The Year in Film (So Far)

The madhouse of awards season and all its many, many controversies — not to mention an ongoing parade of natural and man-made disasters — has until now perhaps overshadowed some of the year’s lower-stakes joys. Case in point: the films below. The movies that studios reserve for the doldrums of the early months are rarely the ones that compete for Oscars later on. But that doesn’t mean they’re skippable, or uninventive (just look at what Steven Soderbergh gets up to in Presence), or any less pleasurable or ambitious — what else to call the spectacle of watching two guys mount a full-scale production of Hamlet inside the world of Grand Theft Auto? Vulture’s film critics have somehow kept abreast of it all. Here, they’ll guide you through the must-sees of the last few months.

All movies are listed by U.S. release date, with the most recent movies up top.

Alex Ross Perry’s ingenious documentary is about the idea of Pavement as much as it is about the band itself. In fact, the parts tracking the rise, demise, and reformation of the influential alternate-rock band are the least interesting aspect of Pavements, because Perry (per the demands of the film’s structure) plays them straight. It’s the stuff braided into the expected material that’s most alive — a fake biopic starring Stranger Things’s Joe Keery as front man Stephen Malkmus, the production of a Pavement jukebox musical called Slanted! Enchanted!, and the construction of a Pavement museum. That none of these things would be true to the band as it was in its ’90s heyday is the point, when there’s no controlling legacy or what people continue to make of your music and memory out of its original context. In the best (staged) scene, a laconic Malkmus grumbles in a post-screening Q&A about how the movie version of his life boils him down to fears about selling out, swearing those weren’t major concerns at the time. —Alison Willmore

➼ Read Nate Jones’s answers to all your Pavements questions. 

Despite its title, Laura Piani’s endearing romantic-comedy is as much about nature as it is about literature. Amid its charming ruminations on books and writing and ambition and love, what comes through most vividly is a distinct sense of place. It begins amid the dense, cloistered shelves of Paris’s storied Shakespeare & Co. bookstore but finds romantic entanglement against the damp foliage and dim light of southern England (though it was apparently shot entirely in France). It’s a movie about finding your place, and quite appropriately, it’s steeped in atmosphere. Its protagonist, Agathe (Camille Rutherford), is an introverted bookstore employee and aspiring author who dreams of romance but refuses to engage with life. When she heads to the Jane Austen Writing Residency, hosted in England by the descendants of the legendary author, we get the sweet, romantic complications we used to get in movies all the time. Agathe says she’s living in the wrong century. She’s thinking, of course, about the 19th century, but the film itself feels out of place and out of time, in the best possible way. —Bilge Ebiri

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.

For years, the Mission: Impossible movies stood as a welcome bulwark against the world-building extravagance of Hollywood’s franchise craze, but the dam breaks astonishingly with the latest installment, which opens with an hour of so much garbled portent and series callbacks that you might wonder if an AI trained on recent movie clichés might have written it. Luckily, Final Reckoning does eventually recover from the calamity of its first hour to give us an entertaining Mission: Impossible movie. It achieves this by tuning out the broody chatter of its first act and giving us a lengthy, ingenious (and refreshingly silent) sequence inside a sunken submarine, a wreck whose unstable spot on the sea floor ensures that our hero will wind up bouncing and rolling around a room inconveniently filled with floating torpedoes. These movies are driven by Cruise doing his Buster Keaton best to look simultaneously graceful and ridiculous in extreme physical circumstances; this whole sequence, with its endless series of stately underwater mishaps, ranks among the series’s greatest. The obligatory, advance-marketed stunt, which has Cruise hanging off the wings of a prop plane, is also sensational. In the end, the most suspenseful conflict in The Final Reckoning might be the one that appears to have happened behind the scenes, between the clear human dedication to art and craft that shines through its most suspenseful moments, and the sloppy opportunism of trying to retrofit a mythology onto these. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, James Grebey’s explanation of the ending, and Keith Phipps’s ranking of every Mission: Impossible. 

