It’s been tough to find any bright spots for the future of the movies over the last decade. Theatrical attendance struggles to regain momentum after the pandemic, and the titles people do want to watch often tend toward intellectual property-based franchises. The emergence of distributor A24 as a potent brand indicating premium quality is nothing short of a miracle.
The scrappy studio named after, improbably, an Italian motorway has ridden the fast lane of growth since its first release in 2013. A24 pierced the cultural consciousness with blasts of youthful cinematic energy like Spring Breakers and The Bling Ring, then began scoring some crossover hits with Ex Machina and Room. Within its first five years, it scored the ultimate grail of cinema — a Best Picture win, for 2016’s Moonlight — and netted a second one for the improbable awards darling Everything Everywhere All at Once within its founding decade.
A24 occupies something of an “auteur” status among a certain flavor of cinephile. Their director-forward and star-packed output shines a spotlight on an eclectic, eccentric variety of human stories that major studios have all but forgotten how to make. That’s not to say that the label has produced nothing but bangers: especially in some of their mid-2010s films released in partnership with DirecTV, there are quite a few that don’t measure up to the company’s vaunted stature.
But when you release over 120 films, there are bound to be a few stinkers. And, all in all, a middle-of-the-road A24 release is still going to be better — or, at the very least, more interesting — than the majority of movies getting made today. We’re ranking every single one of them, from mediocrities to masterpieces, for your benefit and cinematic education!
DIRECTOR: Kevin Smith
STARS: Michael Parks, Justin Long, Genesis Rodriguez
RATING: R
An absolute crime against cinema for which Kevin Smith should be tried at The Hague. You can’t unsee Tusk, particularly an absolutely depraved final image. Just don’t even bother with this abominable Canadian-set creature feature that restages Misery with a podcaster and a walrus-obsessed recluse. If there’s any morbid curiosity, just do a Google Image search — at your own peril.
DIRECTOR: Atom Egoyan
STARS: Ryan Reynolds, Scott Speedman, Rosario Dawson
RATING: R
Every once in a while, you might wish that Ryan Reynolds did something outside of his snide, quippy Deadpool schtick and pushed the range of his acting talents. Then, you might watch something like The Captive and disavow yourself of those notions. It makes sense that the Canadian actor might want to join forces with one of his country’s most acclaimed directors, Atom Egoyan, but their collaboration on this missing child thriller is a dud.
DIRECTOR: William Monahan
STARS: Oscar Isaac, Garrett Hedlund, Mark Wahlberg
RATING: R
William Monahan KNOWS how to write repressed men — he won an Oscar for writing The Departed, for heaven’s sake! But none of that skill shows up in Mojave, a morose and moribund thriller about doppelgangers in the desert. When not even Oscar Isaac can enliven this movie from being a drag, you’re in trouble.
DIRECTOR: Shawn Christensen
STARS: Logan Lerman, Elle Fanning, Kyle Chandler
RATING: R
It makes sense on paper for a film about a novelist to follow a somewhat novelistic structure. The problem with The Vanishing of Sidney Hall is that it’s completely unprepared for that level of non-linear complexity. This mystery tale just becomes a hot mess that no amount of talented young actors can rescue.
DIRECTOR: Pamela Romanowsky
STARS: James Franco, Ed Harris, Amber Heard
RATING: R
The most viewership this will get — and deserves to get — is Timothée Chalamet completists wanting to see a baby version of the megastar. Otherwise, The Adderall Diaries is a self-aggrandizing memoir adaptation that cannot handle all the storylines it wants to tell. It has all the making of a James Franco project from the 2010s, starting with intense interest and then gradually fading.
DIRECTOR: Kate Mulleavy, Laura Mulleavy
STARS: Kirsten Dunst, Pilou Asbæk, Joe Cole
RATING: R
Critics often describe plot-light films as having a “perfume commercial” aesthetic, occasionally as a backhanded compliment but usually as a pejorative. It’s the latter case for the Mulleavys, who founded the Rodarte fashion line, for their venture into feature filmmaking with Woodshock. This psychodrama about a woman (Kirsten Dunst) occupying a liminal state between grief and drug-fueled delusion is far too hazy for its own good. It goes well over the line where you can generously attribute the confusion to mimicry of the character’s mentality. This film is just lost in its own vibes.
DIRECTOR: Matt Shakman
STARS: Liam Hemsworth, Teresa Palmer, John Malkovich
RATING: R
Genuinely curious if the people at Marvel who hired Matt Shakman to make WandaVision had actually seen his feature film Cut Bank. Nothing in this wannabe Coen Brothers rural noir would ever indicate he was capable of the zeitgeist-piercing series he made for them. But hey, everyone has to start somewhere!
DIRECTOR: Stephen McCallum
STARS: Ryan Corr, Abbey Lee, Simone Kessell
RATING: R
Outlaws wants what Sons of Anarchy has. There’s a lot going on here — infighting, yelling, angry fornicating — and not much of it interesting. The film has many scenes, storylines, and characters, but they never add up. Apart from a standout steely performance by Abbey Lee (who cinephiles will recognize from her roles in Mad Max: Fury Road and The Neon Demon), this Australian biker gang drama fails to get the engine started.
DIRECTOR: Austin Vesely
STARS: Chance the Rapper, Zazie Beetz, Paul Scheer
RATING: R
Watching Slice now feels like a weird monument to a time when society was so enamored with Chance the Rapper that we’d just let him do anything. Assemble a star-studded cast to make an entire feature film based on a half-baked idea about the murder of pizzamen in a ghost town? Sure, why not! Zazie Beetz innocent.
DIRECTOR: Julius Avery
STARS: Ewan McGregor, Brenton Thwaites, Alicia Vikander
RATING: R
A movie about a surrogate father-son pairing that forms in a prison — and then that youngun (Brenton Thwaites) helps his master (Ewan McGregor) escape said confines — should be far more exciting than Son of a Gun is. Julius Avery’s thriller is heavy on plot points but light on all the things that really matter. Themes, characterization, style … all apparently hiding in their cells.
DIRECTOR: Atom Egoyan
STARS: Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, Dean Norris
RATING: R
An aging Holocaust survivor trying to push past his dementia to exact some final bits of revenge is, admittedly, an excellent concept for a film. That proves doubly so when you consider that his targets are the Nazis who assumed the identities of exterminated Jews to flee the consequences of their depravity. Yet Atom Egoyan is far too willing to let Remember just become a standard thriller. It’s disappointing that so many thematic threads are left unexplored.
DIRECTOR: Guy Nattiv
STARS: Jamie Bell, Danielle Macdonald, Daniel Henshall
RATING: R
While the Oscar-winning short film of the same name is undeniably more galling in its racial politics, the feature Skin should not get a pass for clearing such a low bar. This tale of a neo-Nazi who ultimately decides to leave the white supremacist movement and erase all his facial tattoos makes for a bizarre redemption tale. The ever-empathetic Jamie Bell goes a long way to give the project some heart, but even he can’t save this film from itself.
DIRECTOR: Patricia Rozema
STARS: Elliott Page, Evan Rachel Wood, Max Minghella
RATING: R
Societal collapse movies are often time overly sensational, yes. But when the pendulum swings too far the other way, that’s not necessarily any better. Into the Forest is a dull, drab dystopian drama about two sisters trying to survive in a forest without electrical power. Director Patricia Rozema does manage to smuggle in some intriguing notes about femininity and sorority in times of peril, but these grace notes struggle to emerge within an otherwise monotone composition.
DIRECTOR: Gus Van Sant
STARS: Matthew McConaughey, Naomi Watts, Ken Watanabe
RATING: PG-13
A white guy goes to take his own life in a Japanese forest famous for committing such acts … who thought this was a good idea? The Sea of Trees suffered one of the worst critical drubbings of all time upon its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, so much so that it’s almost impossible for anyone who’d watch this movie to not come in with that context. Gus Van Sant’s film is slightly more empathetic and aware than the concept suggests, but not much. This deeply misguided film is a real misfire for all involved. When historians look back on the McConaissance, this film might well be the beginning of the end.
