Long-form critic reviews, festival coverage, and film essays from our editorial team.
★★★★☆
Letitia Wright anchors Frank Berry's quietly devastating drama about a young Nigerian woman caught in Ireland's immigration limbo for years.
Humane, patient, and quietly enraging.
★★★★★
Kapadia's Cannes Grand Prize winner maps three Mumbai nurses' loneliness with tender precision—a landmark of working-class Indian cinema.
Essential viewing for anyone who believes cinema can hold ordinary lives with grace.
★★★★☆
Shiori Ito turns her own camera on her years-long fight for justice in Japan — raw, urgent, and impossible to look away from.
Essential documentary filmmaking.
★★★★½
Assembled from two decades of Jia Zhangke's own footage, this drifting portrait of love and displacement finds Tao Zhao aging alongside a nation in flux.
Essential viewing for anyone who believes cinema can hold time.
★★★★★
Ryan White documents poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley facing terminal illness with humor and unguarded affection—earned tears, not sentiment.
The year's most honest love story is a documentary.
★★★★½
Mark Obenhaus traces Seymour Hersh's decades of unwelcome scoops in a documentary that doubles as a masterclass in why dogged reporting still matters.
Essential for anyone who cares about truth in an age of noise.
★★★★★
DiMarco reconstructs the 1988 Gallaudet protests with formal inventiveness that puts deaf perspective at the center of its own historic telling.
Essential history, told with the urgency it deserves.
★★★★★
Lund stretches one last amateur ballgame into a shaggy elegy for small-town ritual, finding poignancy in the sport's dead time and enduring friendships.
Patient, shaggy, and unexpectedly moving — if you meet it on its own clock.
★★★★½
Kathleen Chalfant brings devastating specificity to Sarah Friedland's unhurried drama about a retired cook adjusting to life in memory care.
Quiet, humane, and deeply affecting.
★★★★☆
A grieving woman and an abandoned boy find each other in a black-and-white Mexico City chamber piece that earns its tears without ever reaching for them.
Small, sincere, and quietly devastating.
★★★★☆
Gints Zilbalodis's Latvian cat-survival fable proves dialogue is optional when every frame carries this much beauty and feeling.
The best animated film you haven't seen yet — until now.
★★★★☆
An anthology stitched from short films by Gazan filmmakers under bombardment — shifting tones that no single narrative could capture.
Essential, difficult, and urgently necessary.
★★★★☆
Kelly O'Sullivan's Chicago drama turns a real family cast into something rare — a grief story that earns its Shakespeare without a single false note.
Certified Fresh and deeply human.
★★★★★
Talati turns a Himalayan boarding-school romance into a sly study of inherited shame, with a mother-daughter rivalry that gives the genre real teeth.
The coming-of-age film India needed — sharp, sensual, and unsparing.
★★★½☆
India Donaldson's piercing debut turns a Catskills backpacking trip into a quiet study of how fathers fail their daughters.
A sharp debut that splits audiences and rewards patience.
★★★★½
Neo Sora's 175-minute Tokyo drama threads surveillance-state anxiety through a loose friendship story that builds political fury sideways.
Patient, prickly, and urgently of-the-moment.
★★★★☆
Azazel Jacobs traps Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, and Carrie Coon in a dying father's apartment — and the claustrophobia is the whole point.
Ensemble drama at its most precise.
★★★★☆
Louise Courvoisier finds unexpected sweetness in a teenager's clumsy attempt to hold his family together after his father's death.
A gentle French masterwork hiding in plain sight.
★★★★★
Jafar Panahi transforms a chance encounter into a tense moral interrogation of state cruelty, channeling his imprisonment into pure narrative tension.
A masterpiece of political cinema that argues through suspense.
★★★½☆
Amy Berg's intimate portrait of Jeff Buckley's brief, restless career mourns without wallowing, anchored by home recordings and unguarded interviews.
The definitive Buckley documentary — finally.
★★★½☆
Shane Atkinson wrings dark comedy from mistaken identity, with John Magaro's hapless lead giving LaRoy, Texas the jittery energy of small-town noir.
Modest but sharply entertaining indie noir.