Karan Kandhari’s colorful, odd, genre-inflected comedy-drama Sister Midnight, about the frustrations of a young woman, comes by its tonal shifts and narrative changes honestly. Its twists are organic and rooted in character. A newlywed couple, Uma (Radhika Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak), have just settled into a shack in a crowded, working-class corner of Mumbai, and are clearly unsuited for married life. Uma is bewildered at this new world, while Gopal can’t so much as look at her. Her efforts to try and forge a relationship with her husband are frustrated at every turn, and the human furnace of the city outside her door gets to her. The director fills the frame with people and shadows and color as he tracks his protagonist at night down city streets. We catch glimpses of these other little worlds throbbing behind those doors and windows, all forbiddingly aglow with life. She eventually takes a job as a night janitor at a shipping agency, which forces her into more nocturnal wanderings. That’s when the film goes truly nuts (no spoilers), but thankfully, it also remains in the realm of emotion and character, which comes as a huge relief. With relatively little dialogue, Apte gives Uma compelling interiority: We can read multiple emotions into her facial expressions, and we do get the sense that she’s feeling every single one. When she looks at her husband with a combination of contempt and pity as well as love, it’s a truer approximation of how real people regard those around them than we tend to find in most movies. Such depth makes Sister Midnight that much more fascinating and, ultimately, that much more heartbreaking. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Sister Midnight.

It’s been 14 years since the last Final Destination movie, but Final Destination: Bloodlines fits right in with this series’s slick early-2000s aesthetic and gloriously ludicrous sensibility. The premise, as always, is that Death will find you — in the most spectacular, elaborate fashion — even if you thwart its plans. This latest entry ably expands the palette without messing with the formula. It opens with the queasy destruction of a tony restaurant high atop a Space Needle–style observation tower in the late 1960s, and then follows the modern-day consequences of what happened — or, more specifically, didn’t happen — that night. Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein come up with intriguing new settings, devices, and premises for the film’s Rube Goldbergian slaughter: a tattoo-and-piercing parlor, an MRI machine, a peanut allergy, and (that old Final Destination standby) the family cookout gone horribly wrong. Most horror flicks entrap their characters in one location or put them in some sort of unique, tense situation (think: satanic possession, or pissing off the wrong truck driver, attracting the wrong person, etc.), but in Final Destination, Death works with the great mundane canvas of ordinary life. In these movies, if you just go about your day — driving on the highway, using a vending machine, fixing a drink, doing gymnastics — then, congratulations, you’re the ideal victim. Bloodlines is a welcome revival of a great movie series that was often smarter, funnier, and more existentially resonant than other scare-fests. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Final Destination: Bloodlines.

Jia Zhangke has been capturing and archiving acres of footage since 2001 — everything from random fragments to documentary images to loosely scripted fictional scenarios featuring his actors — and for much of that time, he wasn’t sure what he’d do with it. But now, he’s made Caught by the Tides, a masterpiece that remains impossible to classify. It’s a patchwork narrative/documentary/collage that follows a troubled romance, even as the loose, decades-long plot free-associates in various directions. At its center are a dancer and model named Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao) and a small-time hoodlum named Brother Bin (Li Zhubin) from the industrial coal-mining city of Datong, in China’s Northern Shanxi Province. Their tempestuous relationship is interrupted when he abruptly leaves town to make his fortune elsewhere. A few years later, a quietly determined Qiao goes looking for the elusive Bin. As we see the characters age in real life, we also witness China change dramatically, as the excitement of the new millennium gives way to a period of rapid development and, eventually, an era of tech-fueled isolation. But we also see an art form change. Handheld digital images give way to more solemn documentary reveries, which give way to surveillance footage and TikTok-style social-media interludes. The result is a fragmented familiarity, a sense that we’re watching a seemingly endless tapestry of life, with these characters emerging organically from the bustle and then disappearing back into it. —B.E.

➼ Read Madeline Leung Coleman’s review of Caught by the Tides and Bilge Ebiri’s interview with director Jia Zhangke.

Sure, Andrew DeYoung’s directorial debut feels like an extended I Think You Should Leave sketch. What’s so bad about that? In his first lead movie role, Tim Robinson plays Craig Waterman, a man whose life of suburban adequacy is disrupted when local weatherman Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd) moves in down the street and platonically sweeps Craig off his feet. Friendship is about male friendship gone wrong, but it’s also rife with digressions that become highlights of this comedic horror story — like the cameo from Conner O’Malley, or the running joke about “that new Marvel” that Craig doesn’t want spoiled but never gets around to seeing, or the hilarious sequence in which Craig has an incredibly mundane drug experience. —A.W.