DIRECTOR: Kevin McMullin
STARS: Keean Johnson, Jaeden Martell, Alex Neustaedter
RATING: R
The tide isn’t the only thing that’s low here — it’s the entertainment value. Low Tide somehow manages to turn a teenage treasure hunt into something leaden and predictable to watch. It saps the joy and adventure of feeling the rush of excitement by relying so heavily on predictable plot beats.
DIRECTOR: Daniel Scheinert
STARS: Michael Abbott Jr., Virginia Newcomb, Andre Hyland
RATING: R
The Death of Dick Long is the brainchild of one-half of the Oscar-winning duo Daniels (just Daniel Scheinert), and hopefully, it’s the last time they split. This perverse Southern gothic tale has great local flavor as a pair of friends try to cover up an unsavory secret. There’s a great comedy sketch or short film buried within the concept, but it makes for a bloated and bumbling feature.
DIRECTOR: Andrew Lau
STARS: Justin Chon, Kevin Wu, Harry Shum Jr.
RATING: R
Andrew Lau gave Martin Scorsese his film Infernal Affairs to remake as The Departed, which finally won the American master his first Oscar for Best Director. Scorsese repaid the favor by executive producing and slapping his name on Lau’s Revenge of the Green Dragons, a New York City gang movie set in the Chinese-American immigrant communities of the ‘80s and ‘90s. If you think something like Boogie Nights is just diet Scorsese, you’ll need a new word to describe just how much of a rip-off this movie is. But then again, there are worse fates than watching imitation Scorsese.
DIRECTOR: Mat Whitecross
STARS: Liam Gallagher, Noel Gallagher, Paul Arthurs
RATING: R
Maybeeeee … [this movie] is NOT gonna be the one that saves meeee. This biodoc of the great band Oasis is a Spotify-annotated Wikipedia documentary. Supersonic feels like a film strictly for the superfans of the band. But then again, shouldn’t they already know these things?
DIRECTOR: Jeff Baena
STARS: Aubrey Plaza, Dane DeHaan, John C. Reilly
RATING: R
Life After Beth bills itself as a zom-dram-rom-com. That’s maybe one two many “om”s for this movie to handle. There’s definitely some fun in the concept of having Aubrey Plaza as a zombie who comes back for her ex-boyfriend. But Jeff Baena still doesn’t quite have control over tone here, something he’d later find more success with in films like The Little Hours and Spin Me Round.
DIRECTOR: Oz Perkins
STARS: Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton
RATING: R
Oz Perkins has creepiness running in his blood — he’s descended from Anthony Perkins, who played the chilling Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. One day, he’ll likely make an exceptional work in the genre. The Blackcoat’s Daughter, a supernatural tale set among two girls stranded at a boarding school, has fragments of something great. But the film never quite coheres, perhaps owing to its split timelines.
DIRECTOR: James Ponsoldt
STARS: Miles Teller, Shailene Woodley, Kyle Chandler
RATING: R
The first act of The Spectacular Now is high-school romance excellence. Miles Teller’s cocksure Sutter Keeley begins to fall unexpectedly for Shailene Woodley’s Aimee Finecky, and it’s right on the money… until they share their first kiss. From then on, the film loses its grasp on what makes these characters unique and portrays them as lazy archetypes. That strong start has to count for something, but director James Ponsoldt squanders something great by the end.
DIRECTOR: Roman Coppola
STARS: Charlie Sheen, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray
RATING: R
You might recognize the name Roman Coppola — if not from his impressive lineage, then certainly from his writing collaborations with the great Wes Anderson. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is proof that Sofia got more of the directing genes from Francis Ford Coppola. It’s a grab-bag of Wes Anderson-style quirkiness in search of story, themes, and personality.
Where to Watch A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
DIRECTOR: John Maclean
STARS: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Michael Fassbender, Ben Mendelsohn
RATING: R
It’s just too easy to say Slow West is, well, slow. But sometimes the simplest description is the most apt. John Maclean’s revisionist Western genre film features a strong cast and occasionally solid bouts of humor. But it sags under the weight of what comes across as indecisiveness as it oscillates wildly between different flavors of comedy.
DIRECTOR: Sally Potter
STARS: Elle Fanning, Alice Englert, Annette Bening
RATING: PG-13
“Coming-of-age movies” and “the Cuban Missile Crisis” sure go together like peanut butter and jelly, don’t they? That’s the one-two punch of Sally Potter’s Ginger & Rosa, a story of two teens discovering the boundaries of their activism and affection against a volatile backdrop. The film’s worst sin is just being entirely forgettable — it’s not necessarily an unpleasant watch.
DIRECTOR: Kyle Newman
STARS: Hailee Steinfeld, Samuel L. Jackson, Jessica Alba
RATING: PG-13
Barely Lethal feels like a forerunner for Netflix’s youth-centered “content” more than a true A24 movie. (While it does bear the logo, the film was part of their mid-2010s volume play in partnership with Directv.) This lightweight action-comedy featuring Hailee Steinfeld as a special agent facing her toughest assignment yet — the halls of high school — is frivolous fun.
DIRECTOR: Susanna White
STARS: Jessica Chastain, Michael Greyeyes, Sam Rockwell
RATING: R
It’s hard not to transfer the off-screen persona of Jessica Chastain, a vocal proponent for many varieties of social justice, onto her character Catherine Weldon in Woman Walks Ahead. As a New York painter who ventures to the Dakotas in the 1890s, she finds herself swept up in the Lakota people’s land struggles. It’s an undeniably earnest political drama … but definitely a bit obvious.
DIRECTOR: Dan Krauss
STARS: Nat Wolff, Alexander Skarsgård, Adam Long
RATING: R
The narrative adaptation of The Kill Team poses as the most urgent drama of 2006 … too bad it was released in 2019, long after the U.S. conflicts in the Middle East were off the front page. There’s decent drama from the conflict between Nat Wolff’s obedient recruit and Alexander Skarsgård’s reckless sergeant, especially as the former weighs reporting the latter. But it feels like a rehashed and familiar drama, even if you haven’t seen the exemplary documentary on which the film was based.
DIRECTOR: Ti West
STARS: Mia Goth, Kid Cudi, Jenna Ortega
RATING: R
Ti West’s X could rank among the unlikeliest franchise starters ever. Nothing about this slasher film set among aspiring adult entertainers doing a bootleg shoot in the Texas backwoods screams sequel or prequel. But West finds a new scream queen in star Mia Goth, playing dual roles here as both a young adult film star and an elderly property owner. Even if the film plays it by the book, Goth is never anything less than riveting to behold on screen.
DIRECTOR: Valdimar Jóhannsson
STARS: Noomi Rapace, Hilmir Snær Guðnason, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson
RATING: R
There is a moment in Lamb, a contemporary Icelandic fairytale, that offers a clear “will you or won’t you” follow the movie in an absolutely bizarre and unhinged direction. Judging by its placement on this list, you can probably guess how this reviewer felt. But if you’re willing to follow it off a real cliff, perhaps you’ll enjoy the narrative free-fall.
DIRECTOR: David Leveaux
STARS: Lily James, Jai Courtney, Christopher Plummer
RATING: R
A deposed German monarch in exile during World War II begins to suspect a mole in his midst. With such a dynamite concept, The Exception has to deliver on some of the good as the Kaiser tries to prevent a feared assassination. All the same, it’s fair to expect this to be a little more … compelling beyond its conclusion? Maybe that’s what you get when only Jai Courtney, a black hole of charisma, is available to be your leading man.
DIRECTOR: Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire
STARS: Joe Cole, Vithaya Pansringarm, Panya Yimmumphai
RATING: R
Prison movies don’t get much more brutal than A Prayer Before Dawn. This true-life tale of a British boxer detained in Thailand is as grueling to watch as it is for the subject to endure. If you can tolerate watching the defiling of the male body, then this might be the movie for you. Others who aren’t horrified might need a little more plot than just a parade of indignities.
DIRECTOR: Lukas Dhont
STARS: Eden Dambrine, Gustav De Waele, Émilie Dequenne
RATING: PG-13
If you just need a good cry and don’t care where it’s coming from, then by all means, fire up the Belgian melodrama Close. But if you want to exhibit a modicum of critical faculties, then you’ll want to steer clear. This tragic drama about a friendship between two sensitive young boys is mawkish and maudlin to the extreme. Lukas Dhont does not earn his shameless weaponization of self-harm for both plot engine and character development.
