The most rewardingly cerebral zombie franchise this side of George Romero evolves once more with an exquisite corpse of a new chapter that picks up where last summer’s “28 Years Later” left off — both in regards to its plot, and also to its abstract focus on the philosophical aspects of post-apocalyptic life — while simultaneously pivoting away from the glitchy sense of grief that settled over the previous film like a burial shroud. Where Danny Boyle’s long-awaited sequel was held taut by the braided relationship between death and denial, Nia DaCosta’s almost immediate follow-up refracts the same existentialist streak into a very different meditation on the search for something to live for.

A strange, hysterical, and thrillingly audacious continuation of a saga about the nature of faith in a godless world, “The Bone Temple” might appear to be a more traditional genre offering than its immediate predecessor, but don’t be fooled by the fact that it wasn’t shot on an iPhone: This is very much the part two that 2025’s smartest and most humane studio horror movie deserves. —DE

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Few contemporary films about unresolved childhood abuse — which is always unresolved, in the end, anyway — cut as narrowly close to the bone as Elliot Tuttle’s two-hander masked as provocation, “Blue Film.”

Rejected by mainstream film festivals before it premiered in Edinburgh last summer, this taboo-busting study of a masculine camboy confronted by the pedophile teacher who many years ago desired him holds back little and offers even less that’s palatable to swallow. Its limitations as a stagelike piece aside, the movie wrings emotional complexity from a fraught, ever-shifting dialogue between a convicted child abuser and the student, now a late twenties sex worker, he spared. “Blue Film,” which takes place entirely in a rented Hancock Park Airbnb in Los Angeles with only two actors, dares to go places I have not seen an American movie travel to in a very long time, and it goes to them with terrific purpose. —RL

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Sophy Romvari’s “Blue Heron” follows a protagonist as she navigates her pre-millennial childhood memories through a sea of camcorder clips and hazy recollections. But it would be reductive to belabor the comparisons any further than that, as the Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker’s extraordinary debut feature defies any clear precedent or easy categorization as it ventures down structurally exciting and unexpected paths.

While “Blue Heron” is a drama that works without any knowledge of the filmmaker’s history, Romvari’s feature is also the culmination of a decade-long journey. An international festival favorite since the mid-2010s, her acclaimed shorts regularly fall somewhere between fiction and autobiography, the latter to varying levels of overtness. In the likes of “Still Processing,” Romvari herself is the primary onscreen presence. That particular short from 2020, which grappled with the loss of her brothers by sifting through a box of family photos that had been unseen for decades, shares the most DNA with “Blue Heron,” though Romvari is strictly behind the camera this time.

For her fiction feature, she deploys an onscreen avatar. Or two. Possibly three, depending on how you interpret one specific dramatic set piece. It’s a thrilling formal expansion for a filmmaker who’s already so sharp in examining fragmented identities, and how they might be restored with a greater understanding of how the cracks came to be — even if restoration can be an incomplete process, and “greater” often means that a considerable amount of explanation and potential catharsis remain out of reach. —JSW

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“Gloria Bell” meets “Children of Men” is an odd elevator pitch for any movie, but Gabriel Mascaro’s latest mind-bending trip out of Brazil might fit the bill. “The Blue Trail” is one of those near-future-set films with trappings recognizable to our own present, where the dystopian technology is only a slight update to our own. The porta-potties have a just-so different color. There’s a satellite placed here or there around otherwise underdeveloped surroundings. Told with the economy in the same number of minutes as the years this character has been alive, Mascaro’s short, sharp wonder of a fourth feature after films including “Neon Bull” and “Divine Love” is an enormously moving exploration of the last chapter in a woman’s life. A woman who wants nothing to do with the daughter who’s been assigned to take care of her and send her off into parts unknown. An older woman whose only dream is only, at last, to fly in an airplane.

Mascaro’s wry and witty new film will remind savvy audiences of bleak apocalyptic films about humanity’s potential loss of feeling against technologies that crush them, like “Children of Men” and “The Beast,” where the small perturbations that amount to dystopia register in things like satellites affixed to nearby huts, or plumes of red smoke bursting into the sky above an otherwise tranquil Amazonian journey. What helps make this “Blue Trail” soar beyond its roots are Guillermo Garza’s vivid, Academy-ratio cinematography and Memo Guerra’s hauntingly wounded woodwind score. Basically, you can’t tell the difference between our now and this movie’s present. —RL

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Ambiently queer and awash in rapturously uncertain feeling, Avalon Fast’s ultra-accomplished “Camp” is a micro-budget Canadian movie that invokes a handful of recognizable horror tropes without ever succumbing to the mode altogether. Eerie in a way that feels more seductive than scary, the film isn’t bewitched by its demons so much as the process of transubstantiation by which a (self)tortured young woman can transform them into grace. 