➼ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Friendship.

How disorienting is it to watch a Marvel movie in 2025 that recaptures some of the spark that made the MCU so dominant for a decade? The joke of Thunderbolts is that its characters are all C-listers, a bunch of foils, counterparts, and discarded replacements for the real heroes. Rather than bog them all down with backstory, it’s a premise that frees the movie up to just take pleasure in its cast, which is exceptional — a depressive Florence Pugh, a lost Sebastian Stan, an arrogant Wyatt Russell, and a gloriously enthusiastic David Harbour, plus Lewis Pullman playing his second incongruously named Bob in so many years. The comparisons to A24 may have been tongue in cheek, but the movie does borrow from Everything Everywhere All at Once in having its main villain be a manifestation of despair, an idea which allows for more character solidity than one of these movies have managed in a hot minute. —A.W.

➼ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Thunderbolts, Siddhant Adlakha’s explanation of the ending, and Chris Lee’s interview with director Jake Schreier.

Déa Kulumbegashvili’s stunner of a second film takes place in the stretch of Eastern Georgia where she grew up — a conservative region of closed-off communities and stunning beauty where her protagonist, an obstetrician named Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), quietly provides abortions and birth control to women in the villages. April is about what happens when an investigation into a stillborn infant threatens to call attention to Nina’s illicit activities, but it’s also about the impossibly complex relationship between womanhood and motherhood, the indifference of nature, and the ways in which people talk around the difficult truths they feel they have no choice but to live with. As Nina, Sukhitashvili plays one of the year’s great characters, a woman whose spartan life revolves around the essential services she provides, and who has become a kind of sin eater absorbing the darkness — the sexual abuse, reluctant teenage marriages, and violence — of her community. —Alison Willmore

With a curiosity that is capacious, Sinners — the 1932-set, southern-bound horror epic from writer-director Ryan Coogler — demonstrates something powerful: a deep reverence for the Black South. Its most beautiful and bracing imagery is that of cotton fields plumbed by sharecroppers, endless skies and dusty roads, the verdant expanse of a land that has witnessed so much sorrow. It’s the waning days of Prohibition when the infamous twin brothers Smoke and Stack (played with gusto by Michael B. Jordan) return to their hometown after cutting it up with Al Capone up north, packing illegal liquor and a firmly held dream to open a juke joint by us, for us. The film takes place primarily over the course of a single day and night, barely touching an encroaching dawn. Coogler luxuriates in the lives of the twins and their extended community, and the ecstatic performances they provoke, for about an hour before Jack O’Connell’s vicious Irish vampire, Remmick, cuts a bloodied path through their stories. As much as Sinners succeeds as a celebration of the Black South, it ultimately fails as visceral horror. Yet while Coogler fails to make his genre terror visually or narratively gut-wrenching, he avoids blunt messaging about racism and history and sidesteps the most laborious, rote choices of the modern Black horror boom. Coogler’s script is trying to shake the table. He brings up questions about Black people’s misguided adherence to Christianity, who counts as Black and a part of the community, the ancestral reverberations of Black music, finding love against the odds, and the beauty that is born when two distinct bodies become one. These themes make the vampire saga feel rapturous, bold, ambitious, and brimming with curiosity and care. —Angelica Jade Bastién

➼ Read Angelica Jade Bastién’s full review of Sinners, Craig Jenkins’s close read of the film’s music, Chris Lee’s reporting on Ryan Coogler’s unusual rights deal, Fran Hoepfner’s explanation of the ending, and Hoepfner on the women of the movie.

Actor Callie Hernandez lost her father, a New Age healer, to COVID. She was left with a trove of video tapes of his public appearances, as well as some of his devices — elements she and director Courtney Stephens wove into a slender but beguiling hybrid work about the mysterious nature of grief. Hernandez stars as Carrie, a fictional version of herself who’s also mourning her father, played by Hernandez’s actual dad in clips from those recordings. As Carrie tries to entangle the mess of his estate, she becomes increasingly convinced that the patent he left her, for an experimental medical device caught up in legal limbo, is worth fighting for — a journey that has less to do with the invention’s legitimacy than a complicated posthumous desire to get close to a difficult parent. —A.W.