DIRECTOR: Adam Rifkin
STARS: Burt Reynolds, Ariel Winter, Clark Duke
RATING: R
Twenty years before The Last Movie Star, the legendary Burt Reynolds got the kind of tribute to his stardom that he deserved in Boogie Nights. Paul Thomas Anderson knew what specifically made Reynolds such a sexual dynamo in the cultural imagination and wielded that to his film’s advantage. Here, this last hurrah of an aging icon feels a bit copy-and-paste. Adam Rifkin’s film probably could have used any actor who said yes and changed a few details.
DIRECTOR: Trey Edward Shults
STARS: Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo
RATING: R
It’s almost like Trey Edward Shults knew what was coming in COVID times with It Comes at Night, his uneasy thriller set in a world ravaged by an infectious disease. He gets the way people instinctively mistrust strangers in such a paranoid climate, even when that conflicts with their natural capacity for empathy. As a family tentatively agrees to let a young couple stay in their wooded home, these sentiments play out agonizingly. Shults goes a little too heavy on the atmosphere at the expense of other elements, but it’s impressively unnerving.
DIRECTOR: Elijah Bynum
STARS: Timothée Chalamet, Maika Monroe, Alex Roe
RATING: R
Before he became the A-lister we now know, Timothée Chalamet did normal teen fare like Hot Summer Nights. This crime caper about an outsider who gains status by bringing business acumen to marijuana dealing on Cape Cod packs the style with a good deal of substantive class analysis. While it’s got a lot of the pitfalls of a first feature, Chalamet’s winning screen presence helps paper over many of the flaws.
DIRECTOR: Drake Doremus
STARS: Nicholas Hoult, Kristen Stewart, Guy Pearce
RATING: PG-13
Yes, Equals is a film set in a world of automaton-like humans who don’t show emotion and are stripped of sexual agency. Yet even in such circumstances, you’d expect some more sparks to fly between stars with the raw magnetism of Nicholas Hoult and Kristen Stewart as their characters experience an illicit yearning for each other. Drake Doremus’ film is intriguing in concept but stumbles in execution as it juggles various tones.
DIRECTOR: Elegance Bratton
STARS: Jeremy Pope, Gabrielle Union, Brandon Kyle Goodman
RATING: R
Elegance Bratton’s feature directorial debut The Inspection is undeniably well-meaning. Drawing on his own experiences, he tells the story of a young gay soldier enduring military training to impress his disapproving mother. There are moments of real grace and conviction, especially when Ellis (Jeremy Pope) finds a sympathetic ear in Rosales (Raúl Castillo). But the film is ultimately a toothless confrontation of homophobia, trying to reach for wider resonance while remaining heavily locked within its singular story.
DIRECTOR: Jared Moshe
STARS: Bill Pullman, Peter Fonda, Joseph Lee Anderson
RATING: R
The aging gunslinger narrative has a pretty strong topper in this Western subgenre: Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. Jared Moshe’s The Ballad of Lefty Brown falls well short of that high-water mark — and not because it’s that bad, just that it’s operating in the shadow of a legacy that large. It is nice to see a sturdy supporting player like Bill Pullman get the spotlight, and he’s the real highlight of a delightful (if largely disposable) film.
DIRECTOR: Steven Knight
STARS: Tom Hardy, Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson
RATING: R
The setup of Locke doesn’t get much simpler: it’s one man (played by Tom Hardy), in real-time, taking phone calls as he drives a stretch of highway in the wee hours of the morning. Director Steven Knight always keeps the film visually interesting to break up the monotony of the concept. Yet the film falls a little flat in the content of the story itself. There’s some mystery at first around what exactly motivates such a trip, and then … the big reveal is an underwhelming cliché.
DIRECTOR: Per Fly
STARS: Theo James, Ben Kingsley, Jacqueline Bisset
RATING: R
Want a little more Theo James in your life after his turn in The White Lotus? He’s working in slightly less edgy leading man territory in Backstabbing for Beginners, a boilerplate geopolitical thriller where he stars as an idealistic U.N. analyst who uncovers massive corruption by way of his boss (Ben Kingsley). James is up to the task, sure, but it’s a reminder of how bland a good actor can be without a more visionary director guiding their star power. It’s a fine film if you want a little bit of intrigue, but don’t expect anything that reinvents the wheel.
DIRECTOR: Lee Cronin
STARS: Seána Kerslake, James Quinn Markey, Simone Kirby
RATING: R
If you need a creepy kid movie and any will do, you could do worse than the Irish genre flick The Hole in the Ground. It all goes down when a single mother moves with her young son out to the countryside and begins to suspect some psychic connections between his strange behavior and a mysterious sinkhole. And it’s 90 minutes, to boot!
DIRECTOR: Noah Baumbach
STARS: Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver
RATING: R
While We’re Young is still Noah Baumbach, so it’s going to have some moments of brilliantly realized comedy and drama as a given. But those insights into human behavior really struggle to peek through this screed against millennials delivered an aging Gen X-er. It’s not that younger generations should be immune to criticism and older ones should not have an outlet to vent. But Baumbach’s veil of faux neutrality tries to pass this intergenerational adventure off as some kind of dispassionate observation rather than his own midlife crisis.
DIRECTOR: John Cameron Mitchell
STARS: Elle Fanning, Alex Sharp, Nicole Kidman
RATING: R
John Cameron Mitchell’s How to Talk to Girls at Parties is a bit unwieldy as it tries to both conjure the time and place of London’s punk scene of the 1970s … and introduce an alien played by Elle Fanning into the mix. It’s got immaculate craftsmanship, particularly in the vibrant costumes, but isn’t as strong in storytelling despite coming from a Neil Gaiman short story. There are many eye-catching moments in the film that make it worth a watch — including Nicole Kidman’s most insane wig to date, which is really saying something.
DIRECTOR: Richard Eyre
STARS: Emma Thompson, Stanley Tucci, Fionn Whitehead
RATING: R
The logline for The Children Act is the stuff of knotty courtroom drama. If you’re a judge, how do you handle the case of a 17-year-old trying to defy doctors’ orders for a life-saving blood transfusion due to religious convictions? It’s a bummer that the film chooses the path of least resistance in countless ways, but even that version of the story still proves gripping to watch unfold.
DIRECTOR: Gilles Paquet-Brenner
STARS: Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Christina Hendricks
RATING: R
Among Gillian Flynn’s killer trio of novels, Dark Places is the clear bronze-medal taker in terms of screen adaptations. But when the competition is David Fincher’s feature Gone Girl and Jean-Marc Vallée’s miniseries Sharp Objects, it’s going to be tough to stand out. This mystery featuring the survivor of a murder (Charlize Theron) reinvestigating the crime is still gripping to watch unfold. Flynn’s subtle critique of true crime aficionados feels quite prescient now.
DIRECTOR: Halina Reijn
STARS: Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Myha’la Herold, Rachel Sennott
RATING: R
Was there some kind of screenwriting competition designed to see how many Gen Z buzzwords someone could stuff in a single script? If so, Bodies Bodies Bodies clearly would win. At least there’s some cleverness and humor to this mystery of a seeming murderer on the loose among twentysomethings caught in a palatial manor during a power outage. Rachel Sennott’s line delivery of “your parents are upper…middle…class” alone is worth a watch, even if the rest of the movie can never quite latch onto her satirical frequency.
DIRECTOR: Stephen Karam
STARS: Richard Jenkins, Jayne Houdyshell, Amy Schumer
RATING: R
Stephen Karam is very, very aware of the easy critique of a playwright directing his own work as a movie — it’s just filmed theater. Yet somehow in trying to avoid the lazy trap, The Humans feels even more self-conscious of its own roots. There’s a lot of compelling family drama taking place over this Thanksgiving table in a run-down New York City apartment, but the overly studied form proves all the more distracting. The acting and the writing still shine through even in spite of the odd craftsmanship.
DIRECTOR: Darren Aronofsky
STARS: Brendan Fraser, Hong Chau, Samantha Morton
RATING: R
Good thing Brendan Fraser got the Oscar for this because otherwise … what was the point of The Whale, really? This story of a morbidly obese man trying to make some kind of human connection before he passes is little more than self-satisfied trauma porn. It’s an odd fit for director Darren Aronofsky, a normally kinetic director who has never made a movie so lacking in vibrancy and imagination.
