The best movies of 2023 come as the film industry faces dire times. Studios are consolidating, merging and writing off whatever artworks they can in order to better skirt tax laws. IP movies flood the theaters and clog up the creative arteries of up-and-coming filmmakers. Superheroes are losing their powers but those behind the scenes have already invested everything they’ve got in their eternal success. Workers needed to strike against endless injustices dealt by those at the top. The movie business has always been a business, but it’s also rarely been this bad at hiding it. But despite the crass capitalism now running around completely maskless, up and down the theater aisles like a tween at an Eras Tour screening, the movies persisted. Some have miraculously operated around the edges of these profit-hungry demands; others faced them head-on and managed to excel while doing so. Barbie, Spider-Man and Keanu Reeves, shooting everyone he’s ever met in the head, led movies that have no business being as good as they are. The cinema of 2023 boasted ecoterrorism, sex work, chaotic bisexuals, gourmet food, white guilt, atomic terror and countless aging masters looking back on what they’ve spent their lives on. The best movies of the year were the best despite it all — and that makes us all the more lucky to have them.
Here are the 50 best movies of 2023:
50. Close to Vermeer
While Johannes Vermeer, the Dutch baroque master who painted some 30-odd works during his career, is generally considered an enigmatic figure in the art world, curators and experts have nonetheless dedicated their entire careers to evaluating his comparatively limited oeuvre. Thus, Gregor Weber, a highly-regarded expert on the artist, considers the “crown jewel” of his career to be overseeing the largest and most encompassing Vermeer exhibit ever at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The planning and execution of this Vermeer retrospective is the focus of Suzanne Raes’s documentary Close to Vermeer, which unfurls into an engrossing 79-minute exploration of the experts, museums and debates that continue to engage with the artist and his legacy. Just a year away from retirement, Weber embarks on a quest to acquire as many Vermeer paintings as possible for the swiftly-approaching exhibit. Despite being a Dutch artistic icon, many of Vermeer’s works – including recognizable artworks The Milkmaid and The Art of Painting – are currently (and perhaps forever destined to be) part of permanent collections at foreign museums. As such, he and several Rijksmuseum colleagues, including fellow Vermeer historian Pieter Roelofs, attempt to secure loans of those paintings. They travel to The Frick and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Germany’s Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum and even the neighboring Dutch Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. When able to secure pieces for the exhibit, researcher and conservator Anna Krekeler puts them under her microscope and relishes in the details of Vermeer’s brushwork up-close. Though much of the doc’s beauty clearly stems from the gorgeous details inherent to the 17th century artist’s motifs, the overall momentum of the film is driven by art-world politics that typically don’t filter down into public consciousness. For example, a standoff of sorts develops when American researchers decide to disavow a work long considered to be an authentic Vermeer due to the predominance of a green hue in a subject’s flesh tone. Weber contests this finding – but is it due to genuine scholarly disagreement, or because he’s down to the wire in terms of making decisions for the Rijksmuseum exhibit? Pleasant and contemplative, Close to Vermeer chronicles an exhibit of a master that both civilians and historians know startlingly little about, considering the profound impact he’s had on the craft of painting.–Natalia Keogan
49. Reality
A formal wonder, Reality works its way through the government transcript kept when a pair of FBI agents (and then more and more officials) confronted, then interrogated, NSA translator Reality Winner. Sydney Sweeney’s aw-shucks portrayal of Winner, who leaked U.S. intelligence about Russian election interference to The Intercept, ebbs and flows alongside our own conception of her. Is she innocent or guilty? That’s the wrong question, regardless of your politics. Did she have convictions, or was she just frustrated and naïve? What combination of these qualities can lead to the brave, stupid, simple act that got her locked up — and would we all be tempted, in her situation? Sweeney’s deft, ever-evolving performance is grounded in everything the FBI bothered to transcribe (and didn’t bother to redact), peeling back layers and building up more in accordance with the situation’s unravelling. The two agents who play her foils (Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis, both fantastic) engage in similarly shifting and shifty tactics to gain her trust and, hopefully, her confession. Filmmaker Tina Satter makes her debut adapting her own stage version of this concept, sticking to her “everything’s in the transcript,” verbatim theatre approach while coaxing performances from her leads that’re far beyond simple words in a dry document. Satter’s camera gets unnervingly closer as the noose tightens around Winner, while a few flourishes make redactions into parts of the text. It’s an extraordinary piece of docufiction, compellingly assembled to pose potent questions amid deceptive, predatory bureaucracy.–Jacob Oller
48. In the Rearview
A heartwrenching war documentary with the camera squarely facing the civilians affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, In the Rearview finds humanity and heroism intertwined with mundane senselessness. The debut from Maciek Hamela, the film observes his evacuation efforts: He’s a man with a van, shuttling Ukrainian refugees displaced from their small villages, to Poland. He Ubers families who must leave their grandmother behind, couples who can barely contain a freaked-out cat, and children who’ve suffered immeasurable trauma, literalized in notecards they carry listing their identifying details. Rolling past wreckage and bombed-out homes, Hamela’s car cruises through checkpoints and U-turns away from minefields. Along the way, the Cash Cab-like camera, locked onto the crammed backseat, listens to its passengers. They, like strangers on a bus, share plenty, and open up in the hiccups and spurts natural to stuck strangers. Some worry about their phone’s charge. Others grimace as their children play “Rock, Paper Scissors…Gun.” One, en route to a hospital, simply tries to gut out the bumpy trip. In the Rearview isn’t just a harrowing piece of on-the-ground war reporting, but a constant and steady reminder of tangible, logistical suffering — writ large by an invasive evil and tightly binding viewers to each person on the road against their will.–Jacob Oller
47. Ferrari
More casual appreciators of director Michael Mann might have understandably wondered if he was permanently locked into a late-period For Mannheads Only phase of his career. But you don’t need to be a Blackhat apologist to vibe with Ferrari; in fact, some of his most dedicated followers might blanch at the very lack of neon-dotted opportunities for pure cityscape viewing. Structurally, Ferrari is closer to an Aaron Sorkin-style compressed biopic, following the famous Italian carmaker (Adam Driver) during a time of personal and professional crisis. His mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley) wants him to claim their son with his famous name; doing so would risk the wrath of his powerful wife Laura (Penelope Cruz), who he needs to keep his company from bankruptcy. In the midst of all this, he can secure his future as a manufacturer of race cars if his team triumphs at a major (and dangerous) cross-country race. Mann, working in a more classical mode than his digital-forward experiments, transcends this year’s crop of brand-name-as-protagonist business-plan cinema by turning Enzo Ferrari into one of his haunted, taciturn control-seekers, juxtaposing the freedom of the road with its technological limitations (and personifying it with the cars’ artist-creator). Driver, steering through soulful reflection and deadpan humor, proves true to his name.–Jesse Hassenger
46. Beyond Utopia
Traveling the full length of an Underground Railroad from North Korea, across China, moving secretly from Vietnam into the Laotian jungle in the dead of night, all the way to Thailand and an eventual resettlement in South Korea, Beyond Utopia is a miraculous and harrowing refugee travelogue. A family of defectors working with the heroic Pastor Seungeun Kim goes an extra brave step in allowing their journey to be filmed, thus becoming a cinematic case study in how dire life in North Korea is, and how desperate those who were born there are to escape it. Director Madeleine Gavin juxtaposes this heart-stopping flight with constant context surrounding the ideological forces that split Korea in two, and those that took advantage of the havoc wreaked by the U.S. and their Communist rivals. Though a too-obvious score accompanies some of the year’s most thrilling, affecting images (like an 80-year-old defector looking out onto Seoul’s skyline from her family’s new apartment), Beyond Utopia is composed of amazing footage taken by people risking their lives to do so — and you can feel that conscious decision in every frame’s wavering handheld adjustment.—Jacob Oller
45. Walk Up
The social influences of one’s surroundings—namely the various dwellings we inhabit—act as a clever framing mechanism in South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s Walk Up. Specifically, the film visits each floor-spanning apartment of one particular building, characters neatly shuffling between each residence as they navigate personal employment woes and fluctuating relationship tensions. As Hong makes his way through the building from the ground up, the interpersonal connections between characters shift—romances blossom and fizzle, familial ties strengthen and disintegrate, rental power dynamics sweeten before souring—until they ultimately reset, ready to unfold anew. Filmmaker Byung-soo (Kwon Hae-hyo) and his daughter Jeong-su (Park Mi-so) arrive at a building owned by Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-young), an old friend of the director. Ms. Kim gives the two a tour of the three story edifice, which houses her own work studio on the basement level, her own residence on the first floor, an intimate restaurant owned by a woman named Sunhee (Song Seon-mi) and an apartment rented by a reclusive artist on the top level. After briefly entering each unit (and probably violating a couple lease agreements in the process), the three retire to Ms. Kim’s apartment for an evening of copious wine drinking. As the young woman departs to fetch more wine from a convenience store, the next segment begins with Byung-soo, Ms. Kim and Sunhee eating a meal at the latter’s restaurant, wherein we find the film’s thesis of art, financing and the general impossibility of the two—creativity and capital—coexisting. “For them, a film is purely a means of making money,” Byung-soo drunkenly laments when he reveals that the plug was pulled on his most recent film just weeks before it was set to enter production. “Money is the only standard to judge anything.” Clearly, Hong is working through some personal disappointments as it pertains to his own metric of “success” here. By the time Walk Up comes to a conclusion, all of the characters appear in front of the building. They are either on their way elsewhere, appearing for an overdue visit or returning to perform job duties inside. This set-up mirrors the very beginning of the film, and relationships that have been fortified or abandoned since have miraculously seemed to regress into their original dynamics. Has Hong simply gone full-circle, setting these individuals up to relive the previous events and perhaps make different choices? Or does the suffocation of our small quarters cause us to become callous and self-centered? Does leaving our most intimate spaces allow us to embrace possibilities that we’ve since considered closed-off or impossible? Without the looming pressures of rent, work-from-home set-ups and casual business meetings, Hong suggests that we might just finally be free.—Natalia Keogan
44. Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros
Frederick Wiseman is, and has been for more than half a century now, fascinated by how the sausage gets made. Since the 1960s, he’s spent time documenting hospitals, schools, local government, cultural institutions, zoos and parks, submerging himself and us in their often arcane processes. His films are famously lengthy—his recent work has averaged around the three-and-a-half-hour mark, though he has gone as long as six—because of his granular devotion to detail. The lesser movies of his oeuvre can prove to be something of an endurance test; the better films (and that’s a far more populous category) leave you with the feeling of having properly experienced a whole new world. In Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Wiseman shows us how the sausage gets made in an unusually literal sense, along with a whole host of other culinary delights. His latest odyssey takes us to France, and the restaurants of celebrated chef Michel Troisgros, which he runs with his two sons, César and Leo. For most of the four-hour runtime, we are situated in the main establishment, La Colline du Colombier, nestled in the postcard-perfect French countryside. We spend time both in front and back of house, as well as in the immediate surrounds; a particularly charming scene sees a group of young Troisgros workers heading out into the local forest on a foraging trip in their chef’s whites, the sole woman of the group being hoisted on the tallest man’s shoulders so she can reach higher up in the tree for the fruit. It’s an idyllic sequence; one of the most notable features of Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros is how surprisingly calm the whole business is. For decades, but especially recently, with productions like The Bear and Boiling Point, audiences have seen high-end kitchens depicted as frantic, hellishly stressful places (if you can’t stand the heat, etc…). Here though, Wiseman shows us a workplace that could—in some scenes, at least—be fairly described as tranquil. As we watch these masters at work, Wiseman invites us to revel in the poetry of their expertise—and it’s mesmerizing. And speaking of poetry, there’s a lovely lyricism to the culinary language we pick up along the way (and of course, it helps that everyone’s speaking French): Quenelle, battuta, bigarade, arlettes, duxelles, zabaione, mignardise, gremolata, faisselle, rau răm. We may not be able to taste the food, but between the sights and the sounds of the kitchen, Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros is still a feast for the senses.—Chloe Walker