★★★★☆
David Dastmalchian's unhinged talk-show host and a retro broadcast frame give familiar possession scares a genuinely unsettling new angle.
Smart, stylish, and finally terrifying.
★★★★☆
Shih-Ching Tsou observes a fractured Taipei family with documentary-like patience, making small betrayals sting in the neon bustle of a night market.
A modest, piercing drama that rewards attention.
★★★½☆
Leela Varghese's gleefully lo-fi animated romp turns a breakup rescue mission into giddy sci-fi comedy that never outruns its sincerity.
Messy, horny, sincere — and proudly so.
★★★★½
Maïlys Vallade adapts Amélie Nothomb's novel into animated childhood wonder — Loïse Charpentier's Amélie carries weighty ideas about identity with open eyes.
Tender, vivid, and surprisingly deep.
★★★½☆
Urška Djukić sets a shy teenager's first stirrings of desire against a convent choir retreat — piety and longing in quiet friction.
A quietly charged Slovenian coming-of-age gem.
★★★½☆
Andrew Legge's found-footage WWII sci-fi asks what two sisters would do with a radio that hears tomorrow — and the answer turns alarming.
Inventive, chilly, and divisive in the best way.
★★★★☆
Shoshannah Stern's insider portrait lets Marlee Matlin speak for herself, avoiding hagiography while honoring a groundbreaking career.
Essential viewing on Deaf representation and resilience.
★★★½☆
Mike Figgis turns Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis gamble into a riveting study of creative hubris and self-financed ambition.
Essential for anyone who cares how movies get made.
★★★★☆
The Minions crash a monster-movie lot in the year's most affectionate animated comedy — funny, fast, and surprisingly sincere about classic Hollywood craft.
The best Minions movie since the original — ideal family viewing with genuine cinephile Easter eggs.
★★★½☆
Michael Lukk Litwak's lo-fi cosmic rom-com proves charm beats budget, though its 175-minute sprawl tests even patient viewers.
Inventive, uneven, and genuinely romantic.
★★★★½
Lee Byung-hun gleefully unravels as a laid-off company man in Park Chan-wook's pitch-black comedy — unemployment anxiety turned into a musical nightmare.
Dark, daring, and darkly funny.
★★★★★
Pasolini resists melodrama, trusting Norton's tender performance to carry a dying father's impossible search for his son's future family.
A weepie that earns every tear through restraint.
★★★★★
Nyoni folds dark family secrets into wry, surreal Zambian funeral satire—confirming her gift for finding pointed comedy inside grief.
A bold, uncomfortable, and brilliantly controlled second feature.
★★★★☆
Pablo Berger's silent animated gem about a dog and his robot companion says more about friendship and loss than most films manage with dialogue.
A modern animated classic — bring tissues.
★★★★★
Goswami anchors Suri's tense police procedural, using a rural murder case to expose the caste and gender fault lines running through India's system.
A procedural that understands justice and power are never the same thing.
★★★★☆
Jeremy Workman turns an absurd Rhode Island squat into a sharp, affectionate critique of consumerist sprawl and DIY ingenuity.
Funny, smart, and sneakily subversive.
★★★★☆
Greg Kwedar's prison theater drama pairs Colman Domingo's career-defining turn with formerly incarcerated actors playing versions of themselves.
A rare film where authenticity earns every tear.
★★★★☆
Karan Kandhari's debut swerves from deadpan marital comedy into feral horror, powered by Radhika Apte's fearless, ferocious lead performance.
Messy, divisive, and impossible to forget.
★★★★★
Lojkine follows a delivery cyclist's frantic asylum deadline with urgent handheld immediacy, turning bureaucratic dread into pure cinematic tension.
A thriller where the clock is immigration policy — and it never stops ticking.
★★★½☆
François Ozon's 1930s murder farce pairs gorgeous production design with Isabelle Huppert in scene-stealing form — frothy, fun, and slightly slight.
Stylish entertainment that critics prefer to audiences.
★★★★½
Cédric Kahn confines nearly all the drama to one Paris courtroom, and Arieh Worthalter's combustible Pierre Goldman never lets the grip loosen.
Tense, talky, and riveting.