DIRECTOR: Adam Smith
STARS: Michael Fassbender, Brendan Gleeson, Lyndsey Marshal
RATING: R
The title of the film Trespass Against Us alludes to a prayer beginning with “Our Father, who art in heaven.” But for the film’s subject, the striving Chad (Michael Fassbender), he’s much more concerned with an earthly father. His family’s patriarch Colby (Brendan Gleeson) brings everyone into his family business of criminal enterprise. Chad finds out quickly what it means to break away, a conflict rendered vividly by these two paradigms of Irish on-screen excellence.
DIRECTOR: Alex Garland
STARS: Jessie Buckley, Rory Kinnear
RATING: R
Alex Garland has all the subtlety of a shotgun in Men, his overloaded metaphorical horror film tackling the various strains of so-called toxic masculinity. Though the radiant Jessie Buckley is always capable of holding the frame, it’s really the Rory Kinnear show that makes the film watchable in spite of Garland’s worst tendencies. Kinnear plays countless characters in the film, each of which portrays a slightly different side of his gender’s fragility. He can manage what Garland cannot: maintaining a foot in both the personal and the universal.
DIRECTOR: Lynn Shelton
STARS: Keira Knightley, Chloë Grace Moretz, Sam Rockwell
RATING: R
We’ve seen how many tales of manchildren going through prolonged adolescence … and how often is that same luxury afforded to women? Lynn Shelton’s Laggies lets its protagonist be as aimless as any schlubby bro, but that’s not the only point of the film. Her characterization of Keira Knightley’s idling Megan is revelatory because it reveals the mechanics of why she’s drawn to hanging out with teenagers. She wants to leech off their youth to avoid growing up like some kind of normcore Peter Pan. Shelton’s knack for observation sometimes outstrips her penchant for narrative ingenuity, but the film is overwhelmingly pleasant all the same.
DIRECTOR: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck
STARS: Ben Mendelsohn, Ryan Reynolds, Yvonne Landry
RATING: R
Mississippi Grind, the Ben Mendelsohn-Ryan Reynolds buddy poker movie, has such a lovable “Guys Being Dudes” energy. So much so that you might easily forget that the two leading characters are sadsacks who are trying to outrun their problems on a Southern road trip. Mendelsohn is predictably great, but Reynolds is MVP for showing some vulnerability for a change.
DIRECTOR: Joshua Z. Weinstein
STARS: Menashe Lustig, Yoel Falkowitz, Ruben Niborski
RATING: PG
You could be forgiven for thinking Joshua Z. Weinstein made a documentary with Menashe, a masterfully observed tale of the titular widower in New York’s Hasidic Jewish community trying to make a home suitable to regain custody of his son. The film feels cut from the cloth of everyday life, in part because Weinstein spent so long enmeshed in the community. The story’s familiarity can be a bit tedious, but it also feels like a part of the point Weinstein is trying to make. Menashe is just like any other American father, even if it feels like he lives in a different place altogether.
DIRECTOR: Claire Denis
STARS: Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Benny Safdie
RATING: R
Things get hot and heavy between an American journalist (Margaret Qualley) and a British businessman (Joe Alwyn) in Stars at Noon. As they traipse around Central America asking for trouble, the political dimensions of their misadventures emerge from director Claire Denis’ keen eye for neo-colonialism. The film can be a bit ploddingly slow, not to mention somewhat bumbling, but it’s mostly a winning proposition by the end when it abandons the trappings of an erotic thriller.
DIRECTOR: Joanna Hogg
STARS: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton
RATING: R
The Souvenir, Joanna Hogg’s metafictional tale of her own artistic awakening, is worth watching if only to better appreciate its complementing half. (More on that later.) This tale of her alter ego Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) getting caught up in the tempestuous world of a mysterious older man (Tom Burke) is a meticulously realized doomed romance. It can be a bit obvious at times, so it helps that Hogg frequently finds the most interesting way to frame any given moment.
DIRECTOR: Mike Mills
STARS: Joaquin Phoenix, Gaby Hoffmann, Woody Norman
RATING: R
It is to Mike Mills’ immense credit that he’s able to capture a child-like view of the world in C’mon C’mon. Joaquin Phoenix’s childless radio journalist travels the country capturing youthful perspectives, but he loses that sense of distance once he has to start taking care of his nephew Jesse (the impossibly precocious Woody Norman) on the road. That perspective ends up becoming somewhat limiting as the film can feel a bit pat. Nonetheless, there’s still an undeniable sweetness to the project that proves entirely winning even as it leaves you wanting a little more.
DIRECTOR: Augustine Frizzell
STARS: Maia Mitchell, Camila Morrone, Kyle Mooney
RATING: R
Augustine Frizzell essentially makes a Superbad for gorgeous, gorgeous girls in Never Goin’ Back. But it’s not just lazy gender-swapping that proves women can be in the same stories as men. This crass comedy captures the desperation of two working-class teenage waitresses trying to scrounge together enough money to beat the heat and go to the beach. It’s a wild stoner flick that is refreshingly unafraid of grossing its audience out.
DIRECTOR: Yorgos Lanthimos
STARS: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Barry Keoghan
RATING: R
There’s a moment in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer that feels like somewhat of a betrayal of the director’s surreal affectation: Nicole Kidman’s character cries in earnest responding to an unsettling plot development. It feels like the movie is blinking in the face of the depravity being shown as a troubled teen (Barry Keoghan) begins tormenting a surgeon (Colin Farrell) and his family. The singular vision of Lanthimos still makes this mythically-tinged tale worth watching, but this disruption of the force field by breaking the tacit code of the cinematic universe.
DIRECTOR: Gaspar Noé
STARS: Sofia Boutella, Romain Guillermic, Souheila Yacoub
RATING: R
Gaspar Noé’s Climax starts off with an ecstatic high as his acrobatic camera captures a jaw-droppingly accomplished dance rehearsal … and it’s all downhill for the dancers from there! Someone spikes the punch, leading the gathered participants into an absolute mania. Watching what jarring turn comes next proves propulsive and terrifying.
DIRECTOR: Bryan Bertino
STARS: Zoe Kazan, Ella Ballentine, Aaron Douglas
RATING: R
Before *every* horror movie just became a metaphor for trauma, The Monster did some exciting things in the space. Bryan Bertino’s film keeps it simple: a mother (Zoe Kazan) and her daughter (Ella Ballentine) encounter some terrifying and unknown creature tormenting them while stranded along a secluded road. It’s an effectively spare use of “metaphor-ror” that provides the opportunity for chills and catharsis alike.
DIRECTOR: Jeremy Saulnier
STARS: Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Patrick Stewart
RATING: R
Remember when there was insane discourse around whether or not it was OK to punch Nazis? Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room falls emphatically on the side of needing to fight back, especially because his central punk rocker characters find themselves trapped inside a club operated by neo-Nazis. It’s a gruesome, gory battle of attrition that does not shy away from the epochal nature of its microcosmic conflict. This one is absolutely not for the faint of heart.
DIRECTOR: Sebastián Lelio
STARS: Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Michael Cera
RATING: R
Sometimes we all need to just watch nice people being nice, and Gloria Bell is happy to provide such entertainment. That doesn’t mean that the story of Julianne Moore’s titular divorcee is one ignorant of life’s ups and downs. It’s just a film that lets her find the joy of discovering herself and her priorities through the pain. She comes out smiling, and so should we.
DIRECTOR: James Franco
STARS: James Franco, Dave Franco, Seth Rogen
RATING: R
You don’t need to see The Room, Tommy Wiseau’s worst movie ever turned cult classic, to enjoy The Disaster Artist, the fictionalized account of its making. It might help you catch a few more references, sure. But at its core, this is a story about artists coming together to make something they believe in — and keeping that faith even in spite of public ridicule.
DIRECTOR: Ari Aster
STARS: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Parker Posey
RATING: R
Kudos to A24 for giving Ari Aster carte blanche to make a three-hour epic picaresque of his mommy issues as expressed through Joaquin Phoenix’s stunted titular man-child. Beau is Afraid is an undeniably virtuosic piece of filmmaking with confidence in its vision. But when covering so much ground in a single film, it’s inevitable that stronger pieces emerge. It just so happens that here, those mostly come at the beginning when Beau interacts more with Aster’s vividly realized dystopian urban hellscape. The broad dark comedy slowly gives way to more intimate interactions that lack Aster’s flair for the absurd. At the very least, don’t turn it off until he makes you hear Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” like you’ve never heard it before!