43. Chile ’76
Decades after his death, Alfred Hitchcock’s name is still instinctively used to describe taut political thrillers like Manuela Martelli’s feature debut, Chile ’76. Set 3 years after Augusto Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende, the film steeps in unease for 90 minutes; it’s the product of a nation contemporarily inclined toward fractured partisan politics, as if Martelli intends for her audience to face the historical rearview as a reminder of what happens to democracies when they catch a case of hyper-polarization. The first appropriate qualifier for Chile ’76 that anyone should reach for is “urgent.” But rather than “Hitchcockian,” the second qualifier should be “Pakulan.” Chile ’76 shares in common the same pliable atmospheric sensibility as the movies of Alan J. Pakula; Martelli roots her plot in realism one moment, then surrealism the next, oscillating between a sharp-lined authenticity and dreamlike paranoia. Martelli is an optimist, her belief being that when faced with incontrovertible proof of genuine government tyranny, the average citizen will do their part to buck the system even if it might mean getting disappeared by the bully president’s goon squad. The sensation of the film, on the other hand, is suspicion, the relentless and sickening notion that nobody can be trusted. Whether the thrumming electronic soundtrack or Soledad Rodríguez’s photography, composed to the point of feeling suffocating, Chile ’76 drives that anxiety like a knife in the heart.—Andy Crump
42. Cassandro
In a dark stadium, an empty alleyway, a trashed and red-washed hotel room, a slight wrestler feels the weight of the odds stacked against him. Whether it’s homophobia, abandonment or grief, his approach remains the same: Use his opponent as a ladder. The crueler they are, the higher he goes, buoyed by the sheer determination that his own star will shine so brightly that others may as well revel in his light. If he believes in his own freedom fiercely enough, maybe everyone else will, too. In Roger Ross Williams’ triumphant narrative feature debut Cassandro, such a star rises in the shape of certified charmer Gael García Bernal playing Saúl Armendáriz, better known as real-life luchador Cassandro, the exótico who first toppled the hierarchy of heterosexuality in 1980s lucha libre wrestling. Williams’ direction takes two distinct styles for the film, shuffling between a softer approach to Saúl’s introspective puzzling through his inner life, and the explosive, hard-hitting fun of the ring. The softer side of Saúl is engaging and compassionate, but the matches are where the entire film comes to life. The real Cassandro is the subject of one of Academy Award-winning Williams’ previous documentary projects, and while his billowing mane isn’t quite captured by García Bernal’s bleach job, the film does use Williams’ intimate knowledge—and an impressive roster of Mexican American film workers—to pay a complex, thoughtful and warm homage to Cassandro’s person and shaping of the landscape.—Shayna Maci Warner
41. Godland
A brutal battle between brittle doctrine and flexible conviction, Godland sees Hlynur Pálmason transplant a religious conflict of Scorsesian proportions to the majestic vistas of Iceland. Elliott Crosset Hove plays Lucas, a Danish priest traversing the island without any skills (including the language skills needed to speak to his prospective flock), who weathers all the conditions naturally occurring because of his spiritual-colonial hubris, running himself ragged on the long road to apostasy. Hove’s foil, gruff and capable guide Ragnar brilliantly played by Ingvar E. Sigurðsson, embodies the natural equilibrium of an undisturbed society (his physical feats matched beat-for-beat by montages of waterfalls, ice floes, and the changing of the seasons — all stunningly lensed by cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff). As the friction mounts between this arrogant doofus (whose frailty and unwieldiness is symbolized by his photography hobby) and the world he’s stumbled into, Pálmason mostly avoids obvious conflict in favor of a lavish, lush, luxurious unraveling. Life moves forward, regardless of how we live it. We can hold fast to the strictness of scripture, or relax for once in our lives, embracing a warmer sense of community. Along the way, we can capture the beauty we see, care for the dogs we find, and show compassion to those around us. We can curse the ice we tread, or respect it. But our end, Godland assures us, is already written.—Jacob Oller
40. Birth/Rebirth
What if everything went right for Dr. Frankenstein and Igor, and they became the platonic parents of a beautiful, bouncing, (reanimated) baby Monster? Director Laura Moss and their co-writer Brendan J. O’Brien imagine a sharp, modern version of this best-case scenario (at least, until its own problems come to life) with the horror Birth/Rebirth. With dark irreverence, their transposition is a bolt of lightning into the undead subgenre that’s tight script keeps the two-hander as fresh as the day it was buried. Put your fan-fiction aside: Mad scientist/forensic pathologist Rose (Marin Ireland) and loving mother/maternity nurse Celie (Judy Reyes) don’t need any nudging to forge their lives together. Just the untimely death and untimelier resurrection of Celie’s young daughter Lila (A.J. Lister). As the two crash together, jammed into a single apartment-laboratory when they’re not taking shifts at their hospital, they become a wry reminder that a family can look like anything: Even two women trying to bring an elementary schooler back to life. From this working relationship raising a kid (from the dead), Birth/Rebirth nurtures all sorts of amusing, icky insight. The film is a sharp comment on hospital workaholics who, either through ego, altruism or a mix of both, can’t stop themselves from bringing it home with them. They might not inherently be playing God like Herr Doktor, but they’re certainly meddling with the stuff of life—and once you have some power over that, it’s gotta be hard to sit by and do nothing with it. On the lighter side, Birth/Rebirth draws funny connections between the undead and children in general. Who couldn’t imagine Frankenstein’s creation moaning in displeasure if its Cocomelon got turned off? While the film starts relying on a few contrivances after a solid set-up—its faith in itself wavering a bit between its great premise and banger of a conclusion—Birth/Rebirth is a clever, tight little horror that will leave sickos (like me) smiling and shaking our heads at Moss’ bravado. Moss’ creation is more than a sentient pile of parts with a fresh coat of mortuary makeup: It’s a savvy, gross, black-hearted gem with a humanity all its own.—Jacob Oller
39. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
A visual tour de force of hybrid 2D and 3D animation, Mutant Mayhem is not only the most authentically New York version of the Turtles yet, it’s arguably the most inventive. Rowe, Spears and production designer Yashar Kassai have rendered the brothers as if they’re hand-drawn, complete with messy sketch lines, doodle flairs and a graffiti aesthetic. This is the ultimate paint-outside-the-lines take on the Turtles and it works on every level. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is swinging for the fences with its story and voice performances to ambitiously, quantifiably shake up the artistic rut that theatrical computer animation has been stuck in for the last two decades. Another plus is that the brothers are voiced by non-adult voice actors Nicolas Cantu (Leo), Brady Noon (Raph), Shamon Brown Jr. (Mikey) and Micah Abbey (Donnie), who recorded together, and were encouraged to excitedly talk over one another like a gaggle of real, tight-knit brothers would do. It translates into rapid-fire, organic quips and seemingly effortless timing that conveys a rapport that is singular to this iteration. It also elevates the script so that it doesn’t sound like it was written by a bunch of 40-year-olds trying to be hip and young. Rowe and Spears have a firm hold on their pacing, especially in how they use comedy to enhance their action beats. They also chart a progression to the brother’s battle prowess that is satisfying and pays off in satisfying full-circle moments. There’s also much to be admired in their choice to frame a lot of sequences with hand-held camera blocking, which leans into the unpredictable youth of the heroes that works so well in the gritty New York environs they’re sparring in. The filmmakers are also delightfully experimental throughout the Mutant Mayhem, using inspired live-action inserts, segueing into different artistic styles (including a homage to Eastman and Laird’s comic art) and embracing the asymmetrical character design that gives the film a fresh and energetic looseness. Rowe and company prove that there’s no strength to the myth of IP fatigue when you have the vision and passion to reinvent with such bold and fun intention.—Tara Bennett
38. Fist of the Condor
A silent, hairless man made of muscle. A mysterious text, filled with ancient ancestral ass-kicking knowledge. An animal-based fighting style. A possible identical twin. A revenge-tinged showdown. These are the throwback components making up the neo-classical Chilean martial arts movie Fist of the Condor. Marko Zaror, who’s come stateside before as a villain squaring off against Keanu Reeves and Scott Adkins, reunites with filmmaker Ernesto Díaz Espinoza for a transcendently simple standalone feature. If you’re not familiar with Zaror (I was not), Fist of the Condor is the perfect introduction to the secret weapon best known by direct-to-video action enthusiasts and Robert Rodriguez completionists. He’s jacked, he’s stoic, he can pull off all sorts of silly stuff with a straight face and, most importantly, he’s a great fighter. If you’re looking for 85 minutes of old-school action and the best pure martial arts movie of the year, look no further. This naturally sets expectations high, possibly for a film with the same charming disdain for reality as Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. But Fist of the Condor, though not without its moments of wry humor and gory excess, is a much quieter experience. Think ‘70s kung fu, with its casual lore, minimal characters and mythic tone. Fist of the Condor isn’t non-stop brawls, but something that could inspire the next Wu-Tang Clan. Incorporating both Zaror’s intended introspections and the magical abilities martial arts movies love to unlock through those limit-pushing actions, the training montages do what they’re meant to do: They train us. We learn to love this disciplined dork, and anticipate him putting his education to use in actual fights. Espinoza (who wrote, directed and edited the film) builds this tension perfectly, then reminds us in the moment, quickly cutting between Zaror’s rapid pummeling of a wooden Wing Chun dummy and him putting those same flying fists to work on some poor biker’s face in a barroom confrontation. It’s amazing to watch the human body move so fast, and more amazing to watch it exactingly execute the same sequence of moves again and again. Zaror is a phenomenal talent, displaying the kind of precision and awareness that lets Espinoza shoot wide and long. There’s not much cheating here. Espinoza can experiment with camera placement without worrying about ruining a particular strike or dodge, simply because his stars are such beef machines. He makes it all simple, which gives the indie film room to breathe. Other action movies from 2023 may have bigger setpieces, crazier stunts, more scenes of Tom Cruise trying to kill himself. But none are as ambitious and successful in their pure dedication to good ol’ fashioned hand-to-hand fighting as Fist of the Condor.—Jacob Oller
37. Sanctuary
About three-quarters of the way through Zachary Wigon’s Sanctuary–his first new feature in nearly a decade since his debut The Heart Machine–we learn that “sanctuary” is a safe word. Ultimately, it’s more than just that—it does come to suggest the significance of the relationship between Rebecca (Margaret Qualley), a professional dominatrix, and Hal (Christopher Abbott), her paying sub, who engage in non-physical sessions of erotic roleplay. Hal Porterfield is the heir to a hotel empire, still reeling from the fairly fresh death of his domineering father, which has paved the way for his ascension to taking over the family business. In spite of the meaningful escort-client connection he’s built with Rebecca over an unspecified amount of time (enough for him to buy her a $32K “goodbye” present), Hal feels that having a secret side hobby being shamed into ejaculation isn’t a good look for an incumbent CEO. He decides, earnestly and gracefully, that it is best for the two of them to part ways. Rebecca doesn’t like that she has to lose her highest-paying client, and she begins jumping through a series of unhinged hoops in order to not necessarily keep Hal, but blackmail him into giving her a piece of his fortune. She reveals something that finally gets his attention: She has had hidden cameras recording all their sessions. There’s one concealed in their hotel room right now. This leads into an uproarious disco-set sequence in which the claustrophobic confines of the room (gorgeously designed by Jason Singleton) become an expansive labyrinth, cinematographer Ludovica Isidori using stimulating camera techniques to enhance Hal’s desperate pursuit of the camera (including one memorable moment, in which the camera, as if attached to Hal’s body by an invisible wire, moves in sync with his search). Removed from whatever it is that Sanctuary wants to say about power, pleasure, class and the extent to which our lives can be defined by our sexual proclivities, the film is a truly erotic thriller. Abbott and Qualley’s cat-and-mouse relationship aesthetically titillates bordering on softcore, and the fervor Wigon brings to his direction of the one-locale concept blows movies like Inside, another one-location film from this year, completely out of the water. Sanctuary is exciting and scintillating, a formally impressive and taut erotic thriller that showcases Wigon’s directorial capability and the prowess of the actors under his guidance.—Brianna Zigler
36. When Evil Lurks