“Camp” might begin with a premise that seems ready-made for some post-horror trauma fun in the vein of “Midsommar,” but the “Honeycomb” director’s second feature — shot at a Tim Horton soccer camp in the forests of Alberta, and set at the spiritual crossroads between Panos Cosmatos, Louise Weard, and Jane Schoenbrun, whose “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” could be cast as this movie’s long-lost older sister — soon unmoors itself from the gendered expectations of a legible genre plot. Teenage and/or early twentysomething sex and death are both on the menu, but only as two of the key ingredients Fast needs to conjure a hazy woodland dreamscape where strength is endowed through human sacrifice, the moon cries tears into the lake at night, and even the most haunted of people might find the power to take flight of their pain. —DE

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Ian McKellen stars as the fading artist formerly known as Julian Sklar, a once-revered painter who peaked in the ’90s with a series of portraits of his ex-lover — the titular Christopher — before losing his luster, becoming the Simon Cowell of a ludicrous reality competition show, and finding himself on the wrong side of “cancel culture” for unspecified reasons. Now supposedly dying from some terminal illness, Julian has gone total hermit mode inside of his cluttered London apartment, where the walls are festooned with the relics of his success and the backrooms are a junk pile of painful memories.

His grubby adult kids (James Corden and Jessica Gunning) — still stinging from the casual cruelty he inflicted upon them as children, and well-aware that Julian’s withholding nature will extend to their inheritance — would sure love it if they found a previously unknown trove of three million dollar paintings among their father’s stuff when he died, and so they hire the best art forger in Britain (Michaela Coel) to apply for an assistant job in the hopes that she can nick the old man’s unfinished masterpieces and complete them with Julian’s original materials (thus making it impossible to identify them as fakes). Would that it were so simple. 

If nothing else, it’s always wonderful to see a new Steven Soderbergh movie with some actual life in its bones. After the airless spy games of “Black Bag,” the postmortem gimmickry of “Presence,” and the limp gyrations of “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” the prolific filmmaker’s run of small and increasingly sterile genre exercises was starting to feel like a waste of his un-retirement. I never would have guessed that the answer to Soderbergh’s listlessness might be an 86-year-old man, but Ian McKellen — delivering what’s easily his most essential screen performance since “The Lord of the Rings” — is so full of vim and vigor in “The Christophers” that he threatens to revitalize his director by osmosis. —DE

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The idyllic opening images of Alberto Sciamma’s “Cielo” would never lead you to suspect the morbidity that comes mere seconds later. The shots of a tranquil alpine lake with crystal-clear water and an adorable girl (Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) playing on the shore appear designed to set up something ripped straight from a fairytale. And in a way, they are… but said fairytale starts with said girl swallowing a live goldfish before beating her father to death with a large rock. So begins a surprisingly lovely work of magical realism.

In “Cielo,” life and death exist on an infinite spectrum, with transitions between the two serving more as a logistical matter than anything truly existential. Santa kills her mother (who fully signed off on the plan in advance) as a means of transporting her out of her life of poverty in rural Bolivia and escorting her into Heaven. The eight-year-old is very clear about death being the first step, but we get a feature film out of the fact that she’s murkier about the rest of the details.

Fortunately, she encounters plenty of friendly faces who are willing to help her around the way. Santa’s open-ended journey sees her dragging her mother’s (at least temporarily) dead body through deserts, salt flats, lakes, churches, and small-town wrestling matches in search of a transcendent afterlife that she knows is waiting somewhere. She leaves behind a wake of miracles and happy accidents, often receiving assistance from kind strangers who eventually realize that she was the one sent to help them. It’s a low-stakes affair — perhaps the lowest stakes we’ve ever seen in a movie that’s so blatantly centered around questions of life and death — but Aranda’s joyful charisma and cinematographer Alex Metcalfe’s stunning storybook images make “Cielo” a pleasure to watch. —CZ

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Imagine that you’re about to marry Zendaya, or at least a book editor who looks just like her. Imagine that you met her at a Boston coffee shop a few years earlier (where you clumsily — maybe even sleazily — schemed to make an introduction), embarked upon a storybook romance, and eventually began to live together in a leafy studio apartment with one of those adorable corkscrew staircases that scream “we’re not even thinking about children yet.” Imagine that you know everything you could ever think to ask about this kind, radiant, and loving fantasy of a forever partner. And then imagine what she could possibly let slip just a few days before the ceremony that would cause you to think about crashing out of the relationship altogether. 

Needless to say, there are very, very few things that could even semi-plausibly sour that dream into a nightmare with a single turn of phrase, and the wild secret that Emma (Zendaya) reveals to Charlie (Robert Pattinson) during an impromptu game of “What’s the Worst Thing You’ve Ever Done?” at a last-minute menu tasting is — upon first bite — indeed harder to swallow than even the driest of wedding cakes. But the brilliance of Kristoffer Borgli’s “The Drama,” or at least the brilliance of the sketch comedy-adjacent conceit that it exploits to mixed results, is rooted in the fact that Emma’s confession is impossible to laugh off completely. 

Like the impish anti-romance that crumbles around it, the movie’s twist is both transgressive enough to be pleased with itself and also rooted in a reality that refuses to be dismissed as a bad joke. It’s shocking, yes, but mostly because it’s rare to see a mainstream film so eager to stick out its tongue and lick one of the last genuine third rails of American discourse. —DE

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Michel Franco is back in a pissed-off register about the world we live in with his crisply directed class critique “Dreams,” where the Mexican writer/director rails into the limousine liberal American one-percent identity with all the subtlety of a power drill. But the film’s quietly disturbing power lies in how Franco packages his U.S.-Mexico border metaphor — with rich philanthropist Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) and her young ballet-dancer lover Fernando (Isaac Hernández, in a striking newcomer performance) standing in for each — into an addictive and destructive love story as sharply wrought as the movie’s grander political concerns.

