65Therapy Dogs
The senior year experience chronicled by Ethan Eng in Therapy Dogs is far from extraordinary. Eng and his fellow small town Canadian teenagers are reckless, bored, awkward, and full of boundless energy. To entertain themselves they attack lockers, hang from car roofs as they drift in parking lots, and climb up a tall water tower. But in the process, Eng subtly interrogates his cohort’s budding masculinity, and paints a vivid, often exhilarating portrait of what it is to be young now—both how it’s unique to this moment and just like any other time.
64Waiting For the Light to Change
Linh Tran's debut feature—which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Slamdance—is set at a Michigan lake house. It’s winter, and a group of five 20-somethings—some of whom are old friends—are there for a weeklong vacation. It’s a quiet movie built on mini-dramas that feel big to the people involved. Tran, who is quite gifted at blocking, captures it all with poise and patience, finding beauty in all the fog.
63Hannah Ha Ha
Not much happens in Hannah Ha Ha, the microbudget debut from filmmakers Joshua Pikovsky and Jordan Tetewsky. Hannah (Hannah Lee Thompson), 25 and aimless, spends her summer days working on the family farm, biking around, and giving guitar lessons to children. When her ambitious brother (Roger Mancusi) comes to visit, he urges her to strive for more, and she’s left navigating what she wants with her life. But the film, shot through a hazy, impressionistic filter, is exceptionally rich sensorially, evoking the smoky smell of evening bonfires, the sticky sweat induced by the thick New England air, and the bright chirp emanating from the green trees. It’s the sort of film that lingers after you’ve seen it, like a memory that could be your own.
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62Huesera: The Bone Woman
There have been a lot of Rosemary’s Baby-inspired pregnancy thrillers in recent years, some interrogating popular notions of motherhood and others flipping the script and putting the baby bump on a man. And of all these films, Huesera: The Bone Woman, the snap-cracking, bone-chilling debut from Mexican director Michelle Garza Cervera, may be the best. Garza Cervera captures the bodily horror and gendered double standards of pregnancy without veering overly didactic. Her tale is inspired by Mexican mythology, and it brims with evocative imagery, potent surreality, and gripping tension.
61A Still Small Voice
Luke Lorentzen’s portrait of an aspiring hospital chaplain and her advisor foregrounds the toll of truly giving oneself to the service of others. In scenes with patients and their families, Mati, the chaplain-in-training, is calm, warm, and helpful. But in meetings with her advisor—and similarly in his meetings with his advisor—we see her strain against the vulnerability and burnout. It’s a moving look at the inner life and day to day work of people exposed to death and pain on a regular basis.
60Jethica
The bulk of the press around Pete Ohs’s Jethica revolves around the sheer accomplishment of the movie. Ohs has pioneered a filmmaking method in which he acts as his entire crew, allowing him to make aesthetically dynamic features for less money than most shorts (the bill for Jethica was $10K). But as with Ohs’s previous film working in this style, 2021’s Youngstown, you don’t need to grade Jethica on a curve to enjoy it. The film is a stylish New Mexico-set comic noir about a woman who is haunted by the ghost of her stalker. Ohs brings to the film both the playful spirit of a home movie and the rigor and eye of an auteur. He collaborated on the story with his small cast, and they take the film in several surprising directions, with Will Madden (as Kevin) giving an especially standout performance.
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59Magic Mike's Last Dance
Like Ocean’s 13, Magic Mike’s third and final chapter may not be the franchise’s best, but the general tepid response probably has less to do with the movie itself than the incredibly high bar set by the first two installments. In Last Dance, Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) is retired from dancing and earning a living bartending at high-end parties—that is, until he meets Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault), a rich dilettante who, after procuring Mike’s steamy services, hires him to come to London and put on an extravagant show at a historic theater. The film has its moments as a love story. But it’s at its best as a movie about the artistic process and the complications that arise when making art relies on a wealthy, mercurial benefactor.
58Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part I
The first edition of the seventh Mission Impossible movie is not the franchise’s best. Like all of these movies, it is too long, treats Ethan Hunt’s love interests as comically interchangeable, and is often logically suspect. It also doesn’t quite achieve the enduring suspense of Rogue Nation or Fallout. But what it does do is send Tom Cruise motorcycling off a cliff to catch a moving train, which is among the thrilling action set pieces that make watching this MI a great way to spend a scorching summer afternoon.
57Fallen Leaves
Aki Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves is a decidedly unromantic romance between two struggling blue-collar workers in Finland. The environs are gloomy. The news on the radio is devastating. And there’s a lot of drinking going on. But at least Jim Jarmusch’s 2019 zombie movie, The Dead Don’t Die, is showing at the local cinema. That choice is but one amusing wink fans of the Finnish filmmaker will eat up. The movie on the whole is short, slight, and immensely dry—but charming, and even life-affirming, nonetheless.
