As is true of Baker’s plays, Janet Planet envelops its audience with a lulling mood before delivering a closing punch of meaning, a kind of summation of theme and intent that casts a clarifying light on all that you’ve just watched.

In a world full of images—full of people recording themselves and their friends doing dumb shit, or documenting attractive versions of themselves—Bing’s movie stands out for the complexity of its integrity, and its ability to reveal his own experiences empathically.

Much of what you see in Passing you’ll miss if you don’t really pay attention. This is, obviously, the entire idea. No matter the language we use or the identities we are assigned or take on, race is not material or fixed—it transforms and distorts.

Murphy animates Rita Kalnejais’s script—itself an inventive reimagining of cliché—with insistent artistry, announcing her arrival as an ascendant talent.

There’s an anger at work in the film, but what’s more effective is its ruefulness—its ribbons of abiding hope, frayed and tattered but still there, somehow.

It’s a pleasure seeing the pair reunited for another piercing character study, this time with Baptiste squarely in the lead role. It’s dazzingly complex, bracing work.

Gigi remains MGM’s most elegant musical—and maybe its most unlikely.

Emilia Pérez charms, partly, because of its imperfections, its bold choices that don’t always neatly land. The film walks a fine line between daring and ridiculous, and unlike some other big-swing movies at this year’s Cannes, Emilia Pérez stays mostly on the side of good. Its heart is in the right place, as its style.

With The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal easily proves her talent and instinct as a director by unflinchingly infusing a great story with her own ideas and images‚ and assembling an unbeatable cast and crew (including Happy as Lazzaro and Never Rarely Sometimes Always cinematographer Hélène Louvart) to bring it home.

There is something undeniably exciting about seeing a polished piece of studio-ish entertainment like this be cognizant of the world it exists in.

Karam makes an auspicious directorial debut, one that captures all the tense, rattling mood of his stage horror while giving it a new, decidedly cinematic shape.

The Old Guard is a naked attempt to kick off a franchise, but I wasn’t bothered by all those obvious table-setting mechanics because what they’re establishing is so tantalizing.

Black Panther works best as a dynastic drama, and as a musing on global politics from a perspective we don’t often get. Despite familiar action-scene wobbliness, it’s easily the most engaging Marvel film in a long while. Because—finally!—it has something new to say.

The shivery crazy moments land, and a surprisingly emotional beat at the close of the film does, too. As nutty and off-the-wall as Suspiria is, it has a firm sense of control and proportion. It’s a loose and rambly thing that’s also tightly made, somehow.

The movie’s messaging is solid and persuasive, and Spielberg’s finely honed filmmaking, his sense of movement and controlled spectacle, does not fail him here.

Happy as Lazzaro wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does if Tardiolo, whose innate openness and goodwill start to come off as the most surreal thing in a movie full of them, didn’t live up to the title. He’s the halo atop this film’s knotty, disheveled head.

This is a fast and lean film, an absolute workout for its outstanding cast and a devilish roller coaster ride for audiences. It’s funny, disturbing, cringeworthy, nerve-wracking and, for some, will feel a little too realistic.

The movie belongs wholly to Ronan, who at just 20 years old is such a remarkably poised and confident performer. She's a great actress to watch, and Brooklyn is a wonderful, if low-key, platform for her talents.

Beyond that interesting character profile, Free Solo also operates as a sort of meta criticism of this kind of documentary filmmaking. We see Chin and his crew, most of them friends or at least affectionate admirers of Honnold’s, grapple with the difficult realities—and the potential trauma—of what they’re doing.

Trite as it may sound, we gradually accept that the beautiful boy of the title is not some innocent child, lost to the past, but rather the real and imperfect young man hunched before us. It’s Chalamet’s great accomplishment, and the film’s, that we feel that so keenly.

Bad Education (which honestly isn’t a great title for this movie) is an arresting, nuanced depiction of insatiable want, of the bitter fact that reaching for things is often more instinctual, more human, than holding on to what we’ve already got.

Though premised on the slight pretenses of Twitter, the world of Bravo’s film is no fictionalized, seedily appealing underbelly. It’s simply America: often frightful, sometimes grimly amusing, and ever rattling along in its entropy.

Mostly, the cat-and-mouse of Lowery’s film is just reason enough to contemplate the shuffling everydayness of life, of how we are ever aware of its finality while also tending to, seeking out, and appreciating the little joys, mercies, and adventures of it.

Support the Girls is not a comedy merely because it’s funny (which it is), or because its tumultuous rhythm throws these women’s lives out of whack. It’s a comedy because, without laughter, there’d be no getting by.

Gentle, sad, and funny in a just-shy-of-cutesy way, Broker continues Kore-eda’s tradition of handling tough subject matter with a light touch.

It doesn’t wring its hands with grief and beatify its rumpled subjects. Instead, it arrives at a place of humble, true understanding. Which means more than mere forgiveness ever could.

the sub-90 minute thriller offers a searing yet slyly humorous portrayal of the modern technological landscape—as well as the abuses (and negligence) of both state and corporation towards woman victims of sexual assault.

One Child Nation does not flinch from critiquing mass complicity and the broader cultural logic—specifically the indoctrination into party politics—undergirding it.