Chastain gives her riskiest performance in some time as a rich arts patron who encourages Fernando to cross the border illegally in order for her foundation to give an American showcase of his art. Many of Chastain’s recent movies, including her Oscar-winning “Eyes of Tammy Faye” and even Franco’s own bittersweet dementia romance “Memory,” have a feminist or at least redemptive streak. Not so with her turn in “Dreams” as a woman who invites little sympathy — until she does in the film’s harrowing conclusion — even while she’s being played like a marionette by her father (Marshall Bell) and brother (Rupert Friend). —RL

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A 71-minute wisp of a film that moves and sounds like a cartoon wind curlicue, Pete Ohs’ “Erupcja” — the Polish word for “eruption” — was (clearly) shot with half an outline and scripted on the fly, to the point that all four of its main actors are credited as co-writers as well. Here, that approach proves a bit more pointed than it did in the director’s previous “Jethica” and “The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick,” as its elevated mumblecore energy suits the unformed and searching nature of a wherever you go, there you are story about the ways that people try to make sense of the world around them in real-time. 

People like Bethany (Charli xcx, a sly and natural screen presence), a British girl who’s convinced that a volcano explodes whenever she blows up her life for a biannual fling with flower shop owner Nel (Lena Góra) in Warsaw. Her puppy dog-like boyfriend Rob (Will Madden) wanted to propose to her in Paris, but when Bethany suggested they go to Poland instead — and not even Kraków, with all of its historic charm — some part of her was expecting the planet to crack open when they got there, as if the Earth itself were responding to her fears of heteronormative complacency. 

Ohs, who recently moved to Poland himself, is fascinated by the transformative power of being in a foreign space, and by the process through which people — be they transplants or just tourists — try to reconcile who they are to the new reality around them, and “Erupcja” drifts along with the detachedness of an out-of-body experience. Claude (Jeremy O. Harris as an extroverted American painter who meets Bethany and Rob by chance at a sushi restaurant) is probably the closest thing the director has to a surrogate in this story, and at one point the camera finds him pontificating about how “Being immersed in a culture so different from my own helps me turn my brain off so I can enter a dream state more naturally.” Slight as it is, “Erupcja” crystallizes that condition to a tee. —DE

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Ask anyone — it’s easy to get lost in the Tokyo subway. The city’s underground boasts ample signposting to guide commuters and tourists — but there’s so much of it, the passageways and stairways all look alike, and oh, we’re right back where we started. Genki Kawamura’s delightful blockbuster provocation “Exit 8” understands and exploits these frustrations, transforming these claustrophobic corridors into a site of psychological exploration, personal choice, and national anxieties.

Arashi superstar Kazunari Ninomiya is The Lost Man, a backpack-clad commuter seeking a way out of the underground and back to the light of day — where his once-girlfriend is waiting to hear his decision on whether he wants to keep the baby that she’s carrying. Initially distracted by his playlist and a phone call, he soon realizes that the passageways are looping, a situation that he quickly and pragmatically adapts to.

Toho’s big-screen adaptation offers a remarkably faithful translation of its video game namesake, one-to-one in its central environment and signage, to the point that the film at first feels like an FMV transmedia advertisement for its source material. But the core concept has been expanded in smart and surprisingly thrilling ways. —BS

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It’s a shame the “Scream” franchise has already bled out everywhere but the box office, because Daniel Goldhaber’s similarly meta “Faces of Death” is sharp enough to have cut that self-cannibalizing shibboleth down to size on its own. Much uglier and more pointed than Paramount’s stab-happy ATM of a movie franchise, this similarly meta reflection on media consumption — on the “rules” of the game, and our detached relationship to ubiquitous scenes of violence — exhumes one of the most notorious horror movies ever made in order to shudder at the banality that snuff films have come to assume in the age of social media. Here is a smart, fun, and deeply unsettling post-modern slasher that know it can’t manufacture anything scarier than what people scroll past on their phones every day, and leverages that awareness into a multiplex-ready meditation on the terror of living in a world where even the worst atrocities have been flattened into digital wallpaper. —DE

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A once-promising law student whose crippling anxiety has slowed his legal career, Sam (Matthew Shear) finds himself laid off from a firm that was already asking him to do little more than alphabetize long-obsolete boxes of files. With bills piling up and a deep sense of purposelessness that hasn’t improved since he took a mental health break from Fordham Law School nearly a decade ago, an offer to babysit his shrink’s three granddaughters while their dad plays bass with Gov’t Mule seems like an opportunity that’s depressingly worthy of his time.

Watching the three daughters is a manageable task, but Sam’s real challenge is navigating the complex relationship between his two employers, David and his wife Dianne (Amanda Peet). A beanie-loving rocker, David thinks that his life of lavish domesticity is keeping him from the life of hedonistic adventure he craves. Dianne sees him as inadequately sympathetic to the sense of purposeless that she feels after her acting career took a backseat to motherhood. Their marriage is a tinderbox, and Sam turns out to be the anxious, people-pleasing spark that lights the entire thing aflame.

