-acted and enjoyable a version of this particular thing as you’re likely to find.

A portrait of an eccentric town that almost feels like a social experiment, just as much as it’s a murder mystery, Last Stop Larrimah is a shaggy, fascinating tale that marries Duplass Brothers-style absurdity (they act as producers here) with the ever-popular true-crime genre to pretty enthralling results.

Johnson and Kendrick are just terrific together — ample chemistry, excellent comic byplay — and the sense of play, the feeling of one-upmanship in their scenes together, immediately cranks the picture up a notch.

Torres peels back layers of the immigrant story in something packaged as entertainment. It may appear whimsical, but you don’t need to dig too deep beneath the surface to find universal emotions underneath.

Mustache does its job. It gives Ilyas catalysts for growth other than the cookie duster hanging out under his nose, and the writing invites us to laugh with him, not at him because it’s one thing to laugh and another thing to sneer.

You Can Call Me Bill isn’t a travesty; hearing Shatner discuss his life is always fascinating. But instead, the film’s a missed opportunity to unpack one of the more enigmatic figures in our public consciousness.

Geoghegan’s Brooklyn 45 is largely able to rise above its shortcomings and deliver a unique, chilling story about the horrors of war and unsettling depths of humanity.

Every franchise has its blips, but the magic has fizzled here. Lightning hasn’t struck twice, and it’s a real shame.

There’s a lot of potential in a legal thriller set in the days before German reunification and the end of the Cold War, just as there’s potential in a colorful heist movie that upends the formula and makes the illegal legal. But Tetris fails to thread a particularly tricky needle, resulting in a movie that feels more like a failed ‘90s blockbuster than anything else.

Boston Strangler steps right up to the line of the hokiest girlboss tropes and narrowly avoids crossing into a cringeworthy injection of contemporary feminism into a historical narrative. Rather than blaring its priorities throughout, Ruskin’s film gradually reveals the biases suppressing the idea that women’s stories matter. It’s just enough of a twist on an otherwise imitative, iterative story to hold interest.

The movie’s practical and special effects are a rogues’ gallery of gougings, stabbings, shavings, and scalpings; those who like to have their stomachs turned will find much to cheer about. But is it actually scary – suspenseful, tense, trafficking in more than the cheap shock of a jump scare or vivid effect? Not really, no.

Throughout its trials and tribulations, Wild Life softly asks the question: what kind of life do you want to live? What kind of legacy do you want to leave behind? And these kinds of inspired actions certainly move the heart and soul and prove that the best of humanity has their heart in the right place at the very least.

Pure power, John Wick: Chapter 4 is as exhilarating as it is exhausting. With this wildly satisfying world tour de force, Reeves’ Wick transcends icon status delivering the perfect bone-crunching crescendo to one of the great action franchises in cinema history. It’s pure gold.

Once you get on this one’s wavelength, it’s wildly funny and delightfully subversive.

What Longoria has created is less a history lesson and more a fairy tale that reframes an American success story within California’s Hispanic community. You may doubt its accuracy, but the message will resonate, and that is a far more interesting conversation than how closely Flamin’ Hot matches the Montañez Wikipedia.

No matter how silly or severe the movie may get, Daley and Goldstein always approach the material on its merits. This is a fantasy adventure from people who seem to enjoy fantasy adventures without equivocation.

Gods Of Mexico is a film less interested in breaking down its conceptual framework — or even pushing forward a fully realized thesis — than it is about creating a structured cinematic experience.

While the first two-thirds of the film gets the job done, it’s the third act where 65 goes all out, and it sticks the landing perfectly.

It both ticks genre boxes and throws up some touches that elevate it, such as a car karaoke scene. While not groundbreaking, the audience will root for everyone here, both in front of and behind the camera.

Scream VI builds to a powerful third act of grisly mayhem that is one of the best in the series.

Sadly, good intentions aren’t enough, and as good as the organization’s work is, the film feels like a letdown to the very women whose stories kickstarted the whole thing in the first place.

If a filmmaker can’t be bothered to try, then audiences shouldn’t be asked to care.

Garrel here delivers a witty and elegantly constructed film that joyfully draws parallels between acting and lying, being and pretending, while remaining breezy, fun, eminently accessible and even welcoming.

There’s a way to find the humor in life with mental illness. The Year Between, with exceptions, isn’t it.

The cast does its best with what they’ve got but only so much can be done. The mission might be complete, but it’s hard to call it a success, and there were undoubtedly casualties.

There is just enough on the film’s surface to keep the journey entertaining.

The plot is mostly irrelevant, aside from how it allows for Reeder’s ideas and imagery to flow. Oozing, gooey blood and messed-up school uniforms, secrets whispered in high school bathrooms, glitter dresses, and uncanny face masks all meld together to create a film rich in atmosphere and artifice.

Had it kept prodding at the political parallels of 1990 Berlin and Maria and Henner’s romance, “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything” would have sat beautifully at the intersection between the coming-of-age of a young woman and that of an old country. Instead, Atef opts to stretch out the story, stubbornly tugging at the corners of the narrative, expanding a tale rich in its metaphors until it becomes see-through.