In her latest film, Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt, the director of 2019’s “First Cow” and virtuosa of slow cinema, turns her thoughtful attention to the act of creation itself, rendering both its transcendence and mundanity with equal curiosity.

As always with Östlund, his most profligate flights of fancy tack close enough to reality to ring queasily true.

It is an engrossing tale, full of betrayal and chicanery, and it casts the Egyptian political-military complex and the religious hierarchy as riddled with corruption.

Through a donkey’s large and expressive eyes, Eo shows us the beauty of the world and the cruelty of humanity.

Matilda...explodes with an exhilarating pleasure in filmic transformation, in harnessing the strength of one medium and regenerating it freshly in another.

Olivia Colman delivers an alternately delicate and ferocious performance as a cinema manager in Empire of Light, a tender, tear-soaked valentine to the ineffable joys of moviegoing.

Both a tough-love letter to the commodified IP it satirizes and a scathing takedown of mainstream comedy institutions, this defiantly personal low-budget marvel is also a genuinely affecting queer coming-of-age tale that packs a more poignant punch than most entries in the superpowered canon.

The movie’s a paean to hard work and hedonism, and if its pleasures are mostly surface — grass, clay, emotional — it’s still been too long since we’ve had an intelligent frolic like this.

You Resemble Me would be a vivid, beautifully acted reflection of dispossession and cultural dislocation if it stayed one thing. But, like its mercurial protagonist, it changes shape to become a deeply meaningful meditation on narrative itself, blending fact and fiction into a seamlessly poetic whole.

With its multiple intersecting narratives, writer-director Saim Sadiq’s debut feature takes an almost novelistic approach to its central theme: the repression of human individuality by a regimented traditional society.

You People sounds preachy, doesn’t it? Trust me, it’s not. What it really is is a master class on wedge issues and our shared humanity, delivered by comedians who know that laughter can be at once a bitter pill and the best medicine.

Twisters isn’t art and doesn’t want to be. Like “Twister,” it’ll never be held up as a classic but will instead be reliably watched for the next 28 years until someone gives us “Twister 3: Maximum Vorticity.”

Propelled by a funny, charismatic turn by Hewson (who infused such unpredictable energy in the terrific Apple TV Plus series “Bad Sisters”), Flora and Son is a feel-good movie that largely earns its sentimental uplift, one sick burn and soaring musical number at a time.

Smart, sensuous and stylish, Passages is all about pleasure: the giving of it, the getting of it, the art and pursuit of it, and what it all can cost.

Beyond Utopia contains background material on the history, culture and travails of North Korea that’s necessary but clunkily presented. The filmmakers also take an irksome turn toward the predictable during some of the travel sequences, adding conventional piano-and-strings movie music. But the rest of the movie is fresh and compelling.

Regan directs Scrapper with exceptional verve, interrupting the narrative with witty documentarylike asides whose framing evokes the poppy aesthetic of Wes Anderson.

Writer-director Emma Seligman’s sophomore feature, Bottoms, is a raunchy exploration of queer expression and online culture, bursting with humor.

A satisfyingly suspenseful apocalyptic thriller with almost enough visual effects to give "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Deep Impact" a run for their money.

Suffused with sunlit, sensual images, Chocolat feels rather than finds out, implies rather than blurts out. Like an odd collection of old-time photographs, it seems to hold enigmatic truths -- ones that can't be expressed but that you have an instinctive understanding for nonetheless.

Because McNamara wrote the script, Poor Things brims with his signature polished, sophisticated humor; because Lanthimos directed, it’s full of envelope-pushing zaniness and self-amusement, especially when it comes to Bella’s increasingly uninhibited sexual appetites.

Despite its sometimes overwrought mystery-tale gambits, however, Monster ultimately shifts from a saga of fateful misunderstanding to one of mutual comprehension.

Wise, funny and mysterious, it’s a one-of-a-kind charmer.