DIRECTOR: Lenny Abrahamson
STARS: Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen
RATING: R
There’s a deceptively high degree of difficulty in adapting the novel Room to the big screen. The subject matter is grim given that it involves a young woman (Brie Larson) and her child (Jacob Tremblay), the product of her abuser, as they are held captive within a single room. That setting is also a tough visual challenge to make interesting. Lenny Abrahamson pulls it off with simplicity and sincerity, making a film that’s affecting if not overwhelming.
DIRECTOR: Ben Wheatley
STARS: Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer, Brie Larson
RATING: R
If it’s rip-roaring fun you seek, Free Fire is your movie. Ben Wheatley’s film proves there is truth in advertising given how the bullets fly during this action film centered around a shootout. Add in the ‘70s period trappings as IRA members and arms dealers face off in an abandoned warehouse, and you’ve got all the makings of enjoyable entertainment.
DIRECTOR: Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie
STARS: Adam Sandler, Julia Fox, Kevin Garnett
RATING: R
Hot take alert! While it’s becoming a useful comparison for stressful situations among cinephiles, Uncuh Jams — sorry, Uncut Gems — is a very good and accomplished film. Still, it’s the second best that the Safdie Brothers have made. Bless them for giving the people what they deserve: Adam Sandler fully in his bag as both a dramatic and comedic force of nature.
DIRECTOR: Denis Villeneuve
STARS: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon
RATING: R
Leave it to the bold, brooding vision of Denis Villeneuve to unlock the true terror in the concept of the doppelganger. Enemy gives us a double dose of Jake Gyllenhaal, starting with his sheepish college professor Adam Bell and extending to the actor Daniel Saint Claire who looks just like him. Subtly but surely, the knowledge of their counterpart begins to eat away at their understanding of the universe. Villeneuve amplifies the gnawing dread further with a giant tarantula looming in the distance.
DIRECTOR: Ari Aster
STARS: Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro
RATING: R
There’s nothing scarier in this world than family, if you want to take Ari Aster’s word for it. Hereditary engages with a world of dark forces and satanic spirits, but the film’s most tense and terrifying moments come at the hands of angry parents and neglectful siblings. The bit is overdone at this point but bears repeating all the same: Toni Collette’s snub by awards bodies for this committed, chilling performance is inexcusable.
DIRECTOR: Noah Baumbach, Jake Paltrow
STARS: Brian De Palma
RATING: R
While it’s a bit random that droll dramedy maker Noah Baumbach of all people co-directed a documentary about genre master Brian De Palma, the filmmaker in front of the camera matters most here. De Palma just lets the New Hollywood legend cook, getting his unfiltered opinions and observations about his singular career. It’s a must-watch for fans of film both as art and commerce.
DIRECTOR: Robert Eggers
STARS: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie
RATING: R
Robert Eggers’ folk horror tale The Witch pays such keen attention to period detail that it could make Wes Anderson blush. This doesn’t feel like a contemporary fiction about a family’s haunting that happens to be set in colonial New England. It feels like Eggers somehow had a camera in the 17th century and managed to record this scary saga as it unfolded.
DIRECTOR: Ari Aster
STARS: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, Vilhelm Blomgren
RATING: R
Men will literally make an elaborate Swedish folk horror story instead of going to therapy. Midsommar is the ultimate breakup revenge movie, and you can feel the raw and cathartic anger dripping from Florence Pugh’s Dani as she navigates the betrayal of the men closest to her. At no point during this journey to the film’s literal barn-burner of an ending will you know what’s coming next.
DIRECTOR: Sean Baker
STARS: Simon Rex, Bree Elrod, Suzanna Son
RATING: R
There’s something both slippery and prickly about Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. This 2016-set comedy follows the raucous exploits of Simon Rex’s Mikey Saber, a washed-up porn star who ends up in his Texas hometown after hitting a rough patch. As Trump looms large in the background on TVs, he begins grooming a 17-year-old who works at the counter of a donut store. And yet the film is a raucous comedy that challenges how much you are willing to empathize with and enjoy the presence of Mikey!
DIRECTOR: Peter Strickland
STARS: Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hayley Squires, Leo Bill
RATING: R
Peter Strickland’s off-kilter horror film will make you think twice before ever calling a piece of clothing “killer” again. His ‘70’s-set tale In Fabric centers on a haunted red dress that seems to be a mystical harbinger of doom for all those who come into possession of it. Just in case you needed a new thing to fear! Strickland finds a way to infuse the capitalistic enclaves of Britain with a giallo flair as well as a dash of unsettling comedy.
DIRECTOR: Celine Song
STARS: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro
RATING: PG-13
Celine Song’s Past Lives provides a different kind of love triangle, one centered around longing rather than lust. Korean-American Nora (Greta Lee) lives happily with her husband Arthur (John Magaro) in New York City, but the re-emergence of her childhood crush Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) begins to throw that delicate balance into question. The film’s delicate, tender touch revolves less around the question of “will she or won’t she?” and more around the notion of choices and opportunity costs at large. All the same, Nora’s final decision devastates.
DIRECTOR: Joanna Hogg
STAR: Tilda Swinton
RATING: PG-13
The concept of a frustrated writer taking their family to a secluded (and potentially haunted) hotel might evoke The Shining, and Joanna Hogg is certainly aware of the sandbox she’s playing in with The Eternal Daughter. That otherworldly element figures quietly and ominously into the background of this film, which is Hogg’s extension of the autobiographical character from her Souvenir films. Her dabbling in genre enhances a mother-daughter story by elevating their interactions from the mundane to the mystical, raising powerful questions about legacy in its wake.
DIRECTOR: Charlotte Wells
STARS: Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio
RATING: R
While I didn’t find Aftersun quite as emotionally devastating as many who left the film in a puddle of tears, there’s no denying that Charlotte Wells’ debut feature storms out of the gate in a burst of virtuosic style. The film’s structure revolves around a series of videotapes from a childhood vacation of Sophie and her young father Calum, which then intermingle with the vagaries of her memory. By the finale, Wells cleverly collapses all boundaries between time and space, dancing alongside the demons and delights of the past.
DIRECTOR: Owen Kline
STARS: Daniel Zolghadri, Matthew Maher, Miles Emanuel
RATING: R
If you’d like the phrase “comic book movie” to mean more than just shlocky superhero fare, then step right up for Owen Kline’s Funny Pages. This anarchic comedy harkens back to the world of irreverent underground comic strips, both in inspiration and in its aesthetic. The film’s protagonist Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) so desperately wants to throw off his suburban New Jersey trappings and embrace the edginess of that scene, so much so that he sets in motion a series of ludicrous events through his own choices and dealings. It all comes to a head on a Christmas morning back at his parents’ home that’s one of the best comic set pieces in years.
DIRECTOR: David Lowery
STARS: Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton
RATING: R
David Lowery was all set to premiere his take on the Arthurian legend The Green Knight in 2020. Then, COVID happened, and he had more time to play around with the form and narrative content. What ultimately came to pass from his visionary mind is something that captures the mysticism of myth in awe-inspiring ways.
DIRECTOR: David Robert Mitchell
STARS: Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough, Topher Grace
RATING: R
A24 sat on David Robert Mitchell’s unwieldy Under the Silver Lake for nearly a year after its polarizing premiere at Cannes before dropping it unceremoniously in a few theaters. The film deserves a second chance, in part because its conspiratorially-inclined comic trappings have only become more relevant as the fever dreams of the Internet become our reality. Mitchell’s modern noir pastiche is gonzo in the best possible way as Andrew Garfield’s wannabe City of Angels gumshoe Sam investigates the disappearance of his neighbor. It might not entirely make sense, but then again … does Chinatown, really?