What makes Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister so powerful isn’t that it turns the tables on Cinderella, but rather the way it does so, by placing us in a world of bleak, magically inflected terror that underlines the base grotesquerie of the original. It reveals a dark truth we’ve probably secretly known all along: Cinderella was always a body-horror story. Its hero is wide-eyed Elvira (Lea Myren), one of the supposedly pushy stepsisters who made the angelic (and, of course, gorgeous) Cinderella’s life such hell. With her mouth full of braces, her narrow eyebrows, her zits, her full figure, and her fondness for hidden Danishes, Elvira doesn’t have a chance of attracting Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) — so she undergoes a brutal series of procedures to make herself more desirable. Blichfeldt gives us every gnarly, disgusting consequence in agonizing detail, be it vomit, blood, severed body parts, or some combination thereof. But we feel the sadness, too. Maybe once upon a time we were supposed to identify with Cinderella, but the truth is that we’re all ugly stepsisters at heart. —Bilge Ebiri 

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The Ugly Stepsister.

One to One, the collective name given to the two Madison Square Garden shows performed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono over the course of one day in August 1972, constituted the only full concert Lennon gave in his post-Beatles career as a solo artist. Footage from these shows forms the spine of Kevin MacDonald’s new documentary, which might look at first like a standard-issue concert movie but turns out to be something quite different. Intercutting swift glimpses of news reports, commercials, television shows, contemporaneous interviews, and recently unearthed telephone conversations, MacDonald, along with co-director and editor Sam Rice-Edwards, gives us a whirlwind journey through what these two artists might have seen and experienced as they attempted to navigate the cultural and political upheaval of their times. There has been a bevy of Beatles-related films over the years, but One to One cuts through the Beatles-industrial complex to land us in the middle of Lennon’s rage, confusion, passion, and fear. By taking the focus partly away from him, it finds him all over again. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of One to One: John & Yoko.

Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare is an admirable attempt to counter the truism that there’s no such thing as an anti-war movie — that all war movies, however gruesome or wrenching, effectively (and often unwittingly) wind up glamorizing combat to some degree. It presents a 95-minute journey through the hell of one bloody engagement during the Iraq War, when a group of Navy SEALs found themselves pinned down in a two-story house in Ramadi. Despite the presence of several well-known actors — including Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Charles Melton, and Kit Connor — character development and identification are minimal. The dialogue mostly consists of jargon-y instructions and requests desperately relayed over radios, or the blood-curdling screams of mortally wounded soldiers. Their injuries are stomach-turning, their cries agonizing. There are severed limbs strewn everywhere. The filmmakers do achieve what feels like genuine authenticity in their depictions of combat, both when it comes to direct engagements and the long, uncertain periods of standing around and waiting between such engagements. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Warfare and Matthew Jacobs’s chat with star Will Poulter.

Ryan J. Sloan and Ariella Mastroianni set out to make the kind of feature they’d want to buy a ticket for themselves when they co-wrote, directed (Sloan), and starred in (Mastroianni) Gazer, and the result is an invitingly angular thriller that recalls a livelier era of indie film. Mastroianni plays Frankie, a single mother with a daughter she no longer has custody of and a degenerative brain disorder that makes it difficult for her to keep track of time. Desperate for money, she agrees to perform a sketchy errand for a woman she meets in her grief counseling group, only to become entangled in a conspiracy that requires her to battle her own unreliable perceptions of what’s going on around her. Mastroianni’s very good, but Gazer’s real star is the stretch of North Jersey it takes place in, which has never looked so bleak or atmospheric. —A.W.

➼ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Gazer.

Like an epic poem told through a multitude of voices, Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour is a movie of unorthodox sweep and diffuse grace. In following the fanciful story of two lovers journeying separately through East and Southeast Asia in the early 20th century, Gomes mixes staged scenes with documentary footage — some of it distinctly modern, some of it seemingly more timeless. The film is narrated in the languages of the cultures the characters move through, as Burmese gives way to Thai, to Vietnamese, and beyond — a wandering, collective dream. The Portuguese filmmaker, an art-house darling whose work tends to be both playful and uncompromising, has described the imagery of Grand Tour as evoking for him “the spectacle of the world,” which makes the picture a lovely paradox: Through the occasionally absurd and self-consciously artificial tale of two souls hopping across a continent, he has fashioned a work that inspires us to look closer at our real world and how we live in it. —Bilge Ebiri

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Grand Tour.

