Inspirational, entertaining, and absolutely awards-caliber (from first-time director Karasawa), Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me offers up an indelible and rare experience in cinematic form—it’s simply an absolute treat to be able to spend this much intimate time with such a legendary lady.

While A Thousand and One is a breathtakingly beautiful portrait of Black womanhood and is thoughtfully political, the character beats heave with a noticeable unevenness. The fascinating parts rarely add up to a satisfying interpersonal whole.

This sobering movie is a triumph, but it’s also just a hugely compelling story about how power tries to silence all other narratives.

The Bone Temple does have plenty on its mind about illness and outbreaks—perhaps the sickness that is mankind and the freakshow we doomscroll witness every day— it simply buries those thoughts under layers of bloody viscera and wreckage. That’s the movie’s defining tension: beauty against barbarism, hush against havoc, and the fleeting possibility of grace pressed up against the certainty of carnage.

It’s a compelling watch to be sure, this nearly unhinged desire to democratize the access to art, and ultimately an offer that’s too hard to resist.

What Western Stars best achieves, a universal notion that will hook fans and non-fans alike, is the shared sense of community displayed in the infectious love shown for playing vital and moving music.

When Shults soars under this structure, he composes some brilliant moments. When he falters, it seems like the movie doesn’t know where to go or when to end (if it even wants to).

The Martian is the most purely enjoyable picture Scott has made in years. The streamlined narrative and the film’s consistent pacing, aided by a cast who don’t make a wrongfooted move, makes for easy popcorn entertainment.

Mascaro’s film is an auspicious, original, and absorbing work that thrills with its look into this little-seen world and the dreamers that inhabit it.

Rian Johnson has seamlessly crafted another murder mystery with even more delicious twists and turns than the previous two installments. Maybe even combined. Somewhat hard to believe until you witness it for yourself. And, along with a slightly (and emphasis on “slightly”) more serious tone, the result is often smashing.

Rather than individuals facing all-too-common yet rarely portrayed challenges, the characters here seem little more than pawns in a predictable game, whose conclusion is never in doubt.

The Testament of Ann Lee often proves difficult to pin down, providing enthrallment in fits and starts rather than inducing a consistent state of rapture. It’s a bit slippery in the way that chasing the divine presence in art or life can be: present and tangible, then eluding one’s grasp like smoke.

With its shout-outs to horror classics and juicy pay-offs of its own, X feels like the movie West was born to make.

Transmitting such a deep and moving paean of a band, the music they’ve created, the complex humans behind it, and bow-down respect for the long-haul resilience they’ve demonstrated over years of ups and downs, Wright presents a movie like a superdeluxe mixtape gift, adorned with loving attention to detail, gorgeous artwork, footnotes, and other bells and whistles, that is extremely easy to fall head over heels for regardless of your conversant knowledge of the band or its odd, but catchy music.

Beyond Ocasio-Cortez and her magnetism, we may look back at Knock Down the House years from now as a nascent document of the beginnings of a groundswell in American politics.

Coup 53 is a live-wire thriller that is one of the best documentaries of the year.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On locates a world of wonder inside our drawers, under our noses, within our grasp – and enables viewers with the tools to both access and appreciate it.

Sheldon is a coal miner’s daughter, and her brother is a fourth-generation miner. Coal is intrinsic to her family. This is the story of her people, a celebration of their traditions, a condemnation of an economic system that failed them, and an elegy for a waning way of life.

A high watermark in the fusion of genre and arthouse, and an anthemic, youthful blast of generational pop art, “Good Time” is a 100 minute-long string of fire emojis, that begins and ends with a heart.

The Mastermind sees Reinhardt working with a bigger budget and a larger scale, but she never loses her languorous, absorbing sensibilities as a filmmaker. She’s never been better.

Wherever you may fall on its ending, The Wound is a movie worth watching for myriad reasons, not least of which is the fact that it’s as emotionally and dramatically compelling as any American indie to come out this year. Seek it out and see it on the big screen.

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.

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.

Adroit casting, writing, editing, performing and costuming shade the outline of an affair to a finely sharpened emotional realism, the cycles of fighting and reconciling we’ve all seen before regaining in rawness as if we’re now the ones living through it.

Elemental in construct and narrative, the picture breathes through the screen during Theeb's moments of quiet reflection at his surroundings and all the cruelty the vast, all-encompassing desert has to offer.

The doc does an admirable job of giving pretty much equal screen time to hunters, conservationists, and other experts on all sides of the argument, even though it becomes pretty clear early on where the directors stand as far as their personal feelings on the subject are concerned.

It would have been a relief if, 14 years later, Incredibles 2 had simply met expectations. Instead, it exceeds them.

Focusing primarily on the pandemic’s opening act in the first half of 2020, Totally Under Control feels fresh off the editing table. It is so timely, in fact, that an on-screen note at the end informs viewers that one day after it was completed, Trump tested positive for COVID-19. It reads like a punchline to the least funny joke ever told.