Filmed in Augusto and Pauli’s handsome brick-and-timber home in Chile, and punctuated by home movies and news footage of Augusto in his prime, The Eternal Memory mostly eschews voyeurism for its own maudlin sake.

This is not a happy-go-lucky story, but an old-school fairy tale meant to frighten, confuse and excite.

Visually, sonically and thematically, “Evil Does Not Exist” is a rich and subtle experience.

Top Gun: Maverick showed us there’s still an audience for movies that combine concise and creative action with emotionally resonant characters. Godzilla Minus One is another reminder — and quite possibly the better movie of the two.

Io Capitano takes a news story that’s mostly about numbers, and puts a human face on it.

How do you make a movie about this story? Do you spin it as a thriller, a true-crime drama, a horror film, a sick pop-culture joke? Actress Anna Kendrick, making her debut as a director, does something fascinating. She juggles all four and then adds a fifth layer undergirding the others: the unceasing dread that comes from being a woman who knows men like Rodney Alcala are out there.

Nicolas Cage goes delightfully, derangedly meta in Dream Scenario, a smart, dizzyingly entertaining horror-comedy that morphs into scathing social satire.

Though it takes place in the recent past, at a time when the Bhutanese people were still getting used to such American imports as James Bond movies and “black water” (Coca-Cola), the film has something important to say about the promise and the perils of the present.

Although “Strange Darling” dutifully delivers white-knuckle tension and cinematic panache, Mollner’s savvy script also speaks to the unbalanced power dynamic a woman typically accepts when inviting the advances of an unfamiliar man.

The movie is superficially a comedy — and ultimately a love story, just not the one we think — but there’s a great deal of striving and sadness beneath its layers of glitter and soot and, beyond that, the exhaustion that comes from slowly admitting to yourself that the doors of the kingdom will almost certainly never open for you.

Despite the radio reporting the fall of the Berlin Wall and some very “Just Say No”-era drug busts, this is a mythic 1980s and a mythic USA, peopled by venal desperados pulled from the mildewed pages of a 1950s Jim Thompson novel.

Even at its most despairing, the film never gives up a sense of hope.

If you’re up for a film that tells its own tale, rather than the one it thinks you want to hear, this one has a touch of madness to it, and it seems fashioned from love and old parts for people who genuinely don’t want to know what’s going to happen next.

A book that got under the young Guadagnino’s skin, about the ache to merge with a forbidden lover’s body and soul, has become a film that uses the play of light on a screen to hint at the light we carry inside ourselves and that only the queer know we share.

Sasquatch Sunset is a goofball curio touched with genuine sadness. It’s “The Cherry Orchard” of cryptozoology.

Best of all, “Presence” is short and sure of itself, a tidy 84 minutes that explore a fraying family dynamic as observed by the household poltergeist.

It’s a tricky balancing act to find humor in stereotypes while seeing the human beings behind them — affection and a few years of distance can help — but “Between the Temples” walks the tightrope with wobbly yet confident grace.

There’s lots of hurt, past and present, in “Daughters,” as well as a huge measure of healing and forgiveness. Those feelings are palpable and contagious; they jump off the screen.

Good One takes advantage of the summer lushness of the Catskills, Wilson Cameron’s nature-centric cinematography and Celia Hollander’s ruminative acoustic score to cast a spell over its 89 sure-footed minutes.

Porcelain War is a testament to how life’s beauty — all the world’s fertility an artist is trained to see — endures among privation and death.

In “Kneecap,” a frenetic, funny, searingly angry film from Northern Ireland, language — Irish Gaelic — serves as an active force of rebellion channeled through the beats and braggadocio of African American rap. Very little gets lost in the translation.

Set during the drab 1990s of Clinton-era America, the latest offering from writer-director Osgood “Oz” Perkins throbs with a bone-chilling sense of dread, a marvelous piece of supernatural horror wearing the skin of a serial killer thriller that weaves a lasting, sinister spell.

Glazer and Rabinowitz’s script can be patchy and manic, but it does its best work showing the contortions women undergo to prove their support, especially in today’s “yaaaas queen” era where everyone is a goddess.

