After I watched Fruitvale Station in 2013, I knew that first-time director Ryan Coogler was a genuine talent, but I’ll confess that I couldn’t predict at that time the degree to which he was the heir apparentRead Full Review
The Ballad of Wallis Island
The Ballad of Wallis Island is a feature-length adaptation of a short film from 2007. For better and worse, it shows. Both films feature the actors Tim Key and Tom Basden, and both were directedRead Full Review
The Friend
The Friend is a film that knows all about the tentpole story beats of the dog movie. It understands – almost too well – the narrative premise of dog-as-metaphor. The film is based on aRead Full Review
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
In the opening moments of Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, we meet our heroine, Shula (played brilliantly by Susan Chardy), driving down a dark road, dressed like Missy Elliott in the music video forRead Full Review
Black Bag
Black Bag is the second collaboration between director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp in 2025, and it’s not even the end of March. The first one was Presence, a conceptual horror movie that can impressRead Full Review
Mickey 17
It’s certainly easy to look at aspects of Bong Joon-ho’s filmography and conclude that he’s nihilistic. He’s clear-eyed about the evils of our world and the uphill battles that humanity have in defeating it. AndRead Full Review
JessZilla
If boxing is cinema’s most beloved sport, then director Emily Sheskin utilizes that fact to her advantage in Jesszilla, a new documentary about childhood boxer Jesselyn Silva. Sheskin has been collecting footage with Silva since atRead Full Review
2024 Decent Maybe Awards
Best Director Annie Baker, Janet Planet Bertrand Bonello, The Beast Payal Kapadia, All We Imagine As Light Pascal Plante, Red Rooms RaMell Ross, Nickel Boys Best Actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths Mikey Madison, Anora Julianne Nicholson,Read Full Review
Universal Language
Taking place “somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg”, Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language is a piercing, absurdist comedy in the tradition of Roy Andersson by way of Abbas Kiarostami. The Winnipeg of the film is filled with beige, Twentieth Century architecture,Read Full Review
You’re Cordially Invited
As the ending credits roll on the perfectly mediocre You’re Cordially Invited, various members of the cast, stretching from the main stars to the one-scene cameos, are filmed singing a song in the kind of HollywoodRead Full Review
Companion
Companion is the best of what a B movie should be: consistently entertaining, free of pretension, and possessing good performances from talented actors you anticipate will get more acclaim in “better” movies. Of course, whenRead Full Review
Presence
Steven Soderbergh’s defiance of his own stature is a tension that makes all his films fascinating. His elder statesman status within the 90’s Video Generation means that he had the jump on the likes of PaulRead Full Review
I’m Still Here
It’s been twelve years since we’ve seen a Walter Salles film. The Brazilian director’s last film, On The Road, was a surprisingly muted adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s classic novel. It’s logical that his return is I’m StillRead Full Review
The Last Showgirl
Between this movie, Megalopolis, and Sofia Coppola schilling mass-produced stationery as a fashion accessory, 2024 wasn’t exactly a banner year for the Coppola brand, in terms of quality. The Last Showgirl did all the work it neededRead Full Review
The Best Films of 2024
The movies of 2024 were still affected by the detritus of last year’s strikes among SAG and the WGA. As such, indie distributors such as Neon and A24 were able to further cement their reputationsRead Full Review
Nosferatu
The rise of Robert Eggers is not merely the ascent of another popular horror filmmaker. There are plenty of those to go around these days. Along with his spiritual filmmaking sibling, Ari Aster, Eggers makesRead Full Review
A Complete Unknown
This isn’t the first film about Bob Dylan but it’s probably the biggest. In documentaries like DA Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back or Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, we get the illusion of candor, glimpses of real life, imagesRead Full Review
Babygirl
Twenty-five years ago, Nicole Kidman starred in a sex drama where she played a married woman requesting a more fulfilling sexual experience from her husband. The movie had the distinction of taking place during ChristmasRead Full Review
The Brutalist
In The Brutalist, director Brady Corbet is attempting to craft an epic on par with the Great American Novels of the Twentieth Century. Like many epic tales, we are given a hero, and his life isRead Full Review
The Room Next Door
Last year, Pedro Almodóvar released his first ever film in English: a short film called Strange Way of Life, a queer-tinged western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as cowboys in the old West. Because it’sRead Full Review
Wicked
The orneriest members of the online film elite have made their feelings known about Wicked‘s lighting – or particularly, it’s backlighting. Never before have I seen a group of irony-pilled aesthetes get so hung up on theRead Full Review
Maria
Pablo Larraín makes remarkably interesting and unambiguously political films in his native Chile, but he’s most famous in the US for his now three biopics on Twentieth Century Women in Trouble. 2016’s Jackie explored Jacqueline KennedyRead Full Review
Nickel Boys
Not since Terrence Mallick’s The Tree of Life have I come across a film like Nickel Boys – a movie that is so unlike anything that I’ve ever seen before while taking the care and patience toRead Full Review
The Order
After the first election of Donald Trump, I found myself shocked by the sudden rise of fascists and neo-Nazis freely speaking their tirades of racism and hate without fear of derision. That was eight yearsRead Full Review
Oh, Canada
If the last three films of Paul Schrader have been defined by his Travis Bickle-like protagonists – scribbling furiously in their notebooks while voiceover expresses their philosophical and existential crises – then Oh, Canada is him going MishimaRead Full Review