A first-time writer-director, Shear has previously appeared in four Noah Baumbach movies (“Marriage Story,” “The Meyerowitz Stories,” “Mistress America,” and “While We’re Young”). And “Fantasy Life” wears that influence on its sleeve. A neurotic portrait of creative class New Yorkers who do everything in their power to drown out their own privilege with self-inflicted problems, “Fantasy Life” pulls from Baumbach as liberally as Baumbach pulled from Woody Allen. It doesn’t get any points for originality, but “Fantasy Life” follows in the footsteps of artists who made careers out of anxious protagonists, and its portrayal of anxiety demonstrates an understanding of the disorder that feels more modern than its predecessors. —CZ

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There have been any number of movies about kidnappers who choose the wrong girl to abduct (e.g. “Man on Fire,” “The Searchers,” “Saving Silverman”), but none of the kidnappers in any of those movies have ever chosen wronger than the child traffickers in Kenji Tanigaki’s “The Furious,” who snatch a tradesman’s daughter off the streets and then pay for their insolence by getting their shit absolutely rocked off the bone for the rest of an action film so brutal that it makes “The Raid” feel like “Paddington” by comparison. (OK, that might be overstating the case a little, but it was fun to type out.) 

Which isn’t to say Tanigaki’s braindead symphony of blood and skull-bashings is necessarily gorier than any of the recent martial arts movies that it aspires to one-up (though it does feature one of the coldest decapitations you’ll ever see on screen), but rather to express that its frenetic ultra-violence is staged with a vision and variety that allows each of its 9,349,082.5 hammer blows to the head to hit with the same 4DX force as the first. “The Furious” is too sloppy to stand alongside the true masterpieces of its genre, but it iterates with the best of them, drawing from a fistful of different styles and traditions to create a fresh and unpredictable beat-em-up that never allows you to go numb. —DE

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Subject of the year’s hottest Sundance bidding war, Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite” is deserving of that attention and more. A crackling, crazy, wildly entertaining flick, Wilde not only hits a high-mark in her directing, but her performance as well. Neatly built around four very different performances — though every star, including Wilde, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, and Penelope Cruz, appears to be having the time of their lives — Wilde gets excellent stuff from everyone, especially herself, in a delightfully daffy and unexpectedly muscular performance as an unhappily married woman with major anxiety. The only thing that could make all that worse? Throw a dinner party on top of it! Most viewers can probably see what’s coming once this foursome (Wilde and Rogen the uptight couple who invite their very cool upstairs neighbors, played by Norton and Cruz) is smashed together with little food, lots of booze, and plenty to say, but the pleasures of watching it all unfold outmatch any of that. And with a crowd? The party of the year! —KE

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Playwright-turned-filmmaker Aleshea Harris confronts viewers with some truly horrific material in her feature debut “Is God Is,” a sparkling road trip revenge epic as stomach-churning as it is spiritually exorcising. This daring, multi-genre thriller centers on twin sisters: Racine the Rough One (Kara Young) and Anaia the Quiet One (Mallori Johnson). Having been in and out of foster care their entire lives, we meet the girls shortly before they come face-to-face with their biological mother Ruby (Vivica A. Fox) for the first time in many years. Disfigured from an attack committed by the girls’ father, Ruby asks her daughters to get revenge on her behalf.

Telling her nightmarish tale of survival, Ruby casually smokes a joint and explains to her daughters, “It’s for the pain.” “Is God Is” functions much the same way, as Harris uses dreamlike visuals, pitch-black humor, the perfect soundtrack, and even the pleasures of movie-watching itself to soften the unbearable suffering at the heart of her film. 

In lesser hands, that tonal balancing act could feel glib or exploitative. But remarkably, Harris pulls it off completely — transforming her impossibly hard-to-take premise into the foundation of a rhythmic fantasyland that’s heightened by aesthetic choices functioning more as emotional instruments than maximalist distractions. Like a more acidic Boots Riley (someone program an “I Love Boosters”/”Is God Is” double-feature in Los Angeles this spring, please!), Harris uses bold costume and makeup design, paired with some exceptionally clever post-production flourishes, to bring her dueling heroines’ cellular connection to the forefront. —AF

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Shot on an iPhone with the same crew that Radu Jude had already collected for “Dracula,” “Kontinental ’25” naturally feels like the scrappy and scabrous B-side to a larger project about Transylvanian self-identity. Its moral dimensions are more straightforward than those in Jude’s previous work (and its form much simpler in kind), but only because their practical applications are that much knottier in return. Where “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” and “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” scaled their characters’ personal depravities against sprawling backdrops of systemic abuse, the far more intimate — and less uproarious — “Kontinental ’25” filters the perversity of neoliberalism through the eyes of a well-meaning woman’s attempt to do the right thing. Alas, a bold act of kindness can be a terrible cross to bear in a culture that’s sustained by ambient cruelties.