DIRECTOR: Rose Glass
STARS: Morfydd Clark, Jennifer Ehle, Lily Frazer
RATING: R
Religious fervor to the point of possession is usually something associated with a villain or side character in horror films. Rose Glass’ Saint Maud asks what happens when that force lives within the protagonist. Morfydd Clark’s titular character, a new convert to Roman Catholicism, approves her work as a nurse with a truly religious fervor. Maud’s vision of palliative care becomes increasingly less restorative and more fire-and-brimstone, a descent (or ascent, depending on your perspective) that Glass charts masterfully in just 84 minutes.
DIRECTOR: Lulu Wang
STARS: Awkwafina, Zhao Shu-zhen, Tzi Ma
RATING: PG
The cultural differences between the West and East rarely get such a sensitive, nuanced treatment as they do in Lulu Wang’s The Farewell. This poignant drama, drawn from the filmmaker’s own experiences, follows a Chinese family as they weave an elaborate fabrication to hide the extent of a medical diagnosis from their matriarch Nai Nai (Zhao Shu-zhen). The Chinese-American granddaughter Billi (Awkwafina) struggles to understand why her family wants to avoid grappling with their emotions honestly, and her objections are quickly met with a crash course in the many different ways people can deal with their grief. Wang avoids maudlin emotionality, and her film is all the more moving for it.
DIRECTOR: Alex Garland
STARS: Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac
RATING: R
Ex Machina is the best Black Mirror episode Charlie Brooker never made. Computer programmer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins the opportunity to come to the secluded mountain home of an eccentric tech CEO (Oscar Isaac) and administer a Turing test on his humanoid robot Ava (Alicia Vikander). It feels simple in concept and setup, which is why writer/director Alex Garland is ultimately able to make such a sneakily compelling techno-thriller. The audience, like Caleb, is a proverbial frog in boiling water. The danger isn’t evident until realizing that Garland has slowly ratcheted up the temperature with each scene.
DIRECTOR: Kogonada
STARS: Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Justin H. Min
RATING: PG
Writer/director Kogonada cut his teeth on making video essays about legendary filmmakers, and that knowledge and reverence for classical composition show in his own feature filmmaking work. After Yang builds on his love of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, bringing his somber and sincere silliness into a future where a family tries to save its malfunctioning humanoid robot.
DIRECTOR: Ti West
STARS: Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Tandi Wright
RATING: R
The most horrifying thing in Ti West’s Pearl has nothing to do with any bloody murder. Instead, this 20th-century origin story of Mia Goth’s aged X character is at its most bone-chilling when simply forcing you to stare into Pearl’s eyes as she tries to explain herself. Goth’s climactic extended monologue, shot in one unbroken take, makes it impossible to escape from her … just as she finds it impossible to escape from her life through stardom or any other means. That forced identification with a villain proves queasy, just as West intends it.
DIRECTOR: Nicole Holofcener
STARS: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins
RATING: R
The elevator pitch for You Hurt My Feelings is simple: what if your spouse secretly hated your work? But as with all things written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, the droll dramedies are never so cut-and-dry. Without pretenses of political posturing, the film explores the limits of the little white lie. When is it coddling, and when is it encouraging? Leave it to the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus to make every moment of it hilariously well-observed.
DIRECTOR: Trey Edward Shults
STARS: Kelvin Harrison Jr., Lucas Hedges, Taylor Russell
RATING: R
Trey Edward Shults will absolutely bring you down into the deepest depths of despair in Waves as he charts a teenager’s self-destruction as he buckles under the pressure of paternal expectations. But that’s not the end point of this family drama, only the hinge point. It has to go so low so you can recognize what it’s really like to feel high. An emotional phoenix rises from the ashes of this quasi-movie musical. It soars.
DIRECTOR: Saela Davis, Anna Rose Holmer
STARS: Emily Watson, Paul Mescal, Aisling Franciosi
RATING: R
Do NOT watch this film if you want to hold onto your image of Paul Mescal as only playing gentle soft boys. In God’s Creatures, he’s an actively insidious presence upon returning to his small Irish fishing village. He’s left a lot of destruction in his wake, but his mother Aileen (Emily Watson) is often there running behind him to pick up the pieces. The inciting incident here, though, involves an allegation of severe misconduct with an old flame that may just prove a bridge too far for her.
DIRECTOR: Lee Isaac Chung
STARS: Steven Yeun, Yeri Han, Alan S. Kim, Yuh-jung Youn
RATING: PG-13
“Minari is truly the best,” explains Yuh-jung Youn’s grandma Soonja. “It grows anywhere, like weeds, so anyone can pick and eat it.” It’s an open question throughout the film Minari whether the Korean-American Yi family can live up to the legacy of the titular plant. Director Lee Isaac Chung never shies away from the real struggle of immigrant assimilation, especially in the rural heartland during the early 1980s. But be it through Steven Yeun’s devastating performance or Emile Mosseri’s swelling score, the poignant emotionality always peeks through the pain.
DIRECTOR: Jesse Eisenberg
STARS: Julianne Moore, Finn Wolfhard, Finnegan Oldfield
RATING: R
This is probably not the parent-child comedy of errors you might be expecting when pairing Juliane Moore and Finn Wolfhard. The mother is a passionate social worker, and her son is an aspiring musician chasing clout online. The standard formula would find a way to bridge their differences, but Jesse Eisenberg goes a different route in his feature directorial debut When You Finish Saving the World. It’s a film that leaves its audience to dwell in the depressing reality that perhaps some divides, be they generational or familial, might be irreparable. This might not be comforting, but it always rings true.
DIRECTOR: Kelly Reichardt
STARS: John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones
RATING: PG-13
What a moo-vie! Jokes aside, Kelly Reichardt’s Pacific Northwest parable First Cow is as incisive a tale about masculinity and capitalism on the frontier as you’re likely to find. But the film never feels like an overloaded allegory because it never departs from the tender friendship at its core. Two outsiders, the cook Cookie (John Magaro) and the immigrant fugitive King Hu (Orion Lee), find an ideal match between skill and salesmanship to begin a successful entrepreneurial venture for Cookie’s biscuits. The catch? The milk necessary for the recipe must be stolen from a new cow in the region.
DIRECTOR: Joe Talbot
STARS: Jimmie Fails, Jonathan Majors, Danny Glover
RATING: R
“They say that often a filmmaker’s first film can be his or her best,” filmmaker Alexander Payne once posited. “Why? Because he or she has been waiting 30, 35 years to tell that story.” That unfiltered verve emanates from Joe Talbot’s debut The Last Black Man in San Francisco, an aching tribute to his hometown that he feels is pushing his history out. Like any city symphony, it bustles with life even as it fears the death of what it loves. Talbot’s freshman feature is messy and rough around the edges, but those imperfections are what give it such vibrant texture.
DIRECTOR: Claire Denis
STARS: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin
RATING: R
This is not your parents’ space adventure. Claire Denis’ High Life could care less about your sci-fi genre expectations. The French auteur paints across her grandest canvas yet, but the violence and vulnerability are still as submerged as ever here. Like many Denis films, this might appear inscrutable at first blush — but give it a chance. Denis has a way of teaching you how to watch her movies if you let her guide you by sensation more than story.
DIRECTOR: J.C. Chandor
STARS: Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo
RATING: R
1981. That was the most violent year in New York City’s history, and it was also when Oscar Isaac’s entrepreneurial Abel Morales has the misfortune of trying to expand his business. A Most Violent Year sets its sights on nothing less than a Godfather-like a parable of capitalistic choices — if the thematic parallels don’t grab you, maybe Bradford Young’s cinematography channeling Coppola’s muted hues will. But it’s a clever inversion: whereas the Corleones’ mob operation signals the success of immigrants achieving the American Dream from the shadows, Abel’s constantly thwarted quest for legitimacy shows the limits of legitimacy within formal business institutions.
DIRECTOR: Trey Edward Shults
STARS: Krisha Fairchild, Olivia Grace Applegate, Bryan Casserly
RATING: R
And you thought your Thanksgiving table was stressful? Trey Edward Shults’ microbudget first feature Krisha turns the holiday into a horror show as estranged aunt Krisha (Krisha Fairchild) comes back for the family feast. Everything that can go wrong does. Every temper that could flare rages. And poor Krisha, who has good intentions but stumbling execution, falls back into a pit of anxiety that the swirling camerawork captures breathtakingly.