★★★★½
Geeta Gandbhir assembles bodycam and interrogation footage into a slow-burning indictment of Florida's stand your ground culture without ever raising its voice.
Devastating true-crime cinema with civic urgency.
★★★★★
Charlie Polinger transforms a 2003 swim camp into a nightmare of cruelty and shame — Joel Edgerton anchors a debut that critics call near-perfect.
Queasy, precise, and unforgettable.
★★★★½
Nikolaj Arcel mounts a frontier saga on the Danish heath with Mads Mikkelsen at its center — weathered, quiet, and impossible to look away from.
Handsome, classical, and crowd-pleasing.
★★★★★
Kleber Mendonça Filho folds pulpy genre thrills into a pointed reckoning with Brazil's dictatorship years, anchored by Wagner Moura's haunted performance.
A sprawling political thriller that earns its ambitions.
★★★★½
Christopher Sanders' adaptation of Peter Brown's novel pairs lush animation with Lupita Nyong'o's voice work in a survival story that earns every tear.
Essential family viewing — a modern animated masterpiece.
★★★★☆
Josh Margolin's scam-fueled action-comedy gives June Squibb a rare starring turn — and she plays every stunt for real emotional stakes.
A crowd-pleaser with genuine heart.
★★★★☆
Mahdi Fleifel follows two cousins scrambling for fake passports in Athens — Mahmoud Bakri and Aram Sabbagh make every reckless choice feel dangerously plausible.
Tense, lived-in, and morally complex.
★★★★½
Minh Quý Trương's nearly three-hour debut turns a Vietnamese coal-mine romance into a hazy, achingly patient study of tenderness under pressure.
A festival discovery that rewards stillness.
★★★★½
Joel Potrykus turns a Michigan-woods suicide pact into deadpan comedy that collapses into genuine grief — shoestring craft, full-strength devastation.
Bleak, funny, and finally heartbreaking.
★★★★★
Park and Crossingham needle smart-home gadgetry and AI anxieties without losing stop-motion's cozy handmade charm—Wallace and Gromit still deliver.
The year's best family film is also its smartest tech satire.
★★★½☆
The franchise's billed farewell trades a bit of shock value for genuine affection between its aging daredevils.
A scrappy, sentimental victory lap.
★★½☆☆
Akshay Kumar and Suniel Shetty's comic rapport is the one consistent pleasure in an otherwise overstuffed action-comedy.
Fun in flashes, exhausting overall.
★★★½☆
Nirina Zubir anchors a family drama about elderly abandonment that trades melodrama for something quieter and, mostly, more devastating.
Moving, if occasionally overstuffed.
★★½☆☆
Scott Eastwood carries a WWII survival story that's well-made but rarely surprising.
Solid craft, generic story.
★★★★½
Olivia Wilde's English-language remake turns one noisy apartment building into a showcase for four actors at the top of their game.
Sharp, uncomfortable, and very funny.
★★☆☆☆
A likable cast can't rescue a spiritual sequel that recycles its predecessor's love-triangle setup without any of the freshness.
Committed leads, thin material.
★★★★☆
A tender queer romance and a genuinely inventive horror hook make this Sundance breakout one of the year's sharpest debuts.
A striking, angry, tender debut.
★★★★☆
A stacked ensemble cast carries a sci-fi thriller more interested in fallout and control than spectacle.
Tense, deliberate, and well-acted.
★★★☆☆
Diego Luna is magnetic as the fixer who talked Mexico into hosting the 1986 World Cup, but the satire pulls its punches right when it should dig in.
Fun, fast, and a little too polite.
★★★☆☆
The gang from Mount Madyopuro returns for a sequel that's warmer and more polished than the original, even if it rarely surprises.
Familiar, but reliably fun.
★★★★½
Markus Schleinzer's black-and-white Thirty Years' War drama is a masterclass in control, led by a career-best performance from Sandra Hüller.
Austere, immaculate, quietly devastating.
★★★½☆
A notorious prison becomes a pressure cooker of gore, gallows humor, and institutional rot in Joko Anwar's most purely entertaining film in years.
Splattery, savage, and a lot of fun.
★★★☆☆
Anna Roller's adaptation of Leif Randt's beloved novel is a stylish but uneven portrait of a couple who talk more like a manifesto than two people in love.