The woman’s name is Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), and she’s a middle-aged, upper-middle-class bailiff who was born in Hungary before she moved to the rapidly gentrifying Romanian city of Cluj — or at least to a hilly suburb on the outskirts of town, where she lives with her husband and their two kids in the kind of house that likely priced out the local population and paved over generations of personal history. Consciously or not, Orsolya has played an active role in such urban growth; her job is to evict people from the lots that have been gobbled up by the government and/or greedy real estate developers who want to turn them into condos, chain stores, and luxury hotels. It’s a job that she tries to perform humanely, though a cynic might say that she only does so in order to live with the fact that the job itself is inhumane. —DE

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Australian writer/director Adrian Chiarella makes a major debut with the queer horror movie “Leviticus.” It stars Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, and oh-how-we-missed-her Mia Wasikowska in a story about closeted teens who are haunted by the thing they desire the most: each other. Naim (Bird) and Ryan (Clausen) steal away for a furtive romance that becomes the only thing worth living for in their small town, but it’s also presided over by a conversion therapy cult into which Wasikowska, who plays Naim’s mother, has brought her son. The “It Follows” comparisons are apt as the boys are stalked by phantom versions of one another who feed into their secret desires, but Chiarella’s vision is wholly original. The emotions it delivers on — especially ending with Frank Ocean’s track “Self Control” — become almost overwhelming for anyone who’s gone through the queer experience. This is a sad, scary debut from a filmmaker we can’t wait to see more from. —RL

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There’s something deeply comedic about hearing the word “nutty” repeatedly come up in a serious conversation about finances. Nutcrackers, as they’re formally called, are homemade cocktails of sugary fruit drinks and cheap liquor that daydrinkers hide in plastic bottles for beach consumption. They’re also the bedrock of Rico’s (Juan Collado) burgeoning underground beverage empire. The 19-year-old Bronx resident spends his summer days combing beaches with a cooler full of nutties, selling flavors like the lemon-flavored Pikachu and the pink Kirby Punch for $15, two for $10, or if a customer is pretty enough, an Instagram follow. He’s convinced that the hustle will snowball into a business that affords him a house and a car in no time at all. His looming success is such an inevitability that the details are irrelevant to him.

Rico’s blind self-confidence imbues him with some all-American charm, but the three women in his life aren’t so bullish on his career. He has quite a few problems that can’t be solved with nutties — namely a baby due in seven months with his 16-year-old girlfriend Destiny (Destiny Checo). The couple still live with Rico’s Mami (Yohanna Florentino) and younger sister Sally (Nathaly Navarro), both of whom are determined to make Rico understand the massive responsibilities that are coming his way. 

That juxtaposition between idyllic summer hijinx and adult responsibilities forms the backdrop of “Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo).” Joel Alfonso Vargas’ feature directorial debut is a vibrant tableau of life in the tight-knit Dominican communities of The Bronx, capturing the joys and tragedies of Rico’s life with such specificity that they eventually become impossible to separate from one another. Vargas and cinematographer Rufai Alaja deploy a 4:3 aspect ratio to create a square frame that invokes the warm feeling of flipping through old Polaroids. As the young entrepreneur meanders through life, hawking nutties and trying to pick up girls when he forgets that he’s spoken for, it feels like we’re looking back on the final summer of his youth with the benefit of hindsight from an inevitable future that hasn’t happened yet. —CZ

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“Maddie’s Secret” is probably not what you are expecting. Comedian John Early’s directorial debut, ostensibly a pastiche of basic-cable TV movies, is not a parody, or a satire, or even a comedy. Instead, it turns out a devastatingly sincere high melodrama with a studied queer sensibility. 

Early plays the eponymous Maddie Ralph, a dishwasher at Gourmaybe, a food content production company. She’s sweet, hard-working, and a brilliant chef in her own right. Everyone in the film sees it; Her lesbian best friend (played by Kate Berlant) and her boyfriend (Eric Rahill of the magnificent “Rap World”) can’t help but dote on her, and who could blame them? One day, she finds herself the new face of Gourmaybe after one of her signature vegetarian recipes goes viral. But between the stress of her new job, a big opportunity to impress the executive producers of “The Boar” (not a typo) and the words of her mother banging around in her head, she regresses into bulimia. In attempting to hide her eating disorder, Maddie begins to unravel.

There is no world, really, in which “Maddie’s Secret” would not have turned out very funny. If you were to make a list of the most exciting people in comedy from the past decade, everybody in the movie would be on it. The cast includes Kate Berlant, Vanessa Bayer, and Connor O’Malley. There is an all-time runner about Better Help, Maddie’s house is littered with incredible sight gags, and every time Berlant did so much as move her jaw it sent the whole theater to an uproar. Even when it is not strictly funny, the dialogue is written and perfomed with the kind of hyper-expressive broadness that defines the after-school specials which inspired it. But what is most immediately striking about the film is its straight-forward sincerity. —SB

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Much like her feature directorial debut, the winning “I Like Movies,” “Mile End Kicks” is based on filmmaker Chandler Levack’s own experiences. Set in 2011, the film follows budding music critic Grace (a delightful Barbie Ferreira) as she embarks on a summer in Montreal. She’s hoping to meet and write about rising bands in the city’s vibrant music scene, while also working on a bigger project very close to her heart. Along the way, she deals with life, love (including a pair of paramours from the same band), professional disappointments, and the fallout of a horrible experience from her past.