In theaters
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56Orlando My Political Biography
In Orlando: My Political Biography, Spanish-born philosopher and activist Paul B. Preciado filters different peoples’ nonbinary and trans experience through Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando, intriguingly, and often lightly, reinterpreting and expanding the scope of the book. The stories we hear—both personal and lifted from the novel—cast individuals’ experience as part of a larger collective narrative while maintaining their specificity.
55Mutt
Over the course of one sweltering summer day in New York City, Feña (Lío Mehiel), a young trans man, is taken on a meandering journey through the city and their pre-transition past as they’re visited by three different people with whom they have a complex history. It’s a more interesting emotional voyage than a geographical one, but director Vuk Lungulov-Klotz and cinematographer Matthew Pothier make Feña’s New York into a vibrant and lived-in supporting character nonetheless.
54American Fiction
Accomplished TV writer Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut weaves together an intimate family drama and biting satire about race and the publishing industry. The two pieces often fit better theoretically than practically. But when it’s working, American Fiction is incisive, touching, and very funny.
In theaters
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53Talk to Me
Danny and Michael Philippou–better known around the Internet as RackaRacka–have crafted the latest A24 horror sensation, with their viral spirit conjuring nightmare, Talk to Me. The film plays with a lot of familiar contemporary horror tropes–even nodding to Get Out–but also pulls deeply from the Philippou brothers’ personal fears, traumas, and Australian upbringing. It’s that specificity, coupled with its vicious, unrelenting energy, that won me over.
52Reality
In 2018, when it was reported that Reality Winner, a 26 year-old Air Force linguist and intelligence contractor, had been sentenced to five years and three months of prison time for leaking a classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election, her case was notable. Winner's sentence was the longest ever imposed in federal court for a leak of government information to the media. Aside from her remarkable name, though, Winner’s story didn’t seem obviously cinematic. But in adapting the transcript of Winner’s FBI interrogation, writer-director Tina Satter–who initially brought the story to the stage–has made a film that manages to be gripping and tense while also feeling mundane and true. In this condensed peek at Winner, you get a sense of her character, motivations, and how the FBI lulled her into confessing. Sydney Sweeney gives a fantastically subtle performance as Winner. Plus, Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis are equally good as a pair of disarmingly affable FBI agents.
51The Pigeon Tunnel
David Cornwell, better known as the late, great spy novelist John le Carré, was famous for extending his fictions beyond his books, and into press appearances. So, you’re never quite sure what’s true and what isn’t in Errol Morris’s new documentary, which finds Morris interviewing the author about his life and work over the course of four days in 2019. The film is built around the themes of deception, betrayal, and performance. Though some may watch it with an eye towards the chess match between interviewer and interviewee, Le Carré is such a captivating and convincing storyteller that I was content to lower my guard and listen. Here, at least, there’s satisfaction in being a dupe.
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50All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Raven Jackson’s debut is an exquisitely evocative and poetic memory piece, set in rural Mississippi, and centered around Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson). Through its intimate cinematography and detailed sound design, the film finds poignancy in small gestures and the generational repetition of rituals.
49Skinamarink
Part of the magic of Kyle Edward Ball’s feature debut is how it manages to feel both fresh and nostalgic. Another part: its slow pace and fuzzy white noise threatens to lure you to sleep, while its dimly glimmering nighttime perspective on a suburban home is the stuff of (millennial) childhood nightmares. Ball has a gift for framing, and is clearly fluent in translating analog horror to the digital age. No wonder his film has been such a viral sensation.
48Close
Perhaps it’s because of his approach to collaboration that Lukas Dhont is able to so evocatively capture the amplified feelings of early adolescence. Dhont is a keen observer of the way children are socialized out of their early emotional abandon. When 13-year-old best friends Léo and Rémi enter a new year of school, their intimate bond is broken by the growing awareness of how their outward affection is perceived by their peers. Friction mounts, and without the words or self-awareness to address what they’re each feeling, their relationship meets tragic ends. The stomach-hollowing guilt that mingles with grief isn’t shocking; but rather, its power resides in the ways it feels achingly familiar.
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47Our Father, The Devil
Ellie Foumbi’s feature debut, Our Father, the Devil, is a French-set drama about an African refugee’s encounter with a Catholic priest who she believes to be a warlord who slaughtered her family. Yeah, heavy stuff. But Foumbi pulls it off—on a miniscule budget, mind you—by leaning into the complexity with immense sensitivity, empathy, and passion.
46The Adults
When Michael Cera’s Eric returns to his very gray upstate New York hometown, his plan to limit his time with his two siblings is thwarted by his compulsion to be the best poker player around. As his stay lengthens, he’s forced to confront the strain in his relationship with his sister Rachel (an outstanding Hannah Gross) and the hurt his absence has caused his other sister, Maggie (Sophia Lillis, ditto). Writer-director Dustin Guy Deffa isn’t revolutionizing the sibling drama by any means, but his characters are so specific, funny, and sad, that you’ll want to ante up.
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