Dog movies are a regular fixture of the cinematic firmament, but Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s drama, based on Sigrid Nunez’s National Book Award–winning 2018 novel, distinguishes itself by not trying to anthropomorphize its central animal, to enter its mind and give it a voice. The dog in question is a noble, aging Great Dane named Apollo (played by a dog named Bing, who may be the best dog actor I’ve ever come across), who winds up temporarily in the care of Iris (Naomi Watts), an author and a creative-writing instructor, after the sudden death of his owner and her mentor, Walter (Bill Murray). She lives in a rent-controlled apartment in a Manhattan building that doesn’t allow dogs, but she takes Apollo with the intention of finding him a permanent home. Somewhat predictably, Iris slowly starts to connect with the animal. But the film truly comes alive in its ability to go deep on what it really means to care for something. By the end, we understand that this is not a movie about people and animals but about the unknowability of all souls. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The Friend.

Not unlike last year’s The Beekeeper, A Working Man features Jason Statham as an initially reluctant lone angel of the apocalypse reactivating his special set of skills and making his way up the chain of an alternate, hermetically sealed world of smug villainy. In The Beekeeper, it was reptilian tech bros preying on ordinary citizens; here, it’s human traffickers who kidnap girls at random from bars and are plugged into a network of gangsters living in their own echo chamber of arcane rules and garish fashions. Although director David Ayer initially made his name with gritty urban dramas like Harsh Times and End of Watch, he’s not going for anything remotely resembling realism this time. Instead, he uses the iconography of fairy tales to give our hero’s actions a mythical kick. The whole film feels like it takes place in an alternate universe, and Statham’s stoic, no-nonsense bruiser cuts through it not just narratively but graphically. But at heart, this is a movie about the exaltation of ass-kicking, and it makes sure that we feel the visceral thrill of every arm snap, every neck stab, every head shot. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of A Working Man.

In 2003, a group of young, displaced artists in Providence, Rhode Island, decided as a lark to spend a whole week at the giant new mall that had taken over their neighborhood and wound up staying for years. They chanced upon a forgotten, 750-square-foot “nowhere space” hidden behind dark, narrow, dusty passageways in a forgotten corner of the mammoth Providence Place shopping center. They set up camp and ever so slowly turned it into an ersatz condo, with a couch, a TV, lights, tables, cabinets, and more. Jeremy Workman’s deliriously entertaining and moving documentary lets the artists themselves tell us the story. Many of them were refugees from a nearby artists’ colony known as Fort Thunder, which had been seized by the city in a burst of development and gentrification of which the mall was the great symbol. Thus, the notion of carving out a domestic abode inside one of Providence Place’s own underutilized spaces was a sly way of getting back at the forces that had displaced them. Workman has expertly put this film together using low-res video footage the artists shot themselves at the time, as well as contemporary interviews with the figures involved, many of whom are identifying themselves for the first time. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Secret Mall Apartment.

Steven Soderbergh’s latest pairs Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as married spies fully committed to each other as they deal with threats to their union from the vipers they call colleagues. Slick, but never sterile, the film demonstrates Soderbergh in God mode. Focusing on capable, intelligent, and ruthless people in the British intelligence agency, David Koepp’s script is sharp and enrapturing. The performances by Tom Burke, Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, and, especially, Marisa Abela are distinctive, lived-in, and like the film itself, utterly delicious. From the sartorial grace of Blanchett to the assured camerawork, this is a feast for those who want films to have visual sensuality and an emotional bite. I wrote in my review, “What ultimately cinches the dynamics of Black Bag is the chemistry between Fassbender and Blanchett. Individually, they are refined, glamorous. Together, they’re intimidatingly, pornographically so. It’s more than compounded beauty and charisma, though. This is a matter of complementary craft; of two great listeners and communicators bringing rapture to every gesture.” As one character says to Fassbender’s lead, “My God, that’s hot.” — Angelica Jade Bastién 

➼ Read Angelica Jade Bastién’s full review of Black Bag and Matt Zoller Seitz’s interview with filmmaker Steven Soderbergh.