DIRECTOR: Chad Hartigan
STARS: Markees Christmas, Craig Robinson, Carla Juri
RATING: R
It’s rare to find a movie as earnest as Morris from America in the A24 catalog. But this spunky coming-of-age story (which also doubles as something of a fish-out-of-water tale) earns its place among the distributor’s top titles thanks to its bursts of stylistic flair. It’s a great window into the world of the titular Morris (Markees Christmas), a teenager full of confidence in his own talents but unsure of his surroundings thanks to his soccer coach father (Craig Robinson) uprooting them to go live in Germany. Chard Hartigan finds what might be the evenest ratio of hilarity and heartwarming in the distributor’s catalog.
DIRECTOR: Azazel Jacobs
STARS: Debra Winger, Tracy Letts, Aidan Gillen
RATING: R
When we meet Debra Winger and Tracy Letts’ long-married characters in The Lovers, they’ve all but given up on their union. Each other’s affairs are an open secret. And just on the precipice of leaving, they rediscover the sexiest thing of all in the truly forbidden fruit: each other. This dry, wry comedy from Azazel Jacobs recaptures the spirit of early studio rom-coms, which were often known as “comedies of remarriage” that had to use a couple’s rediscovery of their old flame to get around censorship requirements.
DIRECTOR: Daniel Scheinert, Daniel Kwan
STARS: Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
RATING: R
Ah, the Daniels’ “farting boner corpse movie” that had to run so their later Everything Everywhere All at Once could multiverse jump. Swiss Army Man is a feature directorial debut that shows the duo already in full control of their powers. All the humor in this bizarre tale of a depressed man (Paul Dano) finding a new lease on life through a sentient corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) feels like it shouldn’t work because it is just that sophomoric. And yet, the Daniels already knew the boundaries they could push so long as they let their big beating hearts lead the way.
DIRECTOR: Gillian Robespierre
STARS: Jenny Slate, Jake Lacy, Gaby Hoffmann
RATING: R
Many stories play abortion as a tragic endpoint or obstacle in a character’s plot development. Obvious Child calls out the game and refuses to play it through the journey of Jenny Slate’s stand-up comic Donna, who decides to terminate the unwanted pregnancy that results from a one-night stand with Max (Jake Lacy at peak nice guy). This is just simply a thing that happens, and Gillian Robespierre’s extraordinarily ordinary rendering of abortion feels quietly radical.
DIRECTOR: Dean Fleischer-Camp
STARS: Jenny Slate, Dean Fleischer-Camp
RATING: PG
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On makes the jump from YouTube short to feature film with few problems, even if it does feel a bit like watching an extended playlist of 3-minute bits. Director Dean Fleischer-Camp and lead vocal talent Jenny Slate create a world of wonder on a microscopic scale as Marcel shows us the dignity among the detritus of everyday life. If you let the film work its movie magic, you’ll find yourself seeing the world through a freshly renewed lens of optimism.
DIRECTOR: Kelly Reichardt
STARS: Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, John Magaro
RATING: R
What it means to make art, really make it in a tactical and craftsmanlike sense, rarely gets such a clear-eyed spotlight as it does in Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up. The filmmaker strips artistry of any lofty, idealized notions of creative flow to show just how hard it can be to make space in your life for the thing you love — and the struggle it entails just to persevere. The title can thus be read as both the bare minimum and a laudable achievement in its own right. And don’t let the setting among a group of academically-based artists fool you, either, because this is an absolutely hysterical film in its own right as well.
DIRECTOR: Barry Jenkins
STARS: Trevante Rhodes, André Holland, Janelle Monáe
RATING: R
A24’s first Best Picture winner Moonlight forever changed what that category could be and do. Barry Jenkins’ tale of queer Black love trying to find a way through the harsh climate of Floridian masculinity frees his narrative from simple social realist tropes. His triptych pulls freely from Asian masters like Hou Hsiao-Hsien and French iconoclasts like Claire Denis, yet even amidst this swirling of unique influences, something emerges that feels entirely new. That Jenkins portraiture, a face in slow-motion framed dead-center in shallow focus, feels possessed of the power to stop time altogether. It feels as if we are only just understanding how seismic an impact this film made.
DIRECTOR: Janicza Bravo
STARS: Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Colman Domingo
RATING: R
“Twitter is not real life,” they say, and yet here’s Zola to prove my straw-man haters wrong. Director Janicza Bravo and screenwriter Jeremy O. Harris find a way to adapt the narrative logic of a viral Twitter thread about one CRAZY Florida weekend into the language of cinema. It’s one of the few films from the social media age to understand how these tools affect the way we experience and recount the events of our lives.
DIRECTOR: Sean Baker
STARS: Brooklynn Prince, Bria Vinaite, Willem Dafoe
RATING: R
Sean Baker discovers we learn about America by looking in the shadow cast by its dream factory in The Florida Project. The film takes place in an Orlando motel just outside of Disney World, a realm of post-Great Recession poverty that stands in stark contrast to the Mouse House’s opulent fantasy world. But don’t expect some kind of gritty, hardscrabble social realism here that looks down on the characters in pity. Baker is clear-eyed about their conditions, but he also tells the story through 7-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), who processes her surroundings like a Little Rascals adventure. It’s all fun and game with the motel kids … until it is most decidedly not, and Baker sure knows how to drop that devastating emotional hammer.
DIRECTOR: Joanna Hogg
STARS: Honor Swinton Byrne, Tilda Swinton, Richard Ayoade
RATING: R
Here’s the Wikipedia page for The Souvenir if you just want to skip to the superior portion of Joanna Hogg’s self-reflexive diptych. The star-crossed romance of the first film comes under the microscope as the protagonist Julie examines the relationship’s impact through her studies as a filmmaker. It’s nothing short of revelatory to watch her work through the raw emotions and then refract them through her art.
DIRECTOR: David Lowery
STARS: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, McColm Cephas Jr.
RATING: R
From an unbroken shot of a grief-stricken Rooney Mara slowly taking down a chocolate pie to an edit that elides centuries of time, one thing is clear about David Lowery’s A Ghost Story: it’s about time. This supernatural tale of a phantasm lurking under a bed sheet with two eye slits (Casey Affleck) engages with the cosmic questions of what our brief existence means in the grand scheme of the universe. To tackle a subject this big, Lowery digs into the tactical details of a single plot of Texan land — examining how our lives are but one link in a chain that precedes us and will extend far beyond us.
DIRECTOR: Jonah Hill
STARS: Sunny Suljic, Katherine Waterston, Lucas Hedges
RATING: R
There’s a physiological response that happens in mid90s when the young Stevie (Sunny Suljic) gets the hang of riding his skateboard down a busy Los Angeles street. Director Jonah Hill begins swelling up the chorus of The Mamas & The Papas’ “Dedicated to the One I Love” to hit right as a skater in full bloom emerges within the frame. It doesn’t only look like that first blossom of freedom we all felt as teenagers coming into our own. It feels like rediscovering that sensation from our own youth, as if uncovering an old memory buried in our brains.
DIRECTOR: James Ponsoldt
STARS: Jason Segel, Jesse Eisenberg, Anna Chlumsky
RATING: R
Whether you’re a true David Foster Wallace enthusiast or that copy of Infinite Jest is still sitting unread on your bedside table, there is something for you in The End of the Tour. It’s an unusual take on the biopic, focusing on the acclaimed author (portrayed by Jason Segel) at a moment of unusual vulnerability as the press cycle for his magnum opus comes to a close. As he’s proved by the slightly jealous journalist profiling him (Jesse Eisenberg), both men’s writerly insecurities emerge unexpectedly. While their journey stops short of catharsis, there’s some value in their twinned realizations that their observational prowess does not always extend to their own selves.
DIRECTOR: David Michôd
STARS: Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson, Scoot McNairy
RATING: R
The bleak, unsparing terrain of the Australian outback has made for many a wild adventure on-screen. But few find such similarly barren terrain inside their characters like David Michôd’s The Rover. This dystopian road movie follows a stoic loner (Guy Pearce) as he hunts down the men who stole his car … with a little help from a simple American southerner (Robert Pattinson, delivering the first of many transformative performances under the A24 banner). If you find yourself wondering why on earth a man feels such a violent urge to regain his vehicle, wait until the simultaneously underwhelming and overwhelming ending to find out why. It will all make sense.