When Evil Lurks starts with a bang. Well, two bangs, to be precise. The film opens with brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodriguez) and Jimmy (Demián Salomon) awoken by a pair of gunshots that pierce through an otherwise quiet night in their sleepy rural town. The two then set off to investigate the noise, only to come across a rotting subhuman bathing in his own fetid fluids and excrement. Directed by Demián Rugna, When Evil Lurks follows Pedro and Jimmy’s desperate attempts to contain the infectious evil at hand. It quickly leaps out from under a boldly original and bone-chilling premise and wastes no time hooking its viewers and setting the scene for a film that is impressively committed to defying horror conventions and being its own beast. Indeed, When Evil Lurks takes place in a uniquely-crafted and novel world where characters are all-too familiar with the disease that has taken root in their village. But When Evil Lurks isn’t just a grim and nightmarish cautionary tale – it’s also insanely fun. The film is filled with a profusion of I-can’t-believe-they-went-there moments, one of which involves the creepiest goat you’ve seen since The Witch, another of which sees a kid getting bitten by a zombie dog, and the rest of which are so delightfully gruesome that you’ll simply have to see them to believe them. These shocking moments shine even brighter when juxtaposed with the understated stylization of the film. Mariano Suárez’s cinematography is refreshingly restrained, and through limited, stagnant camera setups, he positions his characters in a stark and eerily real world. Similarly, When Evil Lurks manages to escape the trap of punctuating every jump scare with a deafening musical cue. Instead, the score simply accompanies the viewer through the film’s emotional beats without being manipulative. When a filmmaker finds a way to talk about fears that have existed for literal centuries, that’s something to celebrate–and that is exactly what Rugna has done.—Aurora Amidon
35. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
If there’s one certainty amidst the chaos of puberty, it’s that you’re going to feel misunderstood. Misunderstood by your friends, your siblings, your sex ed teacher and, above all, by your parents. Indeed, when you start to undergo those pesky physical and emotional changes, it inevitably feels as though no one on this godforsaken planet can empathize with what you’re going through–that is, of course, unless you’re lucky enough to stumble across a Judy Blume book. Given the weight that Blume holds for so many kids and former kids, embarking on a film adaptation of one of her works poses a challenge. I’m happy to report, though, that Kelly Fremon Craig’s adaptation of the iconic 1970 novel Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret delivers nearly flawlessly. Margaret follows the young Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson), whose parents Barbara (Rachel McAdams) and Herb (Benny Safdie) move her to a new school in New Jersey for her final year of elementary school. Margaret’s journey of self-discovery is a fascinating and satisfying watch. Craig moves Margaret along at a gratifying pace. Its sunny, pastel color palette, whip-smart comedy (a scene where Margaret and her mother discuss training bras deserves a spot in the Comedic Timing Hall of Fame) and ecstatic musical montages make Margaret an exhilarating, ecstatic and thought-provoking watch. While Craig nails Margaret’s storytelling and tone, this film simply wouldn’t achieve such poignancy and empathy without the stellar lead performance from young breakout Fortson. The budding star is effortlessly funny and brings a stunning level of maturity to her voiceover; when she rattles off an astute, “adult” comment, it feels like she really means and understands what she’s saying. While Fortson is the backbone that holds Margaret together, she’s not the only actor that brings something delightful and delectable to the table. Graham shines, playing the well-intentioned mean girl with masterful physical humor and surprising tenderness, while McAdams serves as Margaret’s emotional core in her best major role in a while. McAdams’ magnificent performance makes Craig’s grasp on Blume’s book even more clear: The 1970 novel was never just for young girls. It was, and remains, for generations upon generations of women. That’s the true beauty of it.—Aurora Amidon
34. Of an Age
Melancholy memories of old flames—and the palpable romantic intrigue they first conjured—are thrusted to sensually cinematic heights in Of an Age, the sophomore feature from Macedonian-Australian filmmaker Goran Stolevski. A somewhat unexpectedly tender and sensual follow-up to his folk horror debut You Won’t Be Alone, this film further expands on themes of coerced assimilation, adolescent growing pains and the act of constantly presenting different faces to the world. Of course, the queer experience is in itself a state of ceaseless shape-shifting until one lands in the right skin—a near-impossible task for a teenage boy in ‘90s Melbourne, Australia who lives with homophobic members of his extended Serbian immigrant family. The year is 1999, and 17-year-old competitive ballroom dancer Kol (Elias Anton) rises early to prepare for the long-awaited finals tournament later that afternoon. Hopes for a relatively stress-free morning are unceremoniously dashed when he receives a frantic call from his best friend and dance partner Ebony (Hattie Hook), who blacked out after a rough night of partying and has no idea which beach she’s woken up stranded on. Frantically consulting a map while trying to sort out a game plan, the two eventually decide to enlist Ebony’s older brother Adam (Thom Green) for clandestine aid without alerting their mother. He picks Kol up in his appropriately boxy sedan, and after getting to know each other on their drive, they eventually find a damp, sandy Ebony sitting in a far-flung phone booth. Kol has virtually no hope of making it back in time for his dance competition, but he has appeared to acquire a much more handsome consolation prize. The film is suffused with the kind of nostalgic attitude that has a tendency to skew toward cringe-worthy sentimentality, yet here allows for the relationship between Kol and Adam to feel all the more realistic and rooted in the director’s lived experience. While the film’s ending feels a bit abrupt and cheesy, Of an Age boasts phenomenal performances and a salient (if somber) central truth. It’s never wise to anticipate a life-altering revelation from haphazard homecomings, particularly when you’ve been yearning for a connection that was fleeting from the offset. In the end, however, reason seldom prevails over romantics. Even after witnessing this cinematic exercise in maintaining hindsight, I’d wager that no viewer will successfully eliminate their own tendencies to ruminate on the infinite possibilities of past passions.—Natalia Keogan
33. Talk to Me
Talk to Me, the feature directorial debut of RackaRacka YouTube creators Danny and Michael Philippou is fierce, fun, and steeped in youthful energy. It’s a film that’s willing to go to some truly dark places in its exploration of grief, death and what it means when we reach too far into the beyond, but it’s also never afraid to laugh along the way. Talk to Me is a séance story, specifically a séance story revolving around a severed, ceramic-encased hand with a mysterious history. These days, the hand is hanging out in the possession of some Australian teenagers, who break it out at parties for 90-second “talk to me” sessions in which partygoers can briefly commune with, and be possessed by, the dead. It’s a quick thrill, the kind of thing perfect for taking smartphone videos to share on social media, and it’s all so detached and laugh-worthy that people either think it’s fake or liken it to a more pedestrian thrill like a drug trip. But when teenage Mia (Sophie Wilde), who recently lost her mother, hears about the hand, she’s eager to see if she actually can reach the other side, where her lost Mom might be waiting. Her best friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) thinks it’s all fake, but she’s still willing to accompany Mia to a party, where a brief encounter with the hand will change both their lives. This is, even non-horror devotees will notice, a riff on classic séance narratives in which humans open a door that’s not to be trifled with, and let something dark and dangerous out. Talk to Me never tries to mask its roots in time-honored formulas, but approaches its tropes and recognizable story beats with an earnestness that’s both endearing and frank. And the horror, when it hits, hits with visceral intensity. Anyone who’s ever seen a RackaRacka horror short knows how well the Philippou brothers can craft a surprising scare, and those scares emerge with real ferocity in Talk to Me. At a time when we spend far too much energy trying to swing horror movies into one side or the other of a senseless binary, Talk to Me reminds us that fun and true existential terror don’t have to be mutually exclusive areas of storytelling. Talk to Me is as funny as it is frightening, as poignant as it is pulse-pounding, and the whole thing is rooted in a modern reality that feels like you could step into it tomorrow, which only adds to both the humor and the fear.—Matthew Jackson
32. The Disappearance of Shere Hite
In a world of digital footprints, it’s amusing to think that anyone with a voice and a strong platform can simply “disappear.” Even those who make the radical decision to vacate their online spaces can never fully do so; once on the internet, always on the internet. So The Disappearance of Shere Hite, the latest film from Nicole Newnham, strikes a discordant tone by the title alone, though its metaphorical substance shouldn’t be discounted. The author and sex educator Shere Hite has, after all, fallen out of cultural consciousness, and for all intents and purposes, she did take a powder from public life in the 1980s. Nobody can blame Hite, who passed in 2020, for flipping the U.S. the bird, after her shabby treatment for the apparent crime of publishing books evincing the pervasive isolation in Americans’ intimate relationships. That’s just one finding from The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, released in 1976, and The Hite Report on Men and Male Sexuality, which came out in 1981. In those days, the very idea of anyone, especially a woman, writing frankly about people’s sexual habits and appetites, and their attendant behavioral and existential woes, was anathema at best and a declaration of war at worst. The Disappearance of Shere Hite suggests that to know Hite was to love her – and not the same thing as truly knowing her. This validates Newnham’s casting of Dakota Johnson as a vocal performer, narrating Hite’s writings in imitation of Hite’s gentle, ethereal voice. As Samuel L. Jackson did for James Baldwin in Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, so Johnson does here for Hite, giving her weight through her reading and affording us a medium for knowing an otherwise unknowable person. In Johnson, we recognize shades of who Hite’s peers tell us she was; through Newnham’s direction, we recognize Hite best of all for how she shone a harsh light on the state of American sexual pleasure and marital comfort with a series of straightforward if uncomfortable survey questions. Newnham isn’t telling a story of exodus, but hoping to usher along Hite’s re-emergence into popular awareness. This requires Newnham to take stock of Hite’s achievements, and then trace her subject’s humanity around and through those achievements.–Andy Crump
31. Knock at the Cabin
Knock at the Cabin has a twist that audiences won’t see coming, if only because it defies what people have come to know about director M. Night Shyamalan. It’s a twist, but it isn’t, but it is, but it also isn’t. But in Knock at the Cabin—adapted from the novel The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay—it’s less about the destination than the journey. A film preoccupied with the frequent use of intimate, shot/reverse-shot close-up conversations, Knock at the Cabin opens with one between Leonard (Dave Bautista) and Wen (Kristen Cui—no Haley Joel Osment, but she’s mostly fine). Leonard bears Bautista’s imposing figure, but Bautista knows how to handle himself with a gentle touch. He’s soft-spoken and warm, and has a tenderness implicit in his presence akin to a large stuffed animal. Accompanied by two women, Adriane (Abby Quinn) and Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), and a hot-headed man named Redmond (Rupert Grint, whose first feature role in eight years proves he’s a force of nature), Leonard and his group forcibly enter the Airbnb housing Wen and her adoptive dads, Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and Eric (Jonathan Groff). The groups was united by shared visions of a forthcoming apocalypse that will bring about the end of humanity, and the only way to stop it is if this particular family makes the choice to sacrifice one of themselves willingly. Knock at the Cabin is, perhaps, the quickest 100-minute film ever made. From the quiet and meditative opening sequence—the last moment of normalcy in Wen’s life—the film is propelled forward with a sense of urgency that parallels that of the doomsday group. Even in moments of calm, there is a constant, tense and invigorating momentum forward. If you’re a fan of Shyamalan’s, or just familiar with his style, you’re accustomed to “dialogue real people wouldn’t say” and “actions real people wouldn’t take.” It’s an oft-held complaint about Shyamalan’s films by his naysayers, but it’s not a creative deficiency. It’s just part of Shyamalan’s cinematic language, one that functions in a sort of un-reality that prioritizes story, emotion and theme over pedantic logistics in dialogue. At this point, you’re either with it or you’re not. And if you are, Knock at the Cabin could be seen as career-best work.—Brianna Zigler
30. Other People’s Children
French director Rebecca Zlotowski tackles the subject of a “biological clock” and the social pressures surrounding it with grace and levity, undoubtedly impacted by her own experience as a child-free woman in her 40s. Her film Other People’s Children doesn’t merely focus on a woman weighing her options when it comes to the prospect of motherhood; it also exemplifies the myriad ways that we can foster genuine, compassionate bonds with kids—particularly those acting outside the “parent” label. Fortysomething Rachel (a dazzling Virginie Efira) is a high school teacher in Paris who, by all accounts, is living her best life. She maintains a friendly-enough relationship with her ex-husband (Henri-Noël Tabary), is devoted to her dad (Michel Zlotowski, the filmmaker’s father who’s appeared in a few of her earlier films) and sister Louana (Yamée Couture) and has recently begun to learn to play guitar. It’s during one of her weekly lessons that she finally goes out for a drink with Ali (Roschdy Zem), a fellow student whose presence has encouraged Rebecca’s own perfect attendance. He makes her laugh, they hit it off and eventually become lovers. As their relationship escalates, Ali tells Rachel about his 4-year-old daughter, Leila (Callie Ferreira-Goncalves), who he maintains full custody of. Interestingly, Zlotowski herself became unexpectedly pregnant during the making of this film, a fact that makes the central struggle of Other People’s Children all the more fascinating and poignant. Funny, frank and never adopting a fatalist viewpoint, Other People’s Children entrenches itself in a full spectrum of human (though largely feminine) emotions that concern prospective parenthood. Its thoroughly French sensibility (humorous nudity, gratuitous shots of the Eiffel Tower and several café/bistro scenes) is only bolstered by the Jewish identity of Rachel and her family, yet the relationship between her and proudly Arab Ali never serves as fodder for milquetoast observations of religious difference (lord knows Europeans typically can’t resist these oft-tepid surveys). Coupled with Audrey Diwan’s vital film Happening from last year, French women directors are creating a necessary canon of child-free womanhood, past and present, assured and uncertain.—Natalia Keogan