Philippe Lesage’s film starts off with a sequence that recalls Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and while he hasn’t made a horror film, the Québécois director understands tension and anticipation. Who by Fire follows a few people gathering at a cabin in the woods, along with the emotional wreckage that ensues. It doesn’t have a typical story, nor does it have the kind of clearly outlined themes and structure that would usually tell us what to look for and what to think, whom to hate and whom to admire. What it does have are characters that the writer-director loves to bounce off each other in sequences that feel like concentrated stretches of real life. Dinner conversations ramble on and become contentious confrontations, often captured in single shots. Some dialogue exchanges even edge into the realm of cringe comedy, without ever going full-bore Apatow. And despite its ambling, almost shapeless nature, Who by Fire is never boring, because Lesage and his actors fill every scene with surprise and suspense. We keep waiting for something awful to happen. That something turns out to be life. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Who by Fire.

There’s a reason why the Looney Tunes franchise was built around shorts for most of its existence. Its goofy, devil-may-care logic and rapid-fire comedy rarely translated to feature-length run times. Comically massive in scale yet modest in ambition, The Day the Earth Blew Up is ostensibly a spoof of ’50s sci-fi and horror, but it’s also a refreshingly daffy twist on modern-day Hollywood stakes-raising. It’s all done with verve and velocity, ably capturing the Looney Tunes spirit. The plot is gloriously stupid: An alien spaceship has spiked an immensely popular bubble gum with an interdimensional ectoplasm that turns everyone who chews it into zombies, and the only ones who can save humanity are bickering foster brothers Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both voiced by Eric Bauza). Their hand-drawn antics play out against a backdrop of familiar (and welcome) Looney Tunes imagery: beautiful blue skies, verdant green lawns, mid-century architecture … with those sudden, jagged changes in shape and color and texture that this style of animation does so well. When Daffy’s face first blows up, it’s like we’ve been reunited with an old friend. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie.

Carson Lund’s new film follows the course of a local baseball game one late-autumn afternoon, and it initially makes for a classic baseball-as-life story. But as the film proceeds, its symbolic qualities recede and it becomes about something more basic — the simple fact of time spent in the presence of others. Slowly but surely, we settle into the film’s (and the game’s) gentle rhythms, and before we know it, it feels like an entire lifetime has drifted by. The “eephus” of the title refers to a high-arcing, low-velocity pitch that’s thrown as if it’s going to be fast, but moves so slow that it takes the batter by surprise. “He tries to swing at it like it’s normal, but it’s already past him,” we’re told. “The eephus makes him lose track of time.” Lund doesn’t play coy with this obvious metaphor. It’s very funny in its signposted obviousness and yet somehow still moving — which is a good way to describe the charm of the film itself. We keep looking for meaning while the world passes us by. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Eephus.

Bong Joon Ho’s first entirely English-language film is an overstuffed marvel — a dystopian story about the dark side of technical advancement, a rollicking space adventure about attempting to colonize a new planet (only to find it inconveniently occupied), and a bitterly funny hypercapitalist black comedy. But at its heart, it’s the tale of how Mickey Barnes, a sweet and not especially bright sad sack played wonderfully in multiple incarnations by Robert Pattinson, learns to love himself instead of internalizing that all the mistreatment he endures is somehow deserved. It may not be S-tier Bong, an honor that goes to Parasite, Memories of Murder, and Mother, but it’s still pretty terrific. —Alison Willmore

➼ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Mickey 17 and Willmore’s conversation with filmmaker Bong Joon Ho on the film’s ending.

Rungano Nyoni’s lovely film won a Best Director prize in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes last year. It follows a young woman, Shula (Susan Chardy), who comes upon the lifeless body of her uncle Fred one night on an empty road in Zambia and then has to help her family organize the funeral. Over the course of the next few days, she and her cousins find themselves in the midst of a traditional grieving ritual, hierarchical and surreal in its own way. The cousins stand by while accusations are leveled at Fred’s widow for not grieving properly. The world appears to have become topsy-turvy. Characters appear mysteriously from one scene to the other. People judge others for the precise pitch of their wails. Every emotion feels like the opposite of what might ordinarily be expected. As the whole mad ritual continues, we learn more about Shula’s family and why everyone is acting the way they’re acting. The comedy transforms into something altogether more horrific, and we realize we’re watching each of these women process unspoken trauma in her own way. The off-kilter, absurdist vibe of the picture is enchanting, but it’s rooted in deep horror: The whole movie is about the ways that cruelty and injustice become codified. Sometimes, the only way to preserve your sanity is to go a little insane yourself. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl.

