Eric Kohn

“Shoemaker of Dreams” works as well as it does because Guadagnino fills each moment with such delight for his subject that it’s impossible not to end up consumed by that spell.

Freeland builds from its humble start to a wrenching conclusion, and eventually coalesces into a poignant, understated character study about the destructive collision of nostalgia and regret — a stoner midlife-crisis drama that fully belongs to the era of legal weed, and what happens when people get screwed by it.

Awaken was reportedly shot over the course of five years and across 30 countries, yet all that time and globe-trotting effort yielded little more than a dense clip reel of sumptuous time-lapse photography strewn about 70-odd minutes in search of a single unifying idea to justify the journey.

The Meaning of Hitler doesn’t have to make sense of this decade’s chaos to clarify just how much it remains vulnerable to the same complaisant attitudes exploited by the German leader decades ago. The movie isn’t just another cautionary tale; it’s a jagged intellectual wakeup call that cuts deep, and America can’t hear it enough.

Lamb takes a low-key minimalist approach to its premise that invites a certain shock-and-awe reaction before doubling back to give it purpose.

The filmmaker has made a rather soulful look at what it means to grasp onto life in its waning moments, and invites his audience into the center of that dilemma.

Memoria is more meditation than movie, a transfixing deep-dive into the profound challenges of relating to people and places from the outside in.

The small miracle of director Andrea Arnold’s experiential documentary is that it enacts its simple premise in straightforward terms, but assembles them into a profound big picture.

The result is an endearing and liberated explosion of Andersonian aesthetics that doesn’t always cohere into a satisfying package, but never slows down long enough to lose its engrossing appeal, and always retains its purpose.

The movie has few tricks on offer but above all, delivers a solid reminder of Penn’s filmmaking talent, and welcome evidence that it runs in the family.

Sure, the carnivalesque twist of the final hour is a touch heavy-handed, and it’s not the only one. Yet as the movie settles into a quiet, somber finale, life and performance collapse into a single contorted mass and Annette becomes a metaphor for its own bumpy ride. Hovering on the brink of collapse, it’s a delicate dance between genius and fiasco, much like Henry himself.

Like Jason Bourne, Natasha and Yelena were trained killers who defected, and the movie follows a similar kind of rapid-fire approach to the espionage genre as they pick up the pieces of their broken past and squabble through awkward family dynamics. The first MCU superhero movie to return to the blockbuster arena since the pandemic put the whole endeavor in jeopardy gets the job done; it’s also, by MCU standards, downright quaint.

Even as the movie devolves into an ineffectual shaggy-dog story shoehorned into a baffling and abrupt real-life backdrop, it remains a slick and enjoyable pastiche about messy outlaws adrift in a world designed to screw them over.

With its dense assemblage of archival materials and candid talking heads, “Roadrunner” gets the job done, yielding a tough, infuriating tribute to Bourdain’s ineffable genius and the tragic inclinations that came out of it.

Pribar’s subtle movie eschews sentimentalism for a patient and inquisitive character study, mining familiar territory and rejuvenating it with emotional impact that worms its way into the material from unexpected places.

The Killing of Two Lovers moves at such an involving pace that it’s easy to get lost in the tension of the moment and forget we’ve seen countless iterations of this scenario before.

A riveting disaster movie that’s actually heartbreaking, and doesn’t so much delight in world-ending events as it recognizes that surviving them never ensures a happy ending. Getting through the ordeal is only half the battle.

It’s a blockbuster that funnels the appeal of big-budget action and horror with an almost sacred reverence for the material. That’s absurd, but Snyder’s a true believer in go-for-broke escapism and at its best, the mayhem in Army of the Dead is an infectious zombie bite of its own.

Whether or not you adore “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Million Dollar Baby” — or even the “Almighty” franchise, for crying out loud — the Freeman spark that elevated those movies is nowhere to be found, and Freeman minus the Freeman factor is just a lost cause.

Unlike Baron Cohen’s work, André seems to invite his targets to crack up with him, and they’re more than happy to oblige. Bad Trip is an extension of that all-inclusive approach: It’s a blunt instrument of absurdity, but that’s also what makes it so much fun.

The movie makes its points in grand, emotional gestures more than policy nuances, but what it lacks in sophistication it makes up in immediacy. The drama acts as a visceral of ode to the nature of activism under dire circumstances.

But Nobody uses its boundaries as an asset. This giddy approach to action in place of story has held appeal ever since Wiley E. Coyote chased the Road Runner off a cliff, and Nobody lingers in a ludicrous plane that works in bite-sized pieces.

Above all, the movie makes a case for the tremendous resources on display by attaching them to genuine investment in the stakes at hand. When the telescope gets to work, it may not deliver firm answers for a world that demands instant gratification. But it will provide many reasons to keep looking up, and The Hunt for Planet B captures many of them.

The overall arc of this “Justice League” coheres throughout, providing occasional dashes of intrigue and inspired visual conceits, and sometimes it’s even fun. Re-centering the drama around ostracized actor Ray Fisher as Cyborg, and drawing out some of the ostentatious fight sequences to their breaking point, Zack Snyder’s Justice League displays genuine effort to make this impossible gamble click.

Operation Varsity Blues provides more than proof that the American educational system is broken; it shows how many people want it to stay that way.

Dweck and Kershaw don’t build a narrative so much as an accumulation of encounters that often lead to the visually immersive thrill of watching a culinary ecosystem come to life.

One of European cinema’s most unclassifiable auteurs has delivered the bitter pill we deserve.

Director Alonso Ruizpalacios’ exciting and unpredictable look at a pair of Mexico City police officers blends documentary and narrative techniques to deliver a refreshing and innovative look at the challenges of modern-day police work — as well as the underlying corruption that makes the most earnest officers vulnerable to a system rigged against them.