29. Rye Lane
Part of the joy of making a romantic comedy is reimagining the stakes of a story, relitigating what is deemed cinematic. Rather than the traditional blockbuster terrain, you are charting the more familiar fallout from relational misunderstanding. Romantic comedies are bound by relatability, and truly great romantic comedies understand this relatability grows from specificity. Where many recent examples of this genre fall short is in dodging this degree of specificity, scared to ground an audience in the monotony of the everyday. Rye Lane leans into this perceived monotony, animating everything with the promise of new love. Rye Lane takes place over the course of a day, following Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah) as they wander across South London, concocting new, increasingly ridiculous ways of spending time together. They use local landmarks as a set of interpersonal stepping stones, guiding one another through the physical ruins of their own romantic histories. Everything is captured in sharp, bright colors, reflecting the joy buried in every corner of this city. But the color scheme is only one way director Raine Allen-Miller navigates the playfulness of Dom and Yas’ dynamic. She stages elaborate setups to heighten their budding relationship: A cinema full of multiple Doms, passionately cheering Yas on as she recreates her recent breakup, is both a funny joke and a constructive character beat, showing two people who bond over a shared way of coping. Allen-Miller experiments with the focus and angle of the camera, switching between the extremes of the fish-eye lens and wide shots to capture the blurred and busy texture of the city. Their love story is one dedicated to recontextualizing their surroundings, to overhearing an embarrassing conversation and seeking out the other’s amused gaze, to buying burritos from the stall in Brixton and letting the other one order for you. Each new location is a gateway into understanding the other person, a prompt for a new story. In this way Rye Lane builds a lovingly transportive setting. Thanks to Rye Lane’s specificity and care for its central relationship, Allen-Miller has made one of the best British comedies–certainly one of the best London-based films—of the last decade.—Anna McKibbin
28. Bad Press
Is there anyone in this country looked down upon and misunderstood more than Indigenous people and journalists? It’s not a hypothetical—the answer is yes: Indigenous journalists. Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler’s engrossing documentary Bad Press clearly lays out the plights faced by an Indigenous news team and, in its hyperfocus on Mvskoke Media and the Muscogee Nation, finds hard, broad truths about both the relationship between the people and the reporters that serve them and the ease with which those being reported upon manipulate that relationship. Of the 574 self-governing tribes operating alongside (or, more often, in conflict with) the U.S., none of their constitutions ensured a free press. So if there’s someone reporting on, say, an embezzling chief, there’s nothing legally fundamental protecting them from retribution. The Muscogee Nation put a protective law in place in 2015, but an emergency legislative session surreptitiously repealed it in 2018. The nuances of sovereign tribal governments create a perfect microcosm for this story. The structure and size of the Muscogee Nation lend its public affairs a local feel, where executives are relatively available for interview and legislators vote in cramped municipal back rooms. This contrasts with the national implications of its power, making Bad Press the best of all worlds: An impossibly important political story that you can grasp with both hands. The filmmaking, confident and immersive, imbues the film with gravity. Context is efficient; characters are cultivated. Its procedural construction is thoroughly convincing, involving and educational. We care about the issue, but we care more about it because the issue comes with faces. Leading the way is Mvskoke Media reporter Angel Ellis. Ellis is as bombastic and brave a central figure as you could wish for, resolutely charming and a bastion of journalistic aspiration: A foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, citizen-serving machine of passion and integrity. Bad Press is wonderful, tightknit political and journalistic non-fiction, about a place and people close to my heart. It does what small-scale documentaries do best, and have been doing exceptionally since Harlan County, USA: Finding the global in the specific, and finding the personal in the ideological. Where Barbara Kopple found feminism, solidarity, tradition and rampant, violent corporate greed at the heart of her Kentucky miner’s strike, Landsberry-Baker and Peeler find vigilance, accountability and the systems in place to discourage both in the heart of a Muscogee newsroom.—Jacob Oller
27. Infinity Pool
Heartbeats and cumshots are the alpha and omega of Brandon Cronenberg’s vacation in White Lotus hell, where the tourists loosen their collars and let loose their lizard brains. The limbic system and the most basic biological processes of life dominate Infinity Pool, the filmmaker’s descent into a slimy, sexy, terrifying world where death is just another game for rich people. It’s a hit-and-run satire of Western nonsense, dismantling the havoc our destination-hopping upper-crust wreaks on other cultures and the faux-mystical enlightenment hawked by gurus and Goop fools—those too wealthy to have real problems, those aspiring to achieve this status, and those taking lucrative advantage of both. In this tropical trial, they spill into each other, forever and ever. Ego death has nothing on Brandon Cronenberg’s brilliantly warped resort. The dangled, juicy lure isn’t subtle: A seemingly normal couple being approached by weird (probably swinging) Europeans always leads to trouble. We’d be fools not to be suspicious of Gabby (Mia Goth) and Al (Jalil Lespert) when they come up to their estranged hotel-mate couple James (Alexander Skarsgård) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman). One of them is played by Mia Goth, which is a sure sign to hightail it back to your room and flip the “do not disturb” sign. But James is a novelist, with one bad book to his name (The Variable Sheath, a fantastic fake title) that only got published because he married the rich publisher’s daughter. Gabby’s proclaimed fandom strokes the part of his ego that’s all but shriveled up and crumbled to dust—he’s weak, he’s hungry for it, he’s the perfect mark. When the white folks inevitably do something irreversibly horrible to the locals of Li Tolqa, their unprepared alienation in their culture is disturbingly hilarious. They don’t speak the language, and can’t read the forms the cops ask them to sign. But it’s stranger than that. Brilliant production design, location scouting and cinematography lock you into a late-night freakout. Getting too deeply into what exactly happens in Infinity Pool is like outlining the recirculating edge of its title’s horizon-flouting construction. It won’t take away from its pleasures, but you can’t really understand until you’re in it. Until Cronenberg drives you down an unlit backroad, long enough that you start wondering if you’re dreaming or awake. But what’s clearest in this gallows comedy is that its characters exist. The people who think they’ve solved reality, the conceited class with the luxury of being horny for death, because death has never been real to them. Infinity Pool’s inspired critique of this crowd is fierce and funny, its hallucinations nimble and sticky, and its encompassing nightmare one you’ll remember without needing to break out the vacation slideshow.—Jacob Oller
26. Unicorn Wars
Who knew an animated movie made up of sunshine, rainbows, cuddles, and teddy bear dicks could be as bleak as Unicorn Wars? Maybe that last list item is a warning sign. For a bigger indicator, look at the director: Alberto Vázquez, the mind behind 2015’s Birdboy: The Forgotten Children. Together, these films make a fine double feature of grotesqueries, though compared to Unicorn Wars, Birdboy is an episode of Sesame Street. A story about drug addiction, corrupt authorities, and environmental collapse sounds grim on paper and plays grim on screen, but Unicorn Wars is more than “grim.” It’s deranged. Scorched earth and religious prejudice tie these two movies together. In Unicorn Wars, the former comes well after the latter, a deep-rooted belief in God being one impelling factor of many driving conflict between warring factions: Peaceful, forest-dwelling unicorns, and warmongering teddy bears. This isn’t a metaphor. There are literal teddy bears. The bears are governed by fascist tough-bears who derive their status from perpetuating war. That doesn’t mean the movie is too serious to enjoy its toilet humor. But Unicorn Wars carefully packs big, meaningful themes into a candycoated parcel, using delirium as bubble wrap to keep its contents secure. The fluidity in craftsmanship is as impressive as Vázquez’s talent for Trojan Horsing metaphors about the human condition into a movie about teddy bears knifing unicorns and unicorns goring teddy bears. If that was the whole picture, then Unicorn Wars would still be worth watching as an exercise in bad taste filmmaking and gonzo animation, like an extended episode of Happy Tree Friends constructed with actual skill. Ridiculous as it sounds, though, there’s more to Vázquez’s neon and gore-soaked vision than its grody particulars give away at first glance. Openly raunchy as his film may be, under that surface, it’s downright biblical.—Andy Crump
25. Anselm
It’s rare to find 3D present in a quiet documentary about German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. It’s even rarer, though, to find the technology used in a manner that feels intentional and vital to its film’s storytelling, successfully eluding 3D’s propensity to come across as gimmicky or cheap. Both of these rarities are found in the mesmeric gold mine that is Wim Wenders’ Anselm. Anselm combines the filmmaker’s technical mastery with a deep curiosity for his subject to create an experience that is as thought-provoking as it is immersive. Shot in 6K-resolution by cinematographer Franz Lustig, Anselm presents a cinematic experience of Anselm Kiefer’s oeuvre, which probes complex themes of human existence, German nationalism, Nazism, poetry, science, mythology, religion, literature and the cyclical nature of history. Filmed over the course of two years, Anselm traces the artist’s path from his native Germany to his current home in France, connecting the stages of his life to the essential places of his career that spans more than five decades. Within the first few seconds, we are immediately transported into Kiefer’s world. This is achieved through a combination of strategic 3D placement and crisp, high-resolution imaging. The depth created through three-dimensional processing creates an overwhelming sense of realism. The images possess such details that they create the illusion that you are viewing them with the naked eye. It’s the first time I have ever truly felt as if I could reach out and touch the objects on a screen. It’s an incredibly immersive experience—and it’s incredibly beautiful. A standout moment happens just two minutes into the film: We’re outside on a still fall morning. The camera floats from a gorgeous wide shot of one of Kiefer’s wedding dress sculptures across to an hilly landscape. As the camera glides away, the sun begins to peek through from the mountains in the distance. The bright orange light, brought to the foreground through the use of 3D processing, feels so real, you almost expect to feel warmth on your skin. It’s subtle, yet divine. Wenders fills the sonic landscape with readings of poems, like “Todesfuge” by Paul Celan—the inspiration behind Kiefer works such as Margarethe (1981) and Your Golden Hair, Margarethe (1981)—haunting whispers from unknown female speakers, and voiceover by Kiefer. The result of this is something much more truthful than what could be uncovered by listening to any talking head. You’ve been allowed a glimpse of what it’s like to be inside Kiefer’s mind and soul for 93 minutes. The seamless flow of spoken thoughts and ideas, mirrored by the smooth, crane-shot visuals, gives the illusion of floating through memories, space and time. We feel Kiefer’s need to create. The work feels organic and, though incredibly intimate, never invasive. For its historical relevance, its personal connections to both filmmaker and subject, and its immersive nature, Anselm is well worth experiencing—yes, in 3D.—Kathy Michelle Chacón
24. Saint Omer
In the largely white seaside commune of Berck-sur-Mer, nestled in France’s northernmost reaches, literature professor Rama (Kayije Kagame) stands out. This is primarily a matter of her skin color, a rich, flawless pecan in striking contrast to the town’s oatmeal-hued locals. But there’s also the fact of her dimension, her statuesque frame. When she first arrives in Berck, people turn their heads. In the best case scenario, Rama’s steely beauty leaves them stunned. In the worst, they simply see her for her Blackness. Rama’s outsider status is central to her role in Saint Omer, Senegalese filmmaker Alice Diop’s latest film and departure from her traditional mode as a documentarian. Like Frederick Wiseman’s A Couple, Saint Omer welds fiction with fact; it’s based on the awful case of Fabienne Kabou, who in 2016 was tried for leaving her 15-month-old child to her death on the beach at high tide. Diop attended the trial, and the experience clearly made an impression on her. Saint Omer views Kabou’s crime and the story unfolding in its wake through the lenses of motherhood and daughterhood, arguing that neither can be disentwined from the other. Like Diop, Rama travels to Berck to witness the trial of a woman accused of murdering her 15-month-old; here, that figure is Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), a student and Senegalese immigrant. And like Diop, Rama intends to fashion Laurence’s transgression into narrative fiction, as a retelling of the tale of Medea. Not that Saint Omer treats Laurence as a monster, of course. Diop peels back layer after layer of humanity in the film, confronting Laurence’s awful deed head-on and clear-eyed all while sparing her judgments made through blinders. There is a version of Saint Omer where the horror of the subject gives way to horror as a genre; Diop has instead gone for a straight ahead interpretation of a nauseating tragedy, where the only thing harder to swallow than infanticide is the realization that there’s very little anyone burdened by Rama’s doubts can do but learn to live with them.–Andy Crump