Paul W.S. Anderson’s film has some familiar features of the postapocalyptic — ruined, smoking landscapes; busted industrial cityscapes; giant mines filled with faceless, chanting hordes à la Mad Max: Fury Road — crossed with elements of medieval fantasy. But there are also cowboys and witches and werewolves and giant skeleton monsters. Each shot looks like a page out of a cursed tome of twisted, postmodern fairy tales, the images forbidding and slightly abstract. Anderson loves visceral, gut-punch action, and in the past he’s brought to fairly generic stories an invigorating sense of menace and savagery. In the Lost Lands has plenty of fighting, but its picture-book precision, its almost hand-drawn quality, tempers the cruelty, at least a little bit. And while it’s a somewhat uncharacteristic film for this director, it’s still a world that’s easy to lose oneself in. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of In the Lost Lands.

As soon as director Alex Parkinson starts walking us through the inner workings of the ship and the pressurization tools used by the deep-sea saturation divers in his new underwater-survival drama, we know we’re in sure hands. We are immediately placed in a tangible, tactile world, which is key to building any kind of suspense. Last Breath recreates a terrifying 2012 incident, in which a deep-sea diver was stranded on the sea floor without oxygen during an attempt to fix a North Sea gas pipeline. And thanks to Parkinson’s showing us all these systems beforehand, once things start to break down (and they break down quite quickly), we immediately grasp the gravity of the situation. After that, it’s heart-attack city as we watch the men underwater (and those on the surface) do all they can to save their downed comrade. There’s an artful elegance to this film’s suspense as well. It feels like a great throwback thriller, one of those movies viewers will still be discovering years from now. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Last Breath.

The fourth Bridget Jones movie, which was sent directly to Peacock, in no way needed to be as good as it is. Renée Zellweger comes back for a meditation on grief, middle age, and searching for meaning in life after finding and losing someone you love (sorry to Mark Darcy, though Colin Firth does show up as a wistful memory). But what really makes this rom-com work isn’t Bridget’s fling with a younger man, played by Leo Woodall, as fun as it is. Rather, it’s her relationship with hopeless cad Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), who’s aged into a slightly tragic but still irrepressible roué who, against all odds, has become one of Bridget’s closest friends in a reminder that having history together has its own value. —A.W.

➼ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.

Paolo Sorrentino has seen all your takes about the male gaze and has decided to counter them with a movie about the life of a transcendently gorgeous woman. But in truth, Parthenope is less about one beautiful person than about our idea of beauty itself as it’s reflected and projected, embodied and perceived. Parthenope (played for most of the film by Celeste Dalla Porta, a newcomer), whose life we follow from her teen years into her 70s (when she is played, briefly, by the legendary Italian actress Stefania Sandrelli), is named for a mythical siren who once lent her name to the city of Naples, Sorrentino’s hometown. Over the course of this episodic film, she comes in contact with any number of figures: young lovers, a playboy who hovers above her in his helicopter, an aging actress, a gangster, a sleazy priest, and (in one odd and charming interlude) a very drunk John Cheever played by Gary Oldman. A few will covet her, a couple won’t dare to, but all will adore her on some level. As the film goes on, our protagonist comes to feel like an avatar of the very ideas of youth and possibility, which also makes her an avatar of the opposite of those things — the idea that life eventually passes us all by. In creating a film about one beautiful person, Sorrentino reminds us that, in our memories, we were all beautiful once. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Parthenope.

Drew Hancock’s horror comedy opens by leading up to what is not a first-act twist so much as it’s an unveiling of the unexpected premise — that Iris (Sophie Thatcher) may believe she’s the devoted girlfriend to Josh (Jack Quaid), with whom she’s headed to a weekend getaway in a lakeside cabin, but that she’s actually a robot he rents for company and sex. The pleasure of Companion comes not just in how this first reveal is handled, but from the way that all the twists that follow are. As the film goes in increasingly, hilariously brutal directions, its construction becomes its own reward. —A.W.