Speak No Evil is the rowdiest horror flick in ages, a hilarious and venomous little nasty that cattle-prods the audience to scream everything its lead characters choke down.

It’s an affectionate finale for the character, crafted with such care — from Molly Emma Rowe’s costumes to Kave Quinn’s thoughtful production design to those signature needle drops, monologues and Bridget-isms — it’s a shame “Mad About the Boy” isn’t opening in U.S. theaters.

Making her fictional feature debut as a writer-director, Kapadia unveils a storytelling style that whispers rather than shouts and whose empathy for the unseen women among us is a balm to the soul.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl draws a portrait of a culture with one foot in a 21st century of iPhones and laptops and the other in a crushing patriarchal hierarchy that goes back millennia and that proves nearly impossible to upend.

At times heavy-handed in its symbolism, “Seed” is still a gripping, provocative knockout — a domestic political thriller — that hints at the limits of oppression and the long, long bending of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “moral arc.”

Even if such murky doings aren’t your cup of absinthe, the skill with which Guiraudie weaves his web is mesmerizing.

It’s a viciously smart and disturbingly funny abduction tale, primarily confined to a grubby basement but with a purview that extends from the inner sanctums of the memory to the outer reaches of the galaxy.

None of this would work were it not for the swaggering, high-wire performance of Chalamet.

Memoir of a Snail, by the Oscar-winning Australian animator Adam Elliot, is a grubby delight, a stop-motion charmer that feels like falling into a dumpster and discovering an orchid.

As a meditative study on what’s often left outside the frame, the film is a literal revelation. It’s also a beautifully crafted punch to the gut.

It’s hard to be a saint in the city, but “Road Diary” reminds us why it’s worth it.

This is a movie to see and a director to watch.

It takes nerve to make a documentary about the most unpopular period of a massively popular public figure’s life. “One to One: John & Yoko” demonstrates that it’s worth the effort.

A sneaky tale of savagery in the dehumanizing digital age, writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cloud” is as bleak a warning as you’ll find in theaters this year, cautioning against the corrosive combination of late capitalism, the internet and human nature.

Adapted by Flanagan from King’s 2020 novella, this meditation on the bittersweet beauty of the human condition is sweeping in sentiment and surgical in intent.

Familiar Touch will probably stymie viewers who like their films moving with appointed speed, and I imagine audiences in the bloom of youth will shrink from it in horror. Yet others may see themselves in the character of the son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin) — a middle-aged architect and a good man — who serves as the film’s anchor of sorrow, concern and deep, abiding love.

Better Man, a delightfully unhinged musical biopic from director Michael Gracey, chronicles the singer’s tumultuous rise, celebrates his effervescent body of Brit-pop hits, and gives the project of ensconcing Williams in the hearts and minds of the global masses another go.

Sinners gives sensuous, supernatural, often electrifying expression to the belief that we’re all simultaneously captive to our histories and capable of so much more.

Fiennes anchors the film with his remarkably layered performance, relishing Kelson’s eccentricities while conveying the underlying anguish of a man losing his grip on what his life once was.

Architects who are already working to make architecture more sustainable and humane will roll their eyes at the last few minutes of commentary. But they won’t regret having seen “Architecton,” which is a raw, beautiful and demanding essay on the fate of our collective home.

Writer-director Russell, a producer and co-writer of TV’s “The Bear” and “Beef,” knows his Hollywood existentialism — the dread that you’re not anybody unless you know a Somebody, the easy California vibe that hides gnawing insecurity, the understanding that a friend today can and certainly would cut your throat tomorrow.

This meditation on life is a 102-minute respite from a world that never gives us a chance to slow down and realize how beautiful it truly is. Perhaps that’s reductive. But, perhaps, that’s the point.

That the two stars are married in real life is part of the movie’s genius and certainly key to why “Together” is as outrageously funny as it is scary.