23. Godzilla Minus One
Big G returns in utterly triumphant fashion in 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, which immediately feels like the most direct corollary to Gojira that the series has ever produced, while thoughtfully modernizing so many of its elements. Wisely, despite the transition to full-on CGI effects to bring Godzilla to life, the creators still capture his stiff, upright movement as it’s always been, the physical remnant of having been played by a man in a suit. Rarely, however, has the sheer mass of the monster been captured so vividly and terrifyingly as it is here, as we watch whole sections of roadway buckle and leap into the air after each of his thunderous footfalls–not to mention the incredible destructive spectacle of his atomic breath. This Godzilla is genuinely terrifying, a rampaging beast without an ounce of mercy or nobility to him. This likewise results in the odd situation where we actually find ourselves genuinely rooting for the human characters to vanquish and defeat Godzilla for once, a rare state of mind for the Godzilla series that is empowered by Minus One‘s sympathetic protagonist Kōichi Shikishima, a man trying desperately to find either a reason to live or the courage to die following the horrors of the second world war. He’s surrounded by salt-of-the-earth Japanese citizens who band together to overcome a truly impossible-seeming obstacle, with an unexpectedly hopeful depiction of human ingenuity and selflessness. An absolutely outstanding kaiju film in general, and one of the few to ever successfully make the human characters an effective center of the action.–Jim Vorel
22. Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One
A scene in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One defines all Tom Cruise is and will ever be, arguably charting—in the language of death-defying action and in the voice of Hollywood A-lister beatitudes—the whole arc of contemporary blockbuster franchise filmmaking. Recovering with his team of Impossible Mission Force (IMF) agents following one of the worst catastrophes they’ve yet faced, Ethan Hunt (Cruise, asexual and totemic) admits to a new team member that, while he can’t guarantee he will keep them safe, he can guarantee that he’ll care more about their lives than his own. Not expecting such unmitigated humanity in the midst of such potential worldwide cataclysm, the new agent stares through welling tears. “But you don’t know me,” they say. “Does it matter?” Tom Cruise and Ethan Hunt both respond. Whether Cruise is capable of making a film that doesn’t reckon with his legacy? That’s not this one’s job. Helmed by director Christopher McQuarrie on his third go at M:I, Dead Reckoning Part One reaches back 28 years to the first film, not only bringing back Kittridge (Henry Czerny) as the head of the IMF, appointed apparently after Director Hunley’s (Alec Baldwin, ejected from the franchise with impeccable timing) murder in Fallout, but culling reverently from De Palma’s penchant for paranoid close-ups and canted angles, for long-held shots obsessed with the creased faces of defiantly sweaty men, studying their buttery eyes for omens. Dead Reckoning Part One’s plot, as convoluted as the best in the franchise, comes together stupendously. Every facet, from sound and set design to Cruise’s sheer athleticism to how McQuarrie knows exactly where to place the camera to embrace that athleticism, coalesces into a very real, often breathtaking sense of peril that’s mostly absent from every other IP that’s lasted this long. Cruise is showing us what kind of death it takes to achieve the immortality cinema promises.—Dom Sinacola
21. Priscilla
If Sofia Coppola specializes in depicting young and feminine life from the inside of a gilded cage, Priscilla features her most gilded cage since Marie Antoinette. Is Graceland, the Memphis home of Elvis Presley, our American Versailles? At least Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) is eventually whisked there by choice, though perhaps it amounts to a similar parental neglect for her well-being. When Priscilla, at the tender age of 14, is spotted at an American military diner in Germany and invited to a party at Presley’s home, her parents hesitate to grant their permission. But in the film’s telling, they’re more concerned by the details of general propriety, their reluctance eased by assuring phone calls about how Priscilla will be chaperoned and Mr. Presley is on the up-and-up. They may be missing the forest for the trees. Priscilla, though, is enthralled. She’s sleepwalking through her freshman year of high school in an unfamiliar place, and the attentions of Elvis (Jacob Elordi) flatter her, make her feel grown up. Elvis towers over this little girl – the height difference between the two actors, with Elordi standing nearly half a foot taller than the real Presley, perfectly exaggerates and distends the physical distance between them, even as they grow close. The resulting relationship, and eventually marriage, is at once deeply intimate, as the two nuzzle in bed together for days, and removed, as Priscilla is not exactly welcomed into Presley’s fold. Large swaths of his life, like his adventures in Hollywood, remain shielded from her gaze. Colonel Tom Parker, the notorious manager so memorably portrayed by Tom Hanks in Baz Luhrmann’s recent Elvis, is spoken of, never seen. Elordi would appear to be performing at a major disadvantage, playing Elvis so soon after Austin Butler embodied the singer with impressive electricity and stage presence. Instead, his Elvis feeling like a charismatic imitation is just about perfect for the role as conceived here, both larger-than-life in aura and sorta underwhelming in the day-to-day. Throughout these bits and pieces of odd domestic life, Spaeny, is conducting a small miracle. She initially plays a 14-year-old girl from the vantage of her mid-twenties, and with such conviction that when we see an older Priscilla (one who is closer to Spaney’s real-life age), it provokes a jolt of surprise. The part of Priscilla’s life shown in the film – the waiting, the isolation, the prison of male perceptions and expectations of femininity – could easily resemble hell. With her trademark acuity, Coppola finds moments of beauty, too: a roller-rink glow, the nostalgic edges of early home movies, the girl-world rituals like toenail-painting and eyelash application. It’s both seductive and terribly sad.–Jesse Hassenger
20. Anatomy of a Fall
Anatomy of a Fall is the tale of a stone-cold female author who steals her husband’s book idea, then mercilessly murders him. It’s also the sorry story of a widow who must defend herself in court after her depressed husband commits suicide by jumping from the attic window of their remote home in the French Alps. The truth remains ambiguous; we may learn the ending of the trial, but we will never know what really happened. The facts of the case: Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is a writer whose books often borrow from her life—the death of her mother, the emotional rift from her father, and the accident that left her 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) partially blind. Her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), also a writer, was unable to pick Daniel up from school on time, leading to the accident, and thus blamed himself. One morning, Daniel goes on a walk with his dog Snoop and returns to find his father dead in the snow. Sandra, the only other person present in the house at the time, is the prime suspect, although she claims she was asleep. Although filmmaker Justine Triet leaves the ending ambiguous, it’s fairly easy to parse which of these two films she set out to make. Sandra might be an icy protagonist, but Triet’s view of her is largely sympathetic. If your romantic life were put under the scrutiny of the law, without time for preparation, would you come out as the victim or the perpetrator? While it may be fun to debate whether or not Sandra is guilty, Anatomy of a Fall is most compelling as a picture of a grieving child working his way through his father’s death. Its interrogation of a marriage is a touch too clinical to deliver any real dramatic gut punches, due both to the nature of the procedural genre and Sandra’s chilly personality. But Machado-Graner’s tear-jerking performance as a heartbroken kid searching for impossible answers after discovering his father’s lifeless corpse is another story. Anatomy of a Fall may not reinvent the wheel, but it’s still one of the most sharply made courtroom dramas in recent memory. —Katarina Docalovich
19. Oppenheimer
For a visionary director of big-budget, big-studio, big-idea sci-fi/fantasy movies, Christopher Nolan has often seemed, if not exactly at war with himself, somehow prone to both methodically ascending his big, obvious building blocks and attempting to take wilder, more ambitious leaps. The real test of Nolan’s mettle is something like the great-man biopic – not because he’s insufficiently reverent (or dad-ish in his WWII-era interests), but because of the temptation to give himself fully to that innate squareness. Is the guy who evoked terrorism, the surveillance state, and Occupy Wall Street in service of Batman-movie plot points really up for a nuanced exploration of the legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb? Yes and no. Nolan’s Oppenheimer isn’t so much a great-man biopic as a great-man-but-maybe-not biopic, and at times, the writer-director seems hell-bent on channeling the instinctive, ethereal ambivalence of a Terrence Malick trip. It’s a fascinating spectacle in large part because Nolan isn’t especially Malickian at all (though at least that frame of reference might temporarily ease the overworked, underbaked Kubrick comparisons). Throughout the film, especially as it builds during its first hour, theoretical physicist Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is beset by cutaway visions of stars, waves, and eventually all-consuming fire, fragments of zoomed-in science, blown up to eye-dazzling, seat-rattling IMAX scale. Half the movie feels like a montage and three-quarters of it feels like a thriller; the clandestine elements of the Manhattan Project and the talk of Soviet spies give the movie a feeling of buttoned-up espionage. A showcase piece, of course, is the first atomic bomb test, where bits of nervous comic relief pop up until the blast drops out Nolan’s usually-booming sound mix, leaving only the sound of breathing for a minute or two. It’s an awe-inspiring and discomfiting climax that hurtles Oppenheimer out of his preferred theoretical realm and into a void of reality. As much peripheral stargazing as the movie offers, it’s more interested in wrapping its mind around a 20th century horror that is, for many Americans, both abstract and intensely nightmarish. There is a clenched, impacted sadness to this semi-opaque figure who spearheads the creation of a bomb whose purpose is all too scrutable in the broader historical view. It might seem reductive to relate Oppenheimer’s merging of theoretical physics and practical project management to the way Nolan balances indelible images with practicality, creating an unlikely workmanlike poetry. It does explain, though, where some of that poetry comes from, and why even some of the movie’s more obvious points are able to shake up the audience, not just the premium-large-format multiplex seats. Nolan-via-Oppenheimer offers an explanation for this early in the movie, talking about his chosen field: “It’s paradoxical, and yet it works”—Jesse Hassenger
18. Poor Things
Yorgos Lanthimos’ off-kilter, pastel-drenched Poor Things opens with static shots of silken embroidery. It is hard to ascertain the images themselves, threaded so neatly in a near-identical gray. But the slippery, elusive texture is integral to the film, which weaves together something thick and rich with detail. What follows is narrow in its focus and big and engulfing in its scale: The story of a young woman who must overcome the experiments enacted against her while embracing her changing body and irrepressible urges. As such, this adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s book of the same name is difficult to summarize, loosely following Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) as she grows to embrace adulthood despite the overbearing tutelage of her de facto father God (Willem Dafoe). Once introduced to the dashing and cocky Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), Bella recognizes the pitfalls of her sheltered life and endeavors to travel around the world, experiencing life anew before marrying her father’s sweet and bumbling assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). Lying in the genre gulf between science fiction and straightforward drama, Poor Things also finds time to unleash Stone’s ability as a physical comedian, building a sticky, entrancing bodily language that lives somewhere between twitchy, childlike enthusiasm and mystical knowingness. She wanders through their eclectic family home with an unsteady gait, crashing into delicately hung porcelain displays and cackling rather than cowering at the destruction which follows. It is a deliciously amoral journey, the kind that has already secured Lanthimos ample praise over the course of his career. But this is perhaps the filmmaker’s most garish and confident endeavor, using Bella’s naive perspective to design a world so heightened that it exists somewhere between a nightmare and a dream. Somewhat surprisingly, Poor Things feels like it is in conversation with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, right down to Stone’s robotic, doll-like physique. Where Barbie feels shallow and tentative in its understanding of what it means to physically grow up, Poor Things is bold and radically (at times uncomfortably) honest. It will satisfy fans of Lanthimos’ previous work and perhaps win over new viewers who are desperate to engage in the kind of coming-of-age stories that propel the genre forward. —Anna McKibbin