➼ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Companion.

A haunted-house movie from the point of view of the ghost, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence combines the director’s ongoing formalist ambitions with stripped-down, boilerplate genre theatrics. A well-to-do family buys a new house, and soon, the daughter is sensing strange occurrences while the others remain oblivious. The story may be familiar, but there’s nothing familiar about the way Soderbergh has shot it. The camera drifts through spaces, hovers around actors, races up and down stairs, and looks out windows — usually in single takes that constitute the entirety of a scene. As usual, Peter Andrews, the credited cinematographer, is a pseudonym for Soderbergh himself, who operates his own camera, which makes the presence more than a presence; it’s the director as well. So the unseen figure of the ghost becomes an expression of the filmmaker’s power over the frame, evoking the sadistic-voyeuristic nature of cinema in general and genre cinema in particular. The director is a presence, but not a participant: He compels characters to do things and makes it look like they did it of their own free will. That may sound like a lot of film-theory hooey, but this idea of manipulation, of exerting unseen power over others who think they themselves have control, actually becomes a key plot point in the picture. It’s an art film that also works as a spellbinding horror film, and it might be the best thing Soderbergh has done in ages. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Presence.

This genial doc-by-way-of-a-video-game may have been born out of the pandemic, which is what prompted out-of-work actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen to attempt a production of Hamlet staged entirely within Grand Theft Auto Online. But at its core, it’s a film about the internet, and about how genuine connection and human ingenuity can yield wonderful things even within the corporate confines of an online world intended only as a playground for wreaking mayhem. Crane, who co-directed the film with his wife Pinny Grylls, and Oosterveen become surprisingly poignant figures even as digital avatars, as they, like the Danish prince, contemplate the nature of existence — while hoping not to get mowed down in an in-game hail of gunfire. —A.W.

➼ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Grand Theft Hamlet.

A sort of stoner flick in which no one actually gets around to getting stoned, this rollicking buddy movie (written by Rap Sh!t showrunner Syreeta Singleton) is a throwback to an era where studios actually made comedies and trusted the talents of their stars to carry them. It definitely helps that, in this case, one of those stars is Keke Palmer, who’s effervescent as Dreux, a server whose attempts to get ahead are imperiled when bestie/roomie Alyssa (SZA, in her acting debut) loses their rent money to her scrub of a boyfriend. But underscoring the very funny adventures that follow is an acknowledgment of how exhausting living in economic precarity can be. —A.W.

➼ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of One of Them Days.

If 2018’s Den of Thieves played like a meathead remake of Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), then the new Den of Thieves 2: Pantera plays like a meathead remake of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006). Neither of these are bad things. Gone is the attention to process and scuzzy detail that made the first heist film notable, replaced here by a wild, drunken emotional energy that dispenses with story logic and clarity. That also makes it a fine showcase for star Gerard Butler, who has been for some years our most begrimed star — a man whose persona is manliness and brokenness in equal measure, a man who makes you wonder if manliness and brokenness might not in fact be the same thing. He is, in other words, a perfect figure to plunge into a chaotic and picturesque European robbery that is destined to go wrong. Pantera belongs in that long line of sequels that seem to lose patience with simply replicating an earlier film’s dynamics and opt instead to just let us bask in freewheeling character interactions. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.

They say the measure of any society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. We could reverse-engineer the idea and arrive at another perhaps obvious, though rarely stated (and even more rarely practiced) truth: that healing a society, maybe even a civilization, begins with healing its most vulnerable members. That thought runs through one’s mind while watching Sally Aitken’s delicately beautiful documentary about the hummingbirds of Los Angeles and the woman who has made it her life’s mission to care for them. Terry Masear runs a rescue operation dedicated to rehabbing injured and orphaned hummingbirds from all over the greater Los Angeles area. The process requires a lot of patience and precision — some have to be taught or retaught to fly, and they can be quite hesitant and scared to do so. The birds are already minuscule and delicate, and many of the ones Masear works with are babies whose mothers have disappeared or died, which puts them in even greater peril. “When you see how vulnerable and helpless they are, you wonder how any of them make it,” we’re told. One could ask that of more than just hummingbirds. Before our eyes, Every Little Thing comes to embody the fragile yet uncontainable mystery of all life. —B.E.

➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Every Little Thing.