Hard Truths
Writer-director Mike Leigh hasn’t been too shy to talk about about how difficult it has become for him to make movies these days. He mentions it in nearly any interview he gives, even during pressRead Full Review
Queer
Perhaps more than any other director working right now, Luca Guadagnino understands that fucking is one of humanity’s greatest motivators, dictating nearly every aspect of our lives, it’s consequences rippling forever through our relationships, ourRead Full Review
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
What are the foundations of an oppressive regime? Paranoia, complicity, fear. Whether you’re on the side of the oppressor or the oppressed, those three factors are always present. Mohammad Rasoulof’s latest film, The Seed of theRead Full Review
Gladiator II
There are legacy sequels and then there is Gladiator II. Ridley Scott returns as director, as do several clips from the Best Picture winner of 2000, in case you were wondering about the connection. Scott’s ownRead Full Review
The Piano Lesson
In the latest stage of Denzel Washington’s career, canonizing the work of August Wilson appears to be of great importance. Washington himself directed and starred in the 2016 adaptation of Fences, while drafting stage director GeorgeRead Full Review
Blitz
They just gave Richard Curtis an honorary Oscar last weekend, and if he had directed Blitz, it would be the best movie that he ever made. But he didn’t make Blitz, Steve McQueen did, and there liesRead Full Review
Dahomey
Mati Diop’s Dahomey is a visually arresting and intellectually heady documentary about twenty-six pieces of art being returned to Africa. The items were seized by French soldiers in 1892 from what was then the nation ofRead Full Review
All We Imagine As Light
In the urban streets of Mumbai, people cram together in search of the life that modernity promises. But what if that promise is false? All We Imagine As Light is a tenderly told story about twoRead Full Review
Emilia Pérez
The good thing about French artists across all mediums is that they attack projects with an intellectual rigor that instills in them a confidence that they can tackle any subject matter. This is also oneRead Full Review
A Real Pain
What is the pain referenced in the title of A Real Pain? Our main characters are depressive, though they show it in completely different ways. They’re visiting Poland to partake in a days-long tour of Holocaust rememberence.Read Full Review
Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan’s fiction is riddled with silences pregnant with foreboding. The rural Irish settings of her books contain characters weathered into submission, accepting the things they cannot change, which is almost everything. In Small Things LikeRead Full Review
Juror #2
Three years between film projects feels like an eternity for Clint Eastwood. His prolific output both in front and behind the camera ran steady for sixty years up until 2021’s Cry Macho. At that point, ClintRead Full Review
No Other Land
I don’t think of this as a spoiler, but be aware: Near the end of No Other Land, there’s a title card that gives the audience a desperate, sinking feeling. At this point you’ve already watched ninety minutesRead Full Review
Conclave
In the realms of “they just don’t make ’em like this anymore”, Conclave stands proud. A deeply engrossing and profoundly silly suspense film set in the Sistine Chapel, director Edward Berger shifts from the vast andRead Full Review
Anora
If Sean Baker wasn’t such an exceptional filmmaker, his interest in sex work as the narrative catalyst of his films would feel like an uncomfortable fetish. Since 2012’s Starlet, all of his films have dealt with sexRead Full Review
We Live in Time
There were rumblings last year when darling indie distributor A24 put out into the trades that they were beginning to look into more mainstream, commercial projects. In a little over a decade, they’ve put out someRead Full Review
The Outrun
At just 30 years old, Saoirse Ronan has already established a sterling reputation as an actor who can “do anything”. Nominated as an adolescent for her precocious performance in Atonement, she’s only capitalized on her potential inRead Full Review
Saturday Night
This year marks fifty years of Saturday Night Live on NBC, a live sketch comedy show that has survived dynastic political and cultural shifts, wild fluctuation in performance talent, and endless accusations of being “not funnyRead Full Review
A Different Man
It’s kind of a miracle that a film like A Different Man – an elliptical, analytical film the persistently prods it’s audience with moral and ethical questions – can also be such a compelling drama. OurRead Full Review
Will & Harper
Will & Harper is a film going for a broad audience and delivering mass messaging. Its cause is righteous and its motivations pure. The movie’s premise is simple: two longtime friends, one of which hasRead Full Review
Megalopolis
The journey of Megalopolis to the screen is astonishing. So much so it almost feels impossible that it would produce a mediocre film. Yet, here we are. Francis Ford Coppola called his shot in 2020, in anRead Full Review
The Wild Robot
Imagine, if you will, a movie for children that truly captures the full scope of everything that cinema has to offer, that doesn’t condescend to them with immature humor or overprotect them by hiding painful realities.Read Full Review
The Substance
If there is one thing that stands out about the Cannes hit The Substance – well, apart from how gross it is – is it’s blistering rage. French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat does not have the inclinationRead Full Review
Rebel Ridge
Filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier wears a lot of hats in Rebel Ridge. He’s the writer and director, the producer, and the editor. He’s certainly not the first person to do all of these things on his movie,Read Full Review
His Three Daughters
The implacable tone of an Azazel Jacobs film – comedies tinged with melancholy, where moods swing inconsistently and dollops of surreality pierce the heightened exterior – is a very difficult balancing act. So difficult, inRead Full Review