17. John Wick: Chapter 4
Early in John Wick: Chapter 4, our titular Baba Yaga—played by Keanu Reeves after a decade as a near-mute terminator monk, his monastic frock a fine three-piece bulletproof suit and his tonsure a greased-down mane the color of night—is still in hiding following Chapter 3’s cliffhanger. Of course, an ever-increasing bounty on his head hasn’t stopped him from continuing to murder a lot of people, including the Elder (George Georgiou), who’s not the same Elder from Chapter 3, because, as this new Elder explains, he killed the last guy and took over, as the Elder did before that guy, and the Elder before that guy did to the guy before that guy. The convoluted hierarchy of the John Wick Murderverse exists only to multiply and grow more convoluted: In Chapter 2, no one sat above the High Table, except for, as introduced in Chapter 3, the Elder, who sits above and also beside it, but apparently has his share of problems. Just as the membership of the High Table is susceptible to sociopathic sibling rivalry (see Chapter 2), there will always be another Elder to kill, another personal war to wage, another henchman to shoot repeatedly in the face. “No one, not even John Wick, can kill everyone,” we hear said in an awed tone. But no, he must kill everyone. This is what we want and this is how this ends, how John Wick can be free: He kills the whole world. If Chapter 3 began immediately following Chapter 2, rarely letting up from its video game formula as levels grew more difficult and bad guys became more immune to John Wick’s superpower (murder), then Chapter 4 is the franchise’s most deliberate entry yet. With three movies worth of stakes and worldbuilding behind it, Chad Stahelski’s latest hyper-violent opus is a modern masterpiece of myth-making indulgence and archetypal action cinema. Stahelski and Reeves know that their movie must inhale genres, superstars, models, singers, Oscar winners and martial arts icons, DTV and prestige alike; consume them and give them space to be sacrificed gloriously to a franchise that values them. Behold Donnie Yen—who feels absolutely at home in the Murderverse—but also Hiroyuki Sanada and Rina Sawayama and Clancy Brown and Scott Adkins, the latter given a lengthy neck-snapping set piece that’s both scene-chewing madness and an expected physical display from Adkins. It’s all patient and omnivorous and beyond ridiculous. Stahelski wields bodies to push them to god-like ends. Everything on screen is stupendous. This is what we want, to watch John Wick murder the whole world, forever and ever amen.—Dom Sinacola
16. Kokomo City
One of the most exciting non-fiction entries to this year’s Sundance is a radical, on-the-ground pulpit from which four Black trans sex workers talk their shit. Putting transphobia within and without Black culture on blast, Kokomo City raises a curtain to reveal four stars: Daniella Carter, Dominique Silver, Liyah Mitchell and Koko Da Doll. Actually, make that five stars. Filmmaker D. Smith, a trans musician making her feature debut, keeps the rollicking conversations and righteously indignant monologues barreling along in beautiful black-and-white as we laugh, cry and commiserate with women whose experiences and insights are only outweighed by their personalities. From the opening anecdote, about a client setting a massive pistol on the bed as he receives head, you understand that these escorts are braver than the troops. Laughing off nightmares like that, running through lists of friends that have been killed by the same men paying them, their resilience forms the sobering foundation of an overwhelmingly entertaining experience. But of course, queer storytellers have always been able to—had to—turn tragedy into exuberant art. Smith refuses to undersell this seriousness while her aesthetic refuses to bury her subjects’ pop under their oppression: If Kokomo City lacks anything, it’s certainly not pizzazz. The soundtrack, some of which was provided by Smith, offers up lyrical laughs, as do the score’s sudden shifts (dopey cartoon tunes play when a worker recounts what it’s like to be approached by a stereotypically macho would-be client) and the on-screen subtitles that chronicle its fast-talking, no-holds-barred interviewees. Carter (the undeniable breakout of the bunch, exuding charisma and eloquent thoughtfulness) compares trans women to broken-down cars that still rev like hot rods—under attack but, defiantly, all the more extravagant for it. Kokomo City follows suit: It’s got a handmade underdog feel, loose and close and raw, but every DIY frame is fierce. Kokomo City vibrates with that energy in part because Smith did…pretty much everything. In addition to directing and contributing to the soundtrack, she also shot, edited and produced the doc. With that level of auteurism comes plenty of personality and a tight tempo. Aside from magnetic subjects that would give Portrait of Jason a run for its money, there’s a kineticism of shape and setting—hopping between New York and Georgia, between apartment couches and shadowy cars, between homes filled with love and those where the loneliness reverberates, between reenacting blowjobs and blowing smoke rings—that churns your body as the political, racial, queer theories put forth by the women dance in your mind. Hilarious, scary, tragic and sometimes flat-out jaw-dropping, Kokomo City is a gripping and accessible dissection of modern life, told through a brutally specific point of view.—Jacob Oller
15. The Holdovers
Alexander Payne takes us back to school in order to satirize the larger American political landscape in The Holdovers, but his once-acidic tone has undoubtedly taken a shift toward the sincere since newcomer Reese Witherspoon first hit our screens as know-it-all Tracy Flick in Election nearly 25 years ago. Now, with the early 1970s-set holiday drama The Holdovers, his indictment of the American Dream may burn more slowly, but the gut punch Payne packs is no less severe, so long as you aren’t put off by a healthy dose of nostalgia. Stinky, sweaty, disgruntled Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti with a lazy eye), a hardass Ancient Civilizations professor who makes no attempt to hide how much he despises his “vulgar” students, is put in charge of babysitting the students whose parents don’t want to deal with them over the Christmas holiday break. “And I thought all the Nazis had left for Argentina,” quips the smartass leader of the gang, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), when Paul harshly disciplines the boys for fighting. Angus and Paul are not alone, as they are joined by Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the head of the school cafeteria, who recently lost her beloved son Curtis, himself a Barton alum, in the Vietnam war. If this sounds like the trappings of an “unlikely family of outsiders finds understanding during the holidays” kind of movie, it’s because that’s exactly what The Holdovers is. Neither Payne nor screenwriter David Hemingson are afraid to lean into the romantic notion that three disparate people with vastly different circumstances can briefly come together as a family, especially during Christmastime, for Christ’s sake. All three of the protagonists are hiding deeply held secrets and desires that are slowly revealed over the course of their time together, to the point that they truly come to rely on each other for trustworthy companionship. All of this is only plausible thanks to Hemingson’s well-developed screenplay, strong performances from all three leads and The Holdovers’ refined, cozy vibe. The syrupy soundtrack and softly glowing photography set the snug tone. If Election is a shot of tequila, The Holdovers is a slow succession of sips of bourbon that you don’t realize have affected your spatial awareness until you get out of your armchair.—Katarina Docalovich
14. The Beasts
Director Rodrigo Sorogoyen draws on two pieces of history for The Beasts’ structure. First, Napoleon’s Spanish campaign in the 1800s, a seed sown centuries ago and yielding fruit in the film’s present. Second, and more importantly, the awful story of Martin Verfondern, German-born, Dutch-naturalized, expatriated in the Galician village of Santoalla, and murdered by his neighbors, Juan Carlos and Julio Rodríguez, in January of 2010. For the spoiler allergic, this constitutes a spoiler, but The Beasts is made with assurance and no small amount of tension, both of which blunt its headline problem: You may know of Verfondern, but you will forget about his fate under the film’s dramatic spell. Such is Sorogoyen’s talent as a writer and director. His carefully assembled and wholeheartedly dedicated cast helps, too. The Beasts swaps Verfondern for Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and Olga (Marina Foïs) Denis, progressive, learned, well-traveled, happily married and ready to start a new chapter in their lives by working the land in the Galician countryside. Their methods hew toward farming’s crunchier side. Pepiño (José Manuel Fernández y Blanco), the Denis’ warm-hearted and quick-witted neighbor, raises an eyebrow at stretches of land left bare. The welcome party doesn’t comprise the entire village, of course. Brothers Xan (Luis Zahera) and Lorenzo (Diego Anido) don’t like Antoine. Xan pours all of his contempt into his interactions with Antoine, save for the latter’s attempt at a drinks summit that humanizes them both and glimmers with the chance for amends. The scene takes place an hour and change into The Beasts’ beefy 130-minute duration, and supplies the most suspense out of even the film’s objectively dangerous moments; a nighttime encounter on a backroad—where a rifle-toting Lorenzo and devilishly plastered Xan block Antoine and Olga’s way to their home—strikes terror, but terror is fleeting. Hope given and snatched away cuts considerably deeper. The blunt, clear-eyed perspective Sorogoyen and his longtime comrade-at-writing, Isabel Peña, take on the war waged between Antoine and Xan, between outsider and native, between France and Spain, is apneic. Xan’s mounting animus, and Antoine’s churning indignation, clang against one another even when they aren’t sharing the same physical space, which has a way of sucking the oxygen out of the room even in the film’s quietest moments, or perhaps especially in those moments. The sensation of observing these details fold into one another and unfold as a narrative isn’t that far off from turning the pages of a novel, or even a newspaper; that’s the journalistic effect of Sorogoyen’s filmmaking. The Beasts comes years after Andrew Becker’s Santoalla, a documentary feature about Verfondern’s murder, but for all of Sorogoyen’s edits to the truth, his fiction strikes just as hard. —Andy Crump
13. Showing Up
Two years after her affecting First Cow hit theaters, Kelly Reichardt doesn’t stray from the Pacific Northwest setting where four of her other films take place. This time, she trades 17th century Oregon County for the present-day Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland, where her exasperated lead, Lizzie (Michelle Williams), works as a day job. When she’s not working, Lizzie is crafting uncanny, rigid portraits of women in disjointed poses, whether in watercolor on paper or in tangible clay, the latter of which being the medium she’s chosen to showcase in an upcoming show. But before Lizzie can arrive at her big day, she has to navigate a whirlwind of chaos: Her dysfunctional family; the contentious relationship with her landlord, neighbor and fellow artist, Jo (Hong Chau); and a poor, injured pigeon that her cat, Ricky, tormented one night. In her fourth collaboration with Reichardt, Williams is better than ever. Possibly overdone in beleaguered, regular-woman makeup this time around, Williams still best showcases just how lived-in of an actress she can be in Reichardt’s work. Every sigh she utters feels pulled down by weights, her slouch hurts to look at; her exhaustion bounces off the screen and infects the audience like an illness. And in spite of how done-up she is in order not to look like an actress, it is primarily in the physicality of her performance and the candor of her dialogue that she is believable as Lizzie, struggling artist. There is never a moment where Michelle Williams slips through the performance. But she’s also surprisingly droll, with Reichardt and co-writer Jonathan Raymond penning a number of lines made comic in Williams’ perfect deadpan. Lizzie strikes as the new apex of Williams and Reichardt’s consistently fruitful relationship, each installment since 2008’s Wendy and Lucy another rung reached in which the two have further hewn the synchronicity between artist and muse. Like Lizzie’s patchy figures, Reichardt’s camera fixates on obscured body parts and jerky zooms as it follows Lizzie working towards her opening night amidst a near-comical string of setbacks. However, the throughline humming through all the maelstrom of Lizzie’s life is creative insecurity. It comes across in how Lizzie carries herself, how she speaks about her art and how she speaks to others. It’s the light, minimalist touch of Reichardt’s atmosphere and her nurturing of interpersonal subtleties that engenders an overwhelming emotional intensity as Lizzie finally sets up her work on display in the gallery. One single, small row of figures in the middle of a large, empty space.—Brianna Zigler
12. The Killer
