Peter Debruge

Even before Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion, Olga was an incredibly strong film, but now, the Kino Lorber release should be considered essential viewing for art-house audiences.

In the end, The Sea Beast is a movie about challenging conventional wisdom and figuring things out for yourself, and that’s a philosophy that worked on both sides of the camera.

An insightful, engaging and all-around affirmational auto-portrait from an Afro-Latina New Yorker with an ear for poetry and an eye for the ineffable, Beba never questions its own right to exist.

Six months into 2022, it’s the funniest film Hollywood has produced thus far. Audiences know what to expect, and Illumination delivers, offering another feel-good dose of bad behavior.

Kosinski is a gifted director, but his specialty is juggling human elements with complex visual effects. He is not cut out for this kind of comedy. His design choices are all wrong. The execution is tone deaf.

It’s here in the movie’s more fantastical details that Yonebayashi’s imagination runs free — and Studio Ponoc’s potential shines brightest. The world they’ve created may not be logical, but it is intuitive, as Mary adapts to whatever hallucinatory wonder or obstacle the filmmakers can throw at her

This sweeping period drama may be up to its eyeballs in costumes and carriages, but it plays with all the brio and jeopardy of a modern-day gangster movie, featuring hack journalists as its antiheroes.

Of the three “Jurassic World” movies, “Dominion” is the least silly and most entertaining. But that’s not saying much. This “stop to ask if they should” cycle’s human characters were never especially interesting, and why should we trust Trevorrow to suddenly make them so?

Though its weak bounty-hunter plot makes almost no sense, After Blue satisfies that thirsty spot in our psyche too few films succeed in tickling, where dreams are born, hormones churn and logic simply doesn’t apply.

[Pálmason's] a cinematic original whose voice grows stronger and more certain with each film.

If Larry Clark had ever found his way onto the Pine Ridge Reservation, he probably would have come away with a film like “War Pony,” which observes its young Native American characters hustling, skating and stealing drugs from otherwise distracted adults.

I am convinced that Dhont has a masterpiece in him. But there’s an immaturity to his movies that he must first overcome. He’s already so close

Kore-eda is surprisingly generous toward his characters, nearly all of whom are breaking the law, but whose fundamental decency is brought out when dealing with others in need.

The result — a stunning Iranian-style riff on “The French Connection” — is a run-and-gun, Hollywood-caliber cop movie grounded by a clear-eyed assessment of how Tehran’s system works, and all the ways in which it doesn’t.

A twisty, action-packed political thriller — one that keeps you guessing even as it spirals into ever-crazier realms.

The helmer constructs scenes with a bustling documentary energy, studiously avoiding melodramic tropes, even when they might serve to make the narrative more engaging, less unwieldy or simply easier to digest overall.

EO is a damning polemic on our relationship to other intelligent species — as free labor, food and companions — as seen through the dewy, wide eyes of a donkey whom we come to adore.

What we’re dealing with here is a fairly conventional political thriller — think “House of Cards,” minus the sleek David Fincher aesthetic or much in the way of suspense — set in a world no one has dared to explore on screen before now.

Yang may be the MVP in this ensemble, though the cast is terrific across the board.

The thing about Östlund is that he makes you laugh, but he also makes you think. There’s a meticulous precision to the way he constructs, blocks and executes scenes — a kind of agonizing unease, amplified by awkward silences or an unwelcome fly buzzing between characters struggling to communicate.

These days, audiences are so savvy about the tricks at a filmmaker’s disposal that the movie’s greatest achievement is that it seizes our imagination (or perhaps that’s our attention deficit disorder being so brusquely manhandled) and holds it for the better part of two hours, defying us to anticipate what comes next.

Hardly anything in Top Gun: Maverick will surprise you, except how well it does nearly all the things audiences want and expect it to do.

Let’s be clear: Lux Æterna is a glorified Saint Laurent commercial. That’s the tweet-length analysis. But there’s more to it than that.

The leaves are so green, the tone is so ominous, and the men are so … Rory Kinnear-y that audiences are all but guaranteed to leave this folk-horror bizart-house offering feeling disturbed, even if no two viewers can agree on what bothered them about it.

In the end, “Memory” isn’t terribly convincing, but it’s at least trying for something more serious than most.

Fellowes gives us an affectionate group hug, which is effectively what these encore visits amount to.

It was on this film that Scodelario met Walker. The couple are now married, which suggests there’s a “happily ever after” to be found somewhere in this froufrou film maudit.

Bourboulon hatches a second-rate romance, rather than detailing the rich, real-life drama that swirled around Eiffel’s controversial endeavor.