The Brit who brought us such violent delights as “Shaun of the Dead” and “Baby Driver” has just the right mixture of empathy and impishness to turn King’s cautionary tale into a would-be blockbuster with integrity.

Weapons slowly and fiendishly turns up the heat under its narrative suspense, lulling moviegoers into complacency until they realize they are well and truly cooked.

In “Left-Handed Girl,” Tsou has made a love letter to nonconformists, and to the freedom one can feel when you simply stop caring about who the world wants you to be.

The message of “Deaf President Now!” comes across loud and clear: We will be heard.

Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” — an uncanny homage to French New Wave master Jean-Luc Godard and, specifically, the making of his 1960 breakthrough, “Breathless” — balances its fervor with a stunning cinematic undertaking. Put simply, lovers of “Breathless” will be left so.

The film is steeped in melancholy, a world populated by people who understand they are not exactly all right but don’t quite understand why.

What a pleasure it is to witness a masterful storyteller at work, and to see Craig lead a franchise he so thoroughly enjoys.

As we’ve come to expect with this director, “A House of Dynamite” is itself an act of professionalism, from the calmly ruthless editing by Kirk Baxter to Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score to the way the many pieces of the film’s narrative puzzle snap together.

In “The Testament of Ann Lee,” we are given the rare chance to watch an exploration of a religion born instead of female pain.

The sheer earnestness of director Ugo Bienvenu’s elegiac, even mournful tale feels as appealingly anachronistic as its lush 2D animation.

It's an incredible show of flexibility on Tavernier's part, as improvisational and exploratory as the be-bop itself. "Round" is living sound, as "Sunday" was canvas come to life.

With composure so out of fashion these days in the public square, Steven Soderbergh's adamantly restrained The Informant! arrives like a cleansing tonic.

Any moviegoers possessed of funny bones will laugh their fool heads off at Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

That rare, genuinely transporting movie that creates an alternate universe, invites the audience in and lets them sink ever deeper into its particular, sublime reverie.

Even the most forced, artificial episodes in Funny People ring oddly true, because George's life -- the obscene wealth, the loneliness, the fame -- is odd. Perhaps not since "Sunset Boulevard" have the wages and eccentricities of celebrity been depicted with such tough, almost perverse honesty.

Ferguson builds a compelling case of bad judgment, error, stubbornness and arrogance.

Crackles right along, stopping only long enough for Scorsese's signature bursts of explosive violence. Those brawls feel a bit rote, but what's different here is a newfound playful humor.

The line between madness and genius is thin. Not to mention more than amply explored in any number of films about tortured artists. But to look at the almost religious ecstasy on Moreau's face is to feel the artist's passion and be inspired by it.

Works as both historical allegory and moving family drama.

It's not art, this movie. But it's much more amusing than you'd expect.

See Food, Inc. after dinner, but see it.

Lord God, can she take control of a scene, dominate a movie, project to the last seat, radiate power and personality unto the rafters. It's a great performance. I love the way Knightley's eyes light with furious intelligence when she cuts the pompous Darcy a new something or other.

The sprawling cast, the naturalistic, overlapping dialogue (here by screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney) and the swirling action: it seemed pure Robert Altman.

Even the uninitiated will be hard-pressed to resist the movie's charms, from its likable leading players and its charming Dublin setting to its wistful take on modern love.

For the right audience, this movie is the butt-kicking, dirt-talking, blood-spurting equivalent of beautiful music.

All of the actors in Turtles Can Fly are nonprofessionals, and all bring electrifying authenticity and presence to their roles.

In one bold stride, Benigni has set himself apart from the rank and file of funnymen, joining the elite class of clowns who know that humor and heartbreak are only a howl of pain apart.

For its flaws, Blood Diamond is a gem, if only for being an unusually smart, engaged popcorn flick.

The movie, while no fun, faces hard truths and asks hard questions.

In the last half-hour, the story, like the Japanese, loses its way; lacking any clear-cut goals except survival, the film becomes repetitive. Letters From Iwo Jima is a necessary movie; too bad it's not a great movie.