There are no easy answers, but Simon Lereng Wilmont’s careful camerawork and clear rapport with the children lead to uncommonly candid footage and, occasionally, a sense of hope.

It’s a gorgeous film, and Chou’s camera moves in a way that frames and heightens Freddie’s emotion. This is a mood piece, at times one with almost abstract aims, and it’s a joy to be swept away in it.

The Pod Generation foregrounds Rachel and Alvy’s relationship, exploring how technologies change our most intimate connections and raising questions from a world not so unlike our own.

It’s hard to imagine Past Lives not being one of 2023’s most talked-about films, and it richly deserves the honor.

M3gan takes the idea of a kid knowing too much about the world and grafts it to an extreme premise, stretching it to the point of absurdity. But the kernel of fear that it begins with isn’t as alien as it seems.

Weeks after I saw it, I cannot quite decide if Babylon is a good film. But I’m entranced, and moved, and frustrated, and transported — which is what Hollywood has built its business on accomplishing from the very beginning.

Its plot is hacky; it’s got some really clunky characters; the dialogue is, at times, unthinkably stupid. (“The way of water connects all things” is the kind of line that sounds profound until you really think about it.) But this new Avatar filled an awe-shaped void in my heart, and for that, I thank James Cameron.

The film works on two levels: one is about the massacre; the other is about the psychology employed not only by perpetrators, but by the powerful forces that back them up.

The joy of Glass Onion is that you can read into it, or just let it flow over you and enjoy the ride.

The break between Colm and Pádraic works on its own terms, but it’s also a startlingly violent fight between men who are basically brothers, a fight that has a logic to it and yet is heartbreaking precisely because of the depth of history between them. It’s the conflict in microcosm.

What Descendant demonstrates is how ignoring the real story — the ship sunk to the bottom of the river by people who find its truths uncomfortable — doesn’t just steal people’s history from them. It impoverishes the future. More than that: without facing the past with courage, exploring it without succumbing to emotional panic, there is no future.

To watch Tár properly requires mental recursion. The surface of each scene is perfectly legible, but the full import of what you’re watching is elusive till the end of the scene, or even the sequence. The end of the film recasts everything that’s come before it. It’s like Kierkegaard’s old saw, embodied: Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

The film shows the birth of the militarization of police in America.

If Bullet Train is a hit, this may be the cause; it’s pure escapism at its finest, with no message or lesson at its core.

By the end of the story, the film’s aims are clear: to show what an absolute miracle the rescue was, and to honor the extraordinary cooperation and selflessness of those who came to help. Yes, that’s inspirational. But it also quietly counters a Hollywood history besotted with lone rangers and mavericks. Everyone matters.

Nope is a big, very loud, very effects-driven spectacle. It’s a movie with a thousand references to the past. It’s also a riotously entertaining thrill ride that owes portions of its plot to some of Hollywood’s most successful summer blockbusters, Jaws and Independence Day. It’s part of the culture; it can’t stand outside of it. But it functions at least a little bit as a warning, or maybe a prophecy, or a call for a reboot, or a reminder to care about what, or who, gets our attention.

Not Okay is not the first film to satirize the age of influencers, but it is easily the most unsettling.

It’s hard to overstate just how bad Netflix’s Persuasion is, and in how many ways.

Lightyear itself is a sweet musing on the value of friendship, an origin story that gives the titular character a sense of purpose, and a zippy ride through an often-gorgeous cosmic world.

Booster and Ahn understand that the world their characters live in isn’t always generous or kind. Their wistful film also shows that despite gay life’s cruelties, it doesn’t ever mean it’s lacking in love.

Men is the most visceral and organic dive into the curse of human nature that [Garland's] made yet. But it’s like each of his movies, filling in the question of what it means to be human — and to keep living on this planet — stroke by stroke.

Eggers recreated, with obsessive accuracy, the world of the medievals in order to lower us into a myth that feels primordial and strange, as if it’s tapping into something in the back of our minds that we’ve always known but half forgotten.

Portraying a lie as the truth so forcefully, so unrelentingly, that people just believe it is a key to understanding Loznitsa’s portrait of the region.

For the most part, though, Deep Water has abandoned thought and logic for horny, unhinged vibes. It’s so much beautiful fun.

With a lack of humor and deadly exposition, Morbius propels itself into an absolutely wild third act, perhaps the unintentionally silliest finish I’ve seen this year.

Reeves has created the best iteration of Batman in years, in a film that examines the humanity behind the character. And it’s one that I would like to see again and again.

I stumbled into the night after Jackass Forever with aching cheeks from laughing, a sore derriere from sitting, and a little bit of gratitude to inhabit a planet with people who don’t mind being fools on purpose

On its face, Venom 2 is a no-frills, rock-and-roll superhero flick that unashamedly swings for the fences when it comes to camp and cheese. Yet beneath those elements, it’s strangely about finding love and the intimacy of relationships, building on the rom-com core of the first movie.