DIRECTORS: Daniel Scheinert, Daniel Kwan
STARS: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, James Hong
RATING: R
There should just be no more multiverse movies after Everything Everywhere All at Once dropped the mic. The Daniels’ Best Picture-winning triumph lives up to its title by corraling a maelstrom of cinematic energy into a genre-defying package. Yet amidst all the inventiveness and imagination, they never lose sight of the sweet immigrant mother-daughter story at its core. It might sound like a clichéd concept to center a film around the idea that love can connect the universe, but the Daniels earn their right to earnestness.
DIRECTOR: Andrew Haigh
STARS: Charlie Plummer, Chloë Sevigny, Travis Fimmel
RATING: R
Have those tissues ready for Lean on Pete. This tender tale of the young Charley (a devastating Charlie Plummer in a breakout performance) just looking for anything he can call his own in the world is a real heartbreaker. The bond he shares with the titular horse represents the rare piece of purity amidst the backdrop of a ruggedly individualistic Pacific Northwest landscape. Take a guess what happens to Lean on Pete, and then saddle up anyways for this achingly beautiful movie.
DIRECTOR: Sofia Coppola
STARS: Katie Chang, Israel Broussard, Emma Watson
RATING: R
Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring deserves a full reappraisal. The audience receiving her 2013 chronicle of fame-obsessed teens who robbed Hollywood celebrities was simply not ready. The film fictionalizes real events, but Coppola writes about the past in the present tense. This is not a story that is done. We’re still living in the world of commodity envy and lazy clout-chasing that the film’s subjects epitomized.
DIRECTOR: Mike Mills
STARS: Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig
RATING: R
Many movies can have smarts. Possessing wisdom takes a special class, and Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women has that in spades. This ‘70s-set tale of an adolescent boy learning to be a man as women of all ages raise him is an intergenerational wonder. Anything the characters learn about themselves and the world gets humbled by the film’s omniscient narration about all the things they do not — and cannot — know. But that’s not meant to be scary to the characters or the audience. Rather, it’s an invitation to love all the more deeply from whatever small vantage point on the world we do have.
DIRECTOR: Robert Eggers
STARS: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe
RATING: R
Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse makes a convincing case for why you can’t just leave two men alone together and trust everything will be fine. Two 19th-century lighthouse keepers, the experienced Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and the neophyte Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), descend into an abject madness fueled by jealousy and cabin fever. It’s a horrifying journey toward insanity with shadings of hilariousness and horniness that make for one wicked storm of fear and fun.
DIRECTOR: Asif Kapadia
STARS: Amy Winehouse, Mark Ronson, Mitch Winehouse
RATING: R
Asif Kapadia’s empathetic memorial to the late Amy Winehouse is the cure for the common talking head biodoc. Amy is not only the story of the great singer-songwriter taken from us too soon at just 27 years old. It’s the tale of a world that created the conditions that drove her despair-riddled verses, devoured her work, and then devoured her. You’ll come away awed by Winehouse’s prodigious rise and implicated in her downfall.
DIRECTOR: Bo Burnham
STARS: Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Emily Robinson
RATING: R
Euphoria, hold Eighth Grade’s retainer. Bo Burnham’s tale of middle school is far scarier and more dramatic than anything because it feels so real. That’s not to say this chronicle of adolescent awkwardness is some kind of cinema verité project. Burnham’s filmmaking language just makes it feel as momentous as it does to be that age. Especially given the dearth of films set between childhood and teenage years, it’s an act of radical empathy to give this age group the spotlight — even if it does make their braces and acne all the more visible.
DIRECTOR: Jonathan Glazer
STARS: Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy McWilliams, Lynsey Taylor Mackay
RATING: R
“I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a film where it’s changed so much over the course of getting to know it,” Knives Out director Rian Johnson said of his love of Under the Skin, “so this is very unique in that regard.” Jonathan Glazer’s singular sci-fi tale may well be one of the most quietly influential movies of the past decade. The stark formalism of this tale of an unnamed alien being played by Scarlett Johansson raises potent questions about what makes us human. Add in the other-worldly score by Mica Levi, and Glazer concocts an experience that gets exactly where its title says.
DIRECTOR: Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie
STARS: Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Taliah Webster
RATING: R
By this point, Robert Pattinson is basically the bard of A24, and he’s never been better than he is in the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time. As Connie, a schmoozing con artist who never met a situation he couldn’t wriggle out of, Pattinson has never been more slippery or scintillating a presence on the screen. The film derives its propulsive energy from a madcap New York night as Connie seeks to secure the funds to spring his brother Nick (Benny Safdie) from Rikers after a stick-up gone south. Though it’s easy to lose sight of the film’s subtle message during the adrenaline rush, watch out for who ultimately faces consequences at each turn.
DIRECTOR: Paul Schrader
STARS: Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric the Entertainer
RATING: R
Terms like “urgent” or “the movie we need right now” are often lazily applied as hyperbole for pull quotes … when they really should be describing Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. This effortless bridging of classical cinema to contemporary issues brings back the filmmaker’s favorite trope: the danger of a man alone in a room with his thoughts. Here, that’s Ethan Hawke as the tortured Reverend Ernst Toller, a man whose conviction in God’s ultimate mercy begins to slip as he witnesses the destruction of the planet before him. When he puts “Will God Forgive Us?” on his church marquee, it’s clear that Schrader is not going to give us any answer — nor should he in a film that grapples with the thorniness of divinity and damnation.
DIRECTOR: Yorgos Lanthimos
STARS: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Jessica Barden
RATING: R
The so-called “Greek Weird Wave” reached its absolute peak with Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, a satire of singleness and courtship rituals that is both pitch-black and pitch-perfect. The warped worlds of the film’s complementary halves — a hotel where uncoupled people must mate in 45 days or be turned into an animal, a forest where escaped singles plot sabotage — feel like places that could only occur in the twisted minds of Lanthimos and co-writer Efthimis Filippou. And yet the film resonates precisely because they are but a funhouse mirror of how our own society’s absurdities that we accept as normal. The film’s open-ended conclusion serves as one of the best litmus tests for how someone views love, so be sure to watch it with someone near and dear to your heart!
DIRECTOR: Andrea Arnold
STARS: Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, Riley Keough
RATING: R
The end credits of American Honey just list off the names of everyone involved, with no indication of rank or role among the group. It’s the perfect cherry on top of a thoroughly egalitarian work of art, one that follows how a lost protagonist — named Star, no less — absorbs herself into a community (and capitalism) in the American heartland. Andrea Arnold’s effortlessly naturalistic epic of the everyday takes its audience on an observational yet absorbing journey along with its characters. As they discover the country and their own group dynamics, so does Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s camera. It’s nothing short of soul-stirring to breathe in her poetry.
DIRECTOR: Greta Gerwig
STARS: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Tracy Letts
RATING: R
Last year, I took to Decider to make the case that you should watch Lady Bird every Thanksgiving due both to a scene set at the holiday and its general spirit of gratitude. Now, I’m here to make the modest proposal that you should just watch Greta Gerwig’s instant coming-of-age classic every day. Why not? In these tight 90 minutes, you get the full spectrum of emotion in tears — of laughter, of joy, of loss — all delivered with the utmost sincerity. While this film’s modest aims and unobtrusive composition might make it seem simple, further viewings only reinforce just how much thought goes into every single choice so it feels honest and heartfelt. It may very well be a perfect movie, not only for its immaculate construction on screen but for the genuine grace Gerwig inspires in the world through all who watch the film.
DIRECTOR: Harmony Korine
STARS: Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, James Franco
RATING: R
Since my first piece in Decider over five years ago, my bio has closed with the statement “Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.” The time is NOW. A24’s first cinematic sensation deserves to be the emblem of the company’s footprint on our culture. It’s a genuinely playful yet provocative film that isn’t afraid to both indulge and critique the ethos of a generation of young people who flock to catch the studio’s latest release. Harmony Korine’s elliptically edited millennial masterpiece manages to float in a liminal state between the drunken debauchery of the “spring break” mindset and delusional daydreams of America’s dark twisted fantasies. It’s still edgy, exciting, and energizing to watch Korine develop a language of his own to portray the youthful energy that has powered this brand for over a decade of excellence. SPRANG BREAK FOREVA!