Handsome but curiously airless.
★★☆☆☆
Iyabo Ojo's long-awaited sequel reunites a starry cast but can't decide if it's a thriller, a political drama, or a spiritual parable.
Overstuffed and unfocused
★½☆☆☆
A promising Anatolian folk-horror premise about a djinn-communing healer collapses under flat pacing and cut-rate scares.
Interesting folklore, forgettable execution.
★★½☆☆
Vedat İnceefe's committed performance can't fully rescue a period drama that flinches at the hardest questions about its notorious real-life subject.
Well-mounted, but morally evasive.
★½☆☆☆
A serial-killer thriller with real ideas about the roots of violence gets buried under a wildly inconsistent villain performance and a script that can't support its ambitions.
Interesting premise, sloppy execution.
★★★★☆
A three-years-unemployed man's race to prove himself before his family's Eid gathering turns into one of the year's most quietly honest comedies.
Funny, sincere, and uncomfortably relatable.
★★½☆☆
Prilly Latuconsina's farewell to Risa Saraswati delivers scattered scares but buckles under four films' worth of ghost lore.
Nostalgic, but narratively overstuffed.
★★½☆☆
Angelique Boyer and Bárbara de Regil turn a formulaic revenge-comedy premise into one of the year's biggest Mexican box-office draws.
Predictable, but the leads make it work.
★★★★☆
İlker Çatak follows The Teachers' Lounge with a Golden Bear-winning drama about a Turkish artist couple crushed by state retaliation.
Urgent, gripping, occasionally overextended.
★★½☆☆
Omar Chaparro trades comedy for combat in a revenge thriller with genuinely first-rate action and a script that can't keep pace with it.
Spectacular stunts, thin story.
★★★★☆
Valerie Pachner delivers a devastating performance in this unflinching, autobiographical Berlinale drama about surviving unimaginable loss.
A gutting, unsentimental portrait of grief.
★★☆☆☆
Ludwika Paleta and Juanpa Zurita are game, but this age-gap romance sequel mistakes manufactured jealousy for genuine conflict.
Thin conflicts, thinner insight.
★★★★☆
Didem İnselel anchors a patient, quietly devastating drama about a disappearance that forces one family to reckon with years of unspoken resentment.
Restrained, aching, deeply humane.
★★½☆☆
A forbidden 1975 romance between an Igbo teacher and a Northern officer aims for reconciliation but settles for tidiness.
Well-acted, historically timid
★½☆☆☆
A divorced couple's fake-vacation premise has real comic potential that this formulaic sequel mostly leaves on the table.
Familiar, forgettable, occasionally funny.
★★★★☆
Olive Nwosu's Sundance-winning debut turns a Lagos cab driver's late nights into a vivid study of friendship, survival, and self-invention.
A confident, textured debut
★★☆☆☆
A magical age-swap premise set among the ruins of Ephesus can't quite justify its own running time.
Cute idea, thin execution.
★★☆☆☆
A promising folklore premise about Central Java's most feared stretch of road gets buried under too many competing ideas.
Atmospheric setup, muddled follow-through.
★★☆☆☆
A time-travel gimmick can't disguise that this family spy franchise has nothing new left to do.
Kids might enjoy it; everyone else can skip it.
★★½☆☆
Funke Akindele's record-breaking family drama connects with audiences even as its glossy staging and telegraphed twists frustrate critics.
Crowd-pleasing but creatively cautious
★★★½☆
Daniel Etim Effiong's directing debut turns a wedding-day abduction into an uncomfortably real portrait of Nigeria's kidnapping crisis.
Tense and timely, if overstuffed
★★★★½
A single day in 1993 Lagos becomes a devastating portrait of fatherhood, memory, and a nation on edge.
A near-perfect debut
★★★☆☆
Luna Wedler anchors a sincere but overly tidy adaptation of Caroline Wahl's beloved sisters-and-swimming-pools novel.
Earnest, well-acted, a bit too neat.
★★★★½
Mascha Schilinski's Cannes Jury Prize winner braids four generations of girlhood into one haunting, formally daring German epic.
A staggering generational achievement.