Naturally, an unnatural filmmaker like David Fincher could only make a hitman movie like The Killer. Adapting a vivid-yet-cold graphic novel into a thrilling-yet-mundane piece of character work, the Titan of Takes meticulously creates a nameless assassin who’d prefer if he wasn’t human at all. A technological man for technological times. Michael Fassbender’s narration-heavy performance as the Killer is one of robotic self-delusion. He is a man who loves perfection, who loves planning. A man who loves challenging executions and loves to think of himself as someone who—if he could just plan enough—is capable of anything. Embedded in his eventual failure is self-effacing humor, mocking this very ideal. It’s easy to pretend that you can optimize your life to programmatic perfection. There’s a whole industry devoted to this capitalistic goal, filled with productivity apps, tech wearables and organizational best practices. The Killer uses this worldview as its setting to ask, “Ok, what happens when you miss?” The Killer isn’t a self-aware guy, and Fincher-favorite writer Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven, rewrites of The Game and Fight Club) knows how to turn obnoxious, comic-like voiceover into revealing psychological commentary. The Killer refers to some suburbanites as “normies,” and you wonder if, after seeing his work co-opted as copypasta, Walker is now conversing directly with the edgelords. Maybe that’s why, despite his surface similarity in appearance, profession and aesthetic to Le Samouraï, the Killer is intentionally not the “cool” kind of hitman. He’s your friend’s dad, always traveling for work, addicted to his Apple Watch and airport amenities. His life is a series of suitcases, lines, and Ubers. Fincher’s process-focused photography—cut with precision by editor Kirk Baxter, framed with hard lines and a little more distance than you expect by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt—makes it clear the Killer is going through the motions, whether those motions are assembling his sniper in the middle of the night, dumping those gun parts, or stopping by McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin. Though the characters are irredeemable, the message is universal: We all end up in the same place, so what’s the use in pretending you’ve “solved” life? The unreliable conversation between aesthetics, genre and character creates something realistic, novel and modern—something Fincher is perfectly keyed into. By applying our technocapitalist present to the kind of person that this reality inevitably creates, Fincher’s created a thoroughly entertaining look at a pathetic crook—all while delivering a self-deprecating blow to clockwork living.—Jacob Oller
11. Barbie
Bursting with big ideas on the complexities surrounding womanhood, patriarchy and the legacy of its eponymous subject, Barbie scores a hat trick for its magnificent balance of comedy, emotional intelligence and cultural relevance. The picture begins with a playful homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Dawn of Man sequence. Except, in Gerwig’s prelude, the apes are young girls and the wondrous discovery they make is not a monolith, but a 100-foot tall bathing-suit-wearing Barbie (Margot Robbie), who is there to put an end to Planet Earth’s sexism with her mere aspirationalism. Life is idyllic until Robbie’s Barbie, who refers to herself as Stereotypical Barbie, begins to experience an unprecedented existential crisis. These uncharacteristic anxieties, coupled with the fact that her once-permanently-tippy-toed feet have fallen flat, lead Barbie on a quest to the Real World in hopes of returning back to her normal, carefree self. When her adoring Ken (Ryan Gosling) joins her in her cross-realm voyage, ideologies are swapped, havoc is wreaked and major changes are brought upon Barbie Land. Gerwig is grappling with these heavy ideas of patriarchy and gender, but Barbie always maintains a delightful sense of play and lightheartedness. This is largely due to the pink, campy, absurd and absolutely bewitching set work created by Barbie’s production designer, Sarah Greenwood, and set decorator, Katie Spencer. The incredible sets that we see in the film are real, tangible places whose presence create a nostalgic desire to feel, grab and touch. The believability of the sets—“this is a real Barbie Dream House and Robbie is a real life Barbie doll,” we think—makes for an interesting meta layer for the film. This sense of self-awareness touches almost every aspect of Barbie, from the set design to the campy performances and even its handling of its source material. Writers Gerwig and Noah Baumbach obviously have a soft spot for Robbie’s character, and the beauty of humans in general, but they don’t allow their work with a large corporation like Mattel to prevent them from exploring Barbie’s complicated legacy throughout the film. Like its protagonist, Barbie is all the things all at once. Funny. Sentimental. Entertaining. Confrontational. Celebratory. Heartfelt. Heartbreaking. Kooky. Emotional. And, maybe most interestingly of all, a damn good time capsule for what was exciting and frightening in mainstream culture at this particular societal moment.—Kathy Michelle Chacón
10. The Taste of Things
While ASMR is most heavily associated with the pleasures of sound, it would be nothing without the aesthetics. The way a cake spatula smooths a dollop of buttery frosting; the way egg noodles gleam under a coating of soy sauce. It might sound reductive to compare Vietnamese-French director Trần Anh Hùng’s lyrical work with a social media fad, but there is now an entire micro-industry dedicated to the way human beings have always lusted after the sensual impressions of food, an idea which is as much in conversation within The Taste of Things as that of the romance between its two leads. If there were no plot at all, The Taste of Things could still very easily coast on the visual and auditory pleasures of its subject: The culinary arts, to which Trần’s camera and microphone dedicate sumptuous displays of rich textures and decadent sizzles of in-process cookery, much of it spearheaded by veteran kitchen cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). Taking place in late 19th century France at the estate of the so-called “Napoleon of Culinary Arts” Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), The Taste of Things focuses on its residents. For Dodin and Eugénie, cooking is an erotic, romantic, intimate act. After the first meal of the film is enjoyed by Dodin and some colleagues, they all bemoan Eugénie’s welcome yet absent company at their dinner. Eugénie assures them she is speaking to them through her food. While Eugénie prepares a lavish spread for Dodin and his friends, she momentarily loses herself, seemingly to the understandable exhaustion that comes with dancing and careening through a hot kitchen. DP Jonathan Ricquebourg glides the camera around Eugénie and co., giving the banquet preparation a sense of precise choreography akin to ballet, all the way to the angle at which a wooden spoon slips through a pan of rich, creamy sauce. Throughout the narrative’s drama, the chemistry between Binoche and Magimel is as palpable as the food that their characters prepare together. And while the film remains free of explicit sex or nudity (though, one scene cheekily parallels Binoche’s nude silhouette with the curvature of a poached pear), the insinuations and implications carried by the appearance, sound and intent behind the cooking are far more sensuous. The Taste of Things is abundantly, if maybe overwhelmingly, accessible; it’s not particularly challenging to watch a film that’s quite literally as gratifying as a home-cooked meal.–Brianna Zigler
9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse webs its way into a far more jaded world, one overstuffed with superhero sequels, and specifically, multiverse storytelling. And yet Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse swings in and, yet again, wipes the floor with its genre brethren by presenting a sequel that is both kinetic and deeply emotional. The script by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) smartly builds upon the foundation of its already established characters, their relationships and the ongoing consequences from the first film to further explore the lives of secret teen superheroes Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) and Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) a year after the first film. The writers do so with a clear agenda to not only best themselves visually, but by upping the game of the now-familiar multiple-timeline tropes. Together with the talents of directing team Joaquim Dos Santos (The Legend of Korra), Kemp Powers (Soul) and Justin K. Thompson (Into the Spider-Verse), Across the Spider-Verse—across the board—swings for the cinematic fences in the rare sequel that feels like every frame has been crafted with the intention of wringing every bit of visual wonder and emotional impact that the animators, the performers and the very medium can achieve. The hybrid computer-animation meets hand-drawn techniques established in the first films returns with a more sleek execution that’s a bit easier on the eyes, which affords the animators to get even more ambitious with their array of techniques and character-centric presentations. The depth and breadth of the animation and illustration styles are jaw-dropping. There are frames you just want to fall into, they’re so beautifully rendered and conceived. If there’s any critique, it’s that the more action-centric sequences are almost too detailed, so that the incredible work of the animators moves off-screen so quickly that you feel like you’re not able to fully appreciate everything coming at you. As a middle film in the trilogy (Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse is due in theaters in 2024), it’s a joy to be able to say that Across the Spider-Verse stands well on its own, based on the merits of its story and stakes. There’s also a killer cliffhanger that sets the stage for a third chapter that doesn’t feel like it’s cheating its audience like some other recent films have done (cough Dune cough). In fact, repeat viewings of Across the Spider-Verse to bridge the gap until the final installment next year sounds like a great way to savor this film as it so richly deserves.—Tara Bennett
8. Passages
With Passages, Ira Sachs brings beautiful devastation. The thorny relationships he usually explores push on boundaries of monogamy, of commitment, of what it means to be with someone and stay with them through the complexity of years. The pressure he exerts on these limits—necessarily drawn (but not always happily accepted) with more give for queer people, particularly gay men—the love that ebbs and flows throughout this adversity, and the limits themselves stagger us with their realism. Passages is this close, painful, sexy twisting of the screws at its best, as Sachs and his frequent co-writer Mauricio Zacharias observe the havoc wreaked by a bisexual brat’s latest dalliance. Sachs so deftly avoids the stereotype of the greedy have-it-all bisexual that he comes back around on it, creating a perfectly punchable narcissist (who’s sexy enough to back up the bad behavior) in Tomas (Franz Rogowski). Given to whims and his own ego, Tomas leaves his bookish, quiet husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) behind at his film shoot’s wrap party in order to hook up with a rebounding extra, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Passages brilliantly and brusquely blows through the low-key, embarrassing, engrossing questions permeating non-monogamous queerness, encapsulated by the singularly focused story of a taker running rampant over the other people in his life. We’re allowed the dignity of applying the themes ourselves, Sachs subtly nudging us with the details of his brash three-way blow-up. It’s a dark thrill, real enough to open our own old wounds. A bittersweet reckoning deftly illustrated by a duo on opposite ends of a relationship’s chaotic twists and turns, Passages revels in the fallout of fucking around and finding out.—Jacob Oller
7. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
Raven Jackson’s debut feature, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, has a southern sense of memory that I adore. It’s not that the coming-of-age film—which ambles around Mississippi, dipping its fingers into the sun-warmed river of time—is full of particulars. At least, not like that usually means. There aren’t any Whataburgers or Ward’s, no recognizable football teams or radio-favorite needledrops. In fact, the movie is so poetic as to be nearly faceless, which means it could apply to so many of us. But it’s all specific to its central force. An opening moment sees young Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson) fishing with her father. It’s quiet, simple. Slow enough to allow memories of my own dad taking me fishing to bubble to the surface of my consciousness. The delicacy and patience, the youthful aggravation tainting the natural sensations all around. The film encourages this kind of dual awareness, where you hold both this movie’s memories and your own in your mind, and asks for the same kind of patience and quiet dedication as a parent on a fishing trip. If you assent, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is endlessly rewarding, a tactile sense-memory tapestry of all the things that matter. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt announces a confident, arresting new artist who’s willing to lean on more experimental techniques and structures to arrive at the honesty she seeks. Raven Jackson’s created a beautifully specific ode to a life fully lived, which helps make it an elegant instrument of subjectivity. Like the water from which it draws so much thematic meaning, its fluid motion and form can contort to fit whatever experiences you’ve encountered, whatever events you dread, whatever hopes you still nurture. And it’s all so closely observed you can almost reach out and touch it.–Jacob Oller
6. How to Blow up a Pipeline
Andreas Malm’s 2021 book How to Blow Up a Pipeline saw its argument for more climate activism morph into an argument for different climate activism. Money isn’t cutting it. Protests aren’t either. Maybe sabotage will. Its vitality flows like an antidote to the poisonous nihilism surrounding the climate crisis from progressives; its fiery points threaten the crisp piles of cash collected by conservatives. Filmmaker Daniel Goldhaber’s air-punching, chair-clenching, heart-in-mouth adaptation is the best way to convert people to its cause—whether they’re dark green environmentalists or gas-guzzling Senate Republicans. Adapting a nonfiction treatise on the limits of nonviolent protest into a specific, heist-like fiction is a brilliant move by Goldhaber and his co-writers Ariela Barer and Jordan Sjol. In its execution of a carefully crafted plan, held together by explosive and interpersonal chemistry, it thrusts us into its thrilling visualized philosophy. How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t naïve enough to rely on optimism, opting instead to radicalize competence. Think of How to Blow Up a Pipeline like a word problem. The most exciting word problem you can imagine, where the two trains leaving the station collide in an explosive snarl of steel, your onboard loved ones saved only by quick thinking and teamwork. How to Blow Up a Pipeline contextualizes its concepts into actions so we can better understand, internalize and identify with them. There’s not a moment lost getting us there. Malm’s chapters (”Learning from Past Struggles,” “Breaking the Spell” and “Fighting Despair”) are elegantly transposed, their high-level arguments humanized into character and conversation. The ensemble—led by student protestors Xochitl (Barer) and Shawn (Marcus Scribner), whose plan organically gathers together surly Native bomb-builder Michael (Forrest Goodluck), horny crustpunk couple Rowan (Kristine Froseth) and Logan (Lukas Gage), terminally ill Theo (Sasha Lane) and her reluctant girlfriend Alisha (Jayme Lawson), and disillusioned landowner Dwayne (Jake Weary)—is colorfully drawn and filled out through savvy, well-cut flashbacks. Everyone has their reasons, and we have everyone’s back. By structuring its simple plot (blow up a goddamn pipeline) as a zigzag, How to Blow Up a Pipeline builds its team without losing steam. It’s as efficient and thoughtful in its planning as its heroes, and the results are just as successful. It’s as satisfying as any good bank job, only it’s stealing a little bit more time on this planet from the companies looking to scorch the earth. Responding to tragedy not with hopelessness but with proficiency, it’s not a dreamy or delusional movie. It knows its sabotage doesn’t take place in a vacuum. It understands that people get hurt. What makes How to Blow Up a Pipeline great, is that it so deftly wins us to its cause anyway. It’s absolutely electric filmmaking.—Jacob Oller