Part rom-com, part coming-of-age tale, the film is bright and funny and sexy and sad, the sort of thing that could only be made by someone who lived through so much of what her heroine encounters. The film establishes Levack as a budding chronicler of coming-of-age in all its forms and also makes clear how much range Ferreira possesses. —KE

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Christian Petzold‘s gossamer latest film, “Miroirs No. 3,” is as compact as a novella, as ephemeral in its emotion, as delicate in register as one of the Chopin or Ravel pieces that float through it. A mystery woman, standing on a bridge, lost in thought. An amnesiac looking for respite. A car flipped upside down, its driver’s brains spilled onto the road while its passenger stares on, unharmed. Later, she eats apples in a bed that belongs to another woman, in clothes that belong to that woman’s daughter, trying on another life almost as a lark.

This is a minor-key drama, which burrows into the psyche despite its slim running time and almost perverse refusal to explain itself or the shapes its narrative takes. The title comes from a piece written by Ravel — yes, that one you probably know from the trailer for “Call Me By Your Name,” but the affiliations with the idylls of summer love and coming-of-age end right there. Writing and directing a script that evolved during the making of his last feature, “Afire,” Petzold has never been less forthcoming, the images from cinematographer Hans Fromm never overstating themselves. Nor does Petzold’s regular collaborator Paula Beer, who shifts with silvery, slippery ease between states of bemusement and shock. “Miroirs” is another gorgeous showcase for what makes her alchemy with Petzold succeed so well. —RL

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David Lowery describes his magnificently strange “Mother Mary” as a film about “how art can take something terrible and turn it into something beautiful,” and he would know. The writer-director may have made a name for himself with scrappy indies (“Ain’t them Bodies Saints”) and esoteric genre experiments (“A Ghost Story”), but he built a career for himself with the likes of “Pete’s Dragon” and “Peter Pan & Wendy” — with movies that rescued something poignant and real from the creative abyss that is Disney’s live-action remake culture, a magic trick so ineffable that it amounts to a corporate act of transubstantiation.

At once both Lowery’s sparkliest and most inscrutable film “Mother Mary” — about a delicate pop star who begs her spurned former designer for a dress — doesn’t just represent his overt attempt to reconcile and confuse those two modes, it also offers a thrilling opportunity to plunge us into the liminal space that separates them from each other. To crystallize the volatile, even violent, energy that binds artistic connections across space and time. A singular, hypnotic, and formally unbound psychodrama that’s staged between a Lady Gaga-like diva (Anne Hathaway) and the only person who might be able to quiet her demons (Michaela Coel), this talky chamberpiece of a film is almost entirely confined to an unheated barn somewhere outside of London, and yet it grows to feel as vast as the synaptic gap that stretches between literalness and metaphor. A wound and its memory. A pop song and the person who wrote it. Indie movies and Disney fare. And good God is the soundtrack full of bangers. —DE

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For the uninitiated, Nirvanna the Band couldn’t have less to do with Kurt Cobain. Launched as a webseries in 2008, the ongoing comedy project stars Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol as fictional versions of themselves who are dying to break into the Toronto music scene. Specifically, they’re dying to play a show at a legendary club known as the Rivoli. The duo is so focused on landing a gig that they don’t have time to practice music. Instead, they spend every day engaging in complex publicity stunts that demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of the music industry and often end up mirroring tropes from classic films.

The scale of the project has gradually expanded as it morphed from a DIY webseries to a Viceland show to the feature film that premiered this week, but the format remains the same. The two friends start their day sitting around a piano and brainstorming an idea for a scheme to play the Rivoli. A documentary crew then follows them as they try and execute their plan on the streets of Toronto, utilizing unknowing actors in a format that might be described as “Nathan for You” meets “This Is Spinal Tap.” The joke only gets funnier the longer they remain unsuccessful. Here, it’s stretched to truly mind-bending — and questionably legal — proportions. —CZ

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It’s hard to stop thinking about Lucrecia Martel‘s gutting true-crime documentary “Nuestra Tierra (Landmarks),” long in the works and about the 2009 murder of an Argentine Indigenous leader, after you’ve seen it. And to call it true crime at all feels like a pitiful, prescriptive, catch-all response to the ambitions of the movie, her first feature-length documentary after fiction films like “The Headless Woman,” “La Cienaga,” and “Zama” (which almost took her down) pulled back the veil on her relationship to her country’s fraught colonial history. But if a documentary that mixes cell-phone footage that feels ripped out of a found-footage horror movie with procedural courtroom red tape and testimony isn’t true true crime, I don’t know what is.

“Nuestra Tierra,” which began around the time the 2018 court hearings began for the murder of Javier Chocobar by three mining entrepreneurs who stepped on his community’s land with firearms and a false sense of ownership, also makes the case that drone footage, which feels so overdone on Netflix crime documentaries and threatens to erase the feeling of an actual human being at the storytelling’s wheel, actually works. Martel jettisons multiple drones into the sky overlooking the Chuschagasta native landscape in northern Argentina, acquiring the effect first of zoomed-in satellite footage, then of something more voyeuristic and frightening, adopting the viewpoint of colonialism itself. —RL

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Curry Barker’s “Obsession” begins with the simplest of horror premises: Bear (Michael Johnston) is a shy and sensitive music store employee who can’t find the courage to ask his co-worker and childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) on a date. Rather than be honest with her and tell her how he actually feels, he wanders into a woo-woo crystal store and buys a One Wish Willow, a kitschy antique toy from the 1960s that promises to grant its owner one wish when they snap a branch in half. Bear wishes that Nikki would love him more than anything else in the world. Problematic!

The film’s most compellingly unpredictable thrust lies in Barker’s choice to tell a story of something objectively horrible — in this case, a guy taking a woman’s entire soul away and turning her into a psychotic replica of herself so that he can have sex with her body and pretend they’re actually dating — exclusively from the perspective of the perpetrator. Navarrette delivers a brilliantly twisted performance as what’s left of Nikki, but given that her real self is stuck shrieking in call-center purgatory and only gets to emerge for seconds at a time, Bear is the human whose eyes we see everything through.

A sizable majority of the horror genre is built around men doing heinous things to women, with results ranging from deeply misogynistic to cathartically feminist. But “Obsession” is built around a much more contemporary male fear: being the problematic guy whose entire social circle knows he took advantage of a girl and wants nothing to do with him.

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When he wakes up on an empty spaceship hurtling away from the sun (and thus Earth and everyone and everything he knows), temporarily amnesiac Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) has such little handle on his situation and his place within it that he takes to a dry-erase board to sort his thoughts and questions. “WHO AM I?” is top of the list. (Later, he will note that he is “OK with cilantro.”) Those three words could just as easily function as the overall theme of Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s marvelously entertaining and deep-feeling “Project Hail Mary.” And, before you balk at the ol’ important-questions-on-a-dry-erase-board gambit (sorry to “A Quiet Place,” we love you, but that dry-erase board has got to go), know this: The dazzling “Project Hail Mary” earns such a heady question over the course of its adorably epic space odyssey. It even answers it.

Based on Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, the film’s comparisons to Ridley Scott’s own Weir adaptation “The Martian” are certainly fitting, but Lord and Miller’s first directorial outing in more than a decade also weaves in shades of everything from “Cast Away” to “E.T.” and just about every (good) film about unlikely friendship you could possibly name. It’s everything you could ask for in a blockbuster these days. —KE

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Nobody else is doing what Mark Jenkin is doing. Over three features the Cornist director has established himself as a singular auteur, and his newest, “Rose of Nevada,” is, in many ways, just more of the same. His particular brand of avant-garde, genre work is, at least from the outside, basically irresistible to anybody who loves cult cinema. His latest, shot on 16mm with all the audio recorded in post-production, is a drone-y folk tale with a lot on its mind and sound mix so loud my ears were still ringing four hours later.

“Rose of Nevada” is the most heavily plotted of Jenkin’s films, though that’s grading on a pretty steep curve. It’s a story that could fit comfortably in a classic “Twilight Zone” episode. Thirty years ago, the eponymous fishing boat disappeared after going out to sea shorthanded. With it went an entire coastal town’s economy, and the sole surviving deckhands, the one who stayed ashore, threw himself off a cliff. Now, the vessel has magically reappeared at the rundown harbor. Two men — drunk named Liam, played by Callum Turner, and a family man named Nick, played by George Mackay — unaware of the vessel’s past, are hired by the families of the deceased crew to go out once more. Upon their return, they find themselves sent into the past, having assumed the roles of the two men who were lost before. 

Mackay and Turner are both excellent, two movie stars who seem totally game to be asked to move with real gruffness. The intrusion of these two men takes almost a metatextual dimension, two celebrities isekai’d into a regional, experimental tradition. The self-reflexive qualities of the work go further, and the film can surely be read as a statement about the limits and possibilities of a totally analogue and backwards-gazing practice. But “Rose of Nevada” is too slippery to every fully be nailed down. You can imagine this same story, recounted by a dozen people, each with a different emphasis and minor post-production tweaks. In that way, “Rose of Nevada” feels like a folk tale. It is the kind of movie that I would half-expect to have an entirely different ending each time I see it. —SB

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Framed as a time capsule from Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason to the future, “Time and Water” — the magnificent new documentary from Oscar-nominated “Fire of Love” director Sara Dosa — is a film about archives. Personal archives from Magnason and his family that connect generations. The historic archives of Iceland that contain its mythic past. But also the archives made by the Earth herself, its past trials and tribulations frozen among its glaciers in the amber of time. What happens when the ice melts? Does our history go with it?

A nature doc mixed with autobiography, “Time and Water” is a poetic musing on intergenerational memory, a whimsical, yet staunchly political elegy for the glaciers, and a mournful look at the Earth in all her majesty and mystery — one that shows how craven capitalism over the last several hundred years has destroyed her, not just for the present, but for the future as well. Dosa’s film asks: If glaciers are an archive of the Earth, how will we move into the future when we’re no longer connected directly to our past? —MG

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It’s long been said that Pixar movies — the good ones, at least — are as made for parents as they are for their kids, but that bit of received wisdom has always been especially true of the “Toy Story” franchise, for the basic reason that those films are about the parents, and to an even greater degree than “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles.” More specifically, they’re about the bittersweet sorrow of parenting, which the best of them articulate with a bluntness absent from so much “adult” fiction on the subject. 