5. May December
Partway through Todd Haynes’ May December, actor Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) is asked how she chooses her roles by a group of high school drama students. Elizabeth is in town to research her upcoming lead role in a ripped-from-the-tabloids independent movie, a part she hopes will be statement enough to eclipse the work she’s currently recognized for (playing a veterinarian on a show called Norah’s Ark, just one of screenwriter Samy Burch’s winky little jokes about the biz). Her next part is decidedly not as family friendly: Elizabeth is set to play Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a former teacher who made the news 20 years ago for having a sexual relationship with and subsequently marrying one of her seventh-grade students, Joe (Charles Melton). May December offers up a tantalizingly ambiguous answer to the question posed during that drama class visit. As she insinuates herself into the Atherton-Yoos’ life—tagging along with Gracie and her daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu) as they shop for prom dresses, taking notes on the makeup brands Gracie uses, shadowing Joe at work—we begin to wonder whether Elizabeth’s devotion to the role comes only from a desperate desire to be taken seriously as an actor, or if there’s something deeper and darker lurking within. Burch’s script—and Portman’s brilliantly cryptic performance—keep these possibilities balanced on a fine edge. We’re never completely sure if Elizabeth is just going ultra-Method when, for example, she complains that the boys auditioning for the part of young Joe aren’t “sexy enough,” or when she visits the pet shop stockroom where the couple were first discovered and simulates the sexual encounter that led to Gracie’s arrest. The disturbing possibility that the two women are secretly more alike than Elizabeth lets on only grows when she talks to the drama students about sex scenes—telling them that, sometimes, the acting is in pretending she’s not enjoying them. That smudging of the line between Gracie and Elizabeth physically manifests in the gradual converging of their appearances in cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt’s inspired Bergman-esque images. May December is a film of great tonal delicacy, as Haynes, Burch and their actors delicately modulate the film between high camp and twisted psychological drama. Pulling off such a seemingly incongruous blend of sensationalism and sincere thoughtfulness is no easy task, but writer and director miraculously find a way to ease the tension between style and substance—and, what’s more, manage to deliver wry commentary on the way we consume scandals at the same time.–Farah Cheded
4. Past Lives
Named partially for inyun—a Korean concept encompassing fate, intention and consequence, like a reincarnation-bridging butterfly effect—Past Lives’ bittersweet romance brings to mind Longfellow’s ships passing in the night. Not because the decades-spanning relationship between Greta Lee’s Nora and Teo Yoo’s Hae Sung is inconsequential, but because it is consequential in spite of its briefness and its emotional opacity. It reminds us that it is possible to encounter magic, conjured by the flow of everyday actions, when we pass people multiple times along our lives’ intertwining rivers. It reminds us that tethering your life to someone else’s to brave the current together is an act of defiant perseverance. Drawing from a long tradition of yearning romances, while showcasing debut writer/director Celine Song’s unique abilities with precise writing and delicate scene-crafting, Past Lives flows from decade to decade with ease, encompassing immigration, coming-of-age, and creative and romantic ennui—only to reach a heartrending acceptance of our exquisite inability to have it all. Nora isn’t really caught between East and West, just as she is never really caught between her childhood crush Hae Sung and her husband Arthur (John Magaro). Whenever we meet her—whether as a kid, about to leave Hae Sung and Korea behind, or as a twentysomething connecting with him on Skype, or as a married woman hosting his visit to New York—she’s made her choices, or has had them made for her. Song’s strongest thematic thrust as she navigates the film’s three acts—spanning Nora’s childhood, loneliness, reconnection, loss and re-reconnection—is that this isn’t exceptional. Drawing from her own experience and a keen sense of psychology, Song writes clever, contained, jewel box conversations. They can have the hesitant, rekindling awkwardness of Yi Yi, or—thanks to an effective use of hairstyling and wardrobe (as well as the posture and demeanor of its leads)—the ambling melancholy of Richard Linklater’s meditations on time’s passage. But they all allow Lee and Yoo (both in star-making performances) quiet depth. Past Lives is a powerful and delicate debut, a beautiful necklace strung with crystalized memories. Its ideas on love and time, and how one impacts the other, are simple and sear across your heart. It is about all the potential people we could have been, and how none of them matter as much as the person we are—and the fool’s errand of trying to figure out what we’d be if we cobbled ourselves together differently. Those possibilities are best left in the past. Besides announcing Song as a brilliant observer of dialogue, interaction, and tone, Past Lives is a strikingly romantic movie about what composes our lives. We are the decisions we make, and the decisions others make for us. But we are also the collection of connections we make, living ship’s logs, dutifully recorded. Each repeat encounter is a minor miracle, and every first encounter has that potential. And there can be love in each, however brief.—Jacob Oller
3. Asteroid City
While The French Dispatch crammed an impressive amount of narrative into its kinetic structure, Asteroid City’s journey to the intersection between California, Arizona and Nevada feels positively placid. The film is a story within a story, structured as a television show about a playwright trying to put together a production called “Asteroid City.” We bounce back and forth from the TV movie about the creation of the play, to a production of the play itself using the same characters, switching between black-and-white sequences narrated by a Rod Serling-like Bryan Cranston, and the Kodachrome splendor realized in the desert setting on the virtual stage. Thus, we have actors being actors playing actors, the kind of narrative playfulness that’s too often ignored when focusing on Anderson’s iconic visuals and soundtrack choices. The result is a meta-narrative constantly folding back on itself (in one of the film’s more playful moments, Cranston’s character accidentally appears in the color sequence, and quickly sees himself out), an alien invasion adventure story and family drama wrapped within the setting of a classic Western, where offramps literally lead nowhere and the seemingly regular shootout down the main street is the only interruption to what otherwise bucolic setting. From the opening moments, the immaculate production design explodes off the screen, the onscreen filigrees and dynamic color scheme a feast for the eye. There’s a mix between the stagey and the decidedly down to earth, with hand-painted signs advertising milkshakes dwarfed by background rock formations that are as theatrical as any Broadway flat. It’s but one way the film toys with our perception of the characters, both believing in their small and intimate moments, but always made aware of the artifice. There are of course many cinematic references, from the schlock of ‘50s sci-fi to more than a hint of Close Encounters that also fueled last year’s Nope. There are also echoes to many of Anderson’s own films. There’s so much joy on screen, so much playfulness, that it’s perhaps churlish to complain about any missteps. While not as deeply moving as some, or downright thrilling as others in Anderson’s filmography, it’s a journey to the desert well worth taking.—Jason Gorber
2. Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese has made a career telling stories that tackle issues of justice, retribution and betrayal. From his overt and poetic crime films, through to his dark comedies, religious parables and character pieces, he has long been drawn to stories where the ambiguities of life collide with the complexities of survival, and where day-to-day choices result in consequences sometimes obvious, and sometimes far more subtle and insidious. With Killers of the Flower Moon, he crafts an ambitious historical drama that’s tragedies echo to this day, an observation of a criminal case that transformed the U.S. justice system and, perhaps too subtly, an allusion to the ongoing epidemic of murders targeting Indigenous women—acts of unsolved violence that are left to languish, continuing to afflict both my country of Canada and Scorsese’s native land. The displaced Nation of the Osage—kicked from their lands back East and forced to travel West, their population decimated—found themselves at the heart of a financial miracle. By coincidence or providence, the land that they called their own in Oklahoma proved to be a rich oil deposit, and the boon resulted in what was then extraordinary wealth for the Native population—but also enormous opportunities for exploitation and violence from those set to extract the oil. The Osage were granted certain economic benefits, but the very withdrawal of their funds was tightly monitored, a paternalistic system that did little to protect from those nefarious in their intentions. One way the system could be subverted was through marriage, and it’s here that the film takes its central story, landing somewhere between love and larceny. Lily Gladstone plays Mollie Burkhart, a beautiful young woman who is helping care for her elderly mother (legendary Cree/Métis actress Tantoo Cardinal). At the behest of his powerful cattle rancher uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro), returning soldier Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) is encouraged to flame the sparks of affection with Mollie both for personal benefit and to potentially secure a line into this lucre. Scorsese elicits terrific performances and provides a canvas for a remarkable story. The way he illustrates the ease in which lies are told and promises betrayed is deeply affecting, as is the way in which individual characters are given space to be complex, with flaws and contradictory feelings intact.–Jason Gorber
1. The Boy and the Heron
Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel How Do You Live? is a time capsule, preserving the virtues of the society it was made and circulated in. It’s about how to live as a good person in this world, about the childhood experience of discovering difference, disparity, and loss—and, thus, turning to philosophy. The influence of the text is apparent in Miyazaki’s work at Ghibli. While the protagonist of his latest film, Mahito (Soma Santoki), is styled around Miyazaki’s childhood, Miyazaki himself appears as he is today more directly in the figure of Mahito’s granduncle (Shōhei Hino), a man who built a mysterious library on the family estate decades ago before disappearing into his stories forever. The Boy and the Heron, released in Japan with the same name as Yoshino’s novel, becomes a firm reminder of the need to grow up, but one that recognizes the importance of the ephemeral experiences of childhood. Unlike Miyazaki’s semi-biographical 2013 swan song The Wind Rises, the quasi-autobiographical The Boy and the Heron is styled as the fantasy Bildungsroman that he became famous for—with a mature, edgier bent. The opening sequence depicts a 1943 firebombing, rendered with striking animation that entirely breaks with the art style of the rest of the film, veering into the abstract. Mahito’s ill mother dies in the flames. Afterwards, the 12-year-old moves to the countryside as his father Shoichi (Takuya Kimura), an industrialist contributing to the war effort, remarries his late mother’s younger sister, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura). Unlike the bucolic farmland of My Neighbor Totoro that imagines a space closer to nature or the remnants of a nostalgic past in Spirited Away that facilitates its fantastical traversal, the impetus for Mahito’s journey is an act of self-harm. The spirits find Mahito, feverish and delirious, on the family’s rural estate. A particularly nettlesome gray heron (Masaki Suda) harasses the boy, drawing him towards the site of his coming-of-age journey. His guide hereafter is apprehensive, the fantasies tainted with death and decay. From here, the script (trans. Don Brown) is perhaps Miyazaki’s best. Sharing its outline with all these past films, The Boy and the Heron utilizes a different narrative mode: The mythic. This is a fantasy world that deals in archetypes instead of history orientated by the polemics of fascists and philosophers. Everything is handled with delicate ambivalence, all implicit, the intentions left ambiguous. It is an open text begging to be read. Some may get the impression the film says nothing at all, but The Boy and the Heron is ultimately something more enduring than an edification. Synthesizing the virtues Yoshino wrote of a pre-war Japan with the terror of growing up in its collapsing empire, Miyazaki draws the world in its entirety. Through decades of refining his craft and iterating on this familiar story, Miyazaki has honed The Boy and the Heron into a platonic form—the kind held by Mahito’s philosopher-storyteller granduncle, who creates whole worlds with his small stone building blocks. To see The Boy and the Heron is to see Miyazaki. The film is as complicated as the man it is about, and this is what makes The Boy and the Heron a masterwork. I can see him still writing his stories, still drawing his airplanes.–Autumn Wright