Sure, Andy’s mom was an incidental figure, and his dad simply didn’t exist, but the attachment and responsibility that Buzz and Woody feel towards their children is impossible to mistake. The same goes for the toys’ inevitable heartbreak, best articulated by the crushing pangs of nostalgia that ginger rag doll Jessie suffers whenever she thinks about the precious little girl who first outgrew her. If this series and its deathless plastic heroes cling to friendship as their prevailing theme, that’s only because it, like them, can last forever without changing. It’s because friendship is the only form of love that’s liable to stay right where you played with it last. 

The genius of Andrew Stanton’s “Toy Story 5,” which for all its flaws proves sharper than any of these movies have been since the late ’90s, is that it recognizes how tech poses an unprecedented danger to the nature of play itself — how it threatens to make kids grow up even faster than they already did, while also gamifying the act of friendship into something that requires constant screen time in order to survive. —DE

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Sho Miyake (“Small, Slow but Steady”) is one of the finest, most soulful Japanese filmmakers of his generation. His patient dramas favor characters who struggle with loneliness, often withdrawing from engaging with people much at all due to factors that make human connection harder for them. In his latest tender, beautifully textured feature, the main character’s tendency to say very little is rooted in a creative slump, intertwined with cultural isolation.

Li (Shim Eun-kyung, “Train to Busan”) is a Korean screenwriter who’s experiencing writer’s block and struggling to still connect to her surroundings in Japan, where she’s been based for years. At a Q&A session, she seems scared to answer the first question, suggesting that her main takeaway from watching her own work is that she doesn’t have much talent. Within her own mind, she’s a little more articulate. Japanese is the only language that leaves Li’s mouth, but her occasional inner monologues are in her mother tongue, the most crucial example expressing her growing conflict with the very act of writing itself.

Loosely adapting two specific manga short stories by Yoshiharu Tsuge, “Two Seasons, Two Strangers” is a finely wrought film about the process of getting out of our own heads to more properly appreciate the possibilities before us — instead of vocalizing our worries and doubts to the point of blocking our progress. To nod to a famous song that, like Miyake’s filmmaking, suggests enjoying the silence where possible, sometimes words are very unnecessary. —JSW

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March (Witsarut Himmarat) runs a successful vacuum cleaner factory in Thailand. It’s a largely uneventful life, save for the occasional encounters with ghosts that haunt his place of business. But everything changes when his beautiful, loving wife Nat (Davika Hoorne) dies after being poisoned by dust in his factory. Much like “Titane” before it, the early discourse around “A Useful Ghost” might revolve around an intimate love scene between a Thai man and a Shop-Vac that’s possessed by the ghost of his late wife. But like Julia Ducournau, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke has made a darkly hilarious film that deserves to be remembered for much more than its shock value.

The backbone of March’s young family and an incredible mother to their son Dot, Nat is gone but not forgotten. And she’s not even gone for that long. She soon returns as a ghost and assumes the body of one of March’s vacuums. The husband and wife resume their emotional and carnal relationship, but it’s clear she came back for a very specific reason: to clean the factory and prevent her child from being exposed to the particles that killed her. But her arrival poses a major emotional roadblock to March’s traditional family, who are jaded from a bad experience when a dead employee returned as a vacuum and threw a metaphorical wrench into their business. Plus, they’ve barely been able to wrap their minds around the fact that his older brother is gay.

Welcoming a human-vacuum relationship into the family is a tougher proposition. “A Useful Ghost” masterfully blends deadpan lines like “I’m less worried about the fever than the fact that he made out with a vacuum cleaner” with a sincere story about the invisible workers we choose to ignore and love that doesn’t waver in the face of family disapproval. —CZ

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Horrified by the country of his birth and heavy with the weight of its sins, Nadav Lapid has created modern cinema’s most splenetic filmography by fighting his Israeliness as if it were an incurable virus infecting his body of work. That trend continues with the deliriously provocative “Yes,” a veritable orgy of self-loathing surrender that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director on a shot-by-shot basis.

In a movie that unfolds like an Ecstasy-addled cross between Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and the Jim Carrey comedy “Yes Man,” Lapid doubles down on the frenzied violence of his filmmaking at the same time as he fully embraces his growing appetite for submission.

Telling the story of a struggling jazz musician and his dancer wife who afford a life for their newborn by acquiescing to every demand made of their talent and bodies by Tel Aviv’s militaristic ruling class, Lapid doesn’t rage against the worst monstrousness of the modern age by speaking truth to power, but rather by volunteering his characters to get crushed under the heel of its boot. And then — with a literalness no one else would dare — by forcing them to lick that boot so clean the whole world can see the dehumanizing nature of Israel’s crimes reflected in its leather. Needless to say, the underside of its sole leaves a memorable impression. —DE

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