136 pieces in this section.
Bertolucci's 1970 adaptation of Moravia is usually praised for its colour. The argument it actually makes is architectural: a man is sorted by the spaces he walks through.
The Zodiac killer is the least present figure in Zodiac. What the film dramatises instead is how knowledge fails to travel between desks, counties and decades.
Event Horizon lost money in 1997 and has been defended ever since, usually for the wrong reasons. The film that survived is a haunted house with a gravity drive for a cellar.
Dredd lost money in 2012 and has been winning arguments ever since. The film that failed and the film that lasted are the same film, and the reason is one tower block.
Wong Kar-wai's 2000 film is remembered as a romance of restraint. It is better understood as a film about frames: doorways, corridors and apertures that do the work the lovers will not.
John Carpenter's The Thing earned back its budget and was savaged anyway. The record says the film was not the problem. The poster, the tagline and the weekend it opened were.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi's three-hour adaptation is usually described as a film about grief. It is closer to a film about who is permitted to drive, and what a man gives up when he finally hands over the keys.
A $4 million picture grossed about $22.5 million, and Paramount still spent the spring of 1979 pulling its own advertising. The Warriors is a case study in a studio mistaking its audience for the film.
Chantal Akerman's 201-minute film is usually described as an endurance test. It is better understood as a ledger, and the scissors at the end are what happens when the sums stop coming out.
James Gunn's Superman was carrying a whole rebuilt DC on its back and still had to be a movie for two hours. It managed both, and the strain shows in exactly one place.
Celine Song's second feature was sold as a romantic triangle. It is really an argument about what happens to people once you agree to put a number on them.
Edgar Wright's Stephen King adaptation took $69 million worldwide on a $110 million budget. The film was fine. The price tag assumed a star Paramount had never actually tested.
Kleber Mendonça Filho's Recife thriller left the Academy Awards with nothing from four nominations. Its subject was never the chase. It was who gets to keep the record of a city.
Everybody wrote about the Predator becoming the protagonist. The genuinely dangerous decision was the rating, and it returned $184.6 million on a $105 million budget.
Paul Thomas Anderson's Pynchon adaptation took six Academy Awards and $213.1 million, and the reason it works is a running joke about a man who cannot remember a phrase.
Zach Cregger spent a decade writing sketch comedy and then applied the sketch runner's structure to a film about seventeen missing children. It made $270 million on $38 million.
Danny Boyle made a film about a boy walking his mother across a dead country, then handed the last reel to a sequel he was not directing. The seam is visible and it is worth arguing about.
Sirāt opens as a father's search for a missing daughter and quietly stops being one. What replaces the search is the reason the film won six Goyas for craft.
Del Toro's Frankenstein is built in two halves that only work if you sit through both in one go. Netflix released it as something you can pause.
Miguel Gomes tells the same journey across colonial Asia twice, once as flight and once as pursuit, and the doubling turns out to be the whole argument of the picture.
Barry Levinson's mob drama had a Goodfellas screenwriter, a great cinematographer, and Robert De Niro playing both leads. It grossed 9.6 million dollars. Here is why.
Jafar Panahi's Palme d'Or winner is a revenge thriller built on a doubt that can never be cleared, and the doubt is the point.
Netflix reportedly spent around $320 million on The Electric State. The film that came out the other end is the clearest argument yet against frictionless money.
Eli Roth's Borderlands cost a reported $110 million and grossed about $33 million worldwide. The film is bad. The thing that made it a disaster happened in the edit room, three years before release.
Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value gives a family house more screen time than most films give their leads, and that decision is the whole argument of the picture.
Jia Zhangke built his new film out of twenty-two years of his own discarded footage. The result is the rare picture whose real subject is the time it took to shoot.
Madame Web is a genuinely bad film. It is more interesting as the public death certificate of Sony's plan to build a Spider-Man universe without Spider-Man in it.
Leigh Whannell's January 2025 Wolf Man cost about $25 million and grossed about $36 million globally. The film is not the disaster the numbers suggest. The strategy around it is.
Sean Baker's Brooklyn fairytale won five Academy Awards on the strength of two minutes of silence in a parked car. The film is more interested in what that silence costs.
Kristoffer Borgli's A24 feature used Nicolas Cage as the vehicle for a media satire that landed in late 2023 and has aged, through 2024 and into 2025, into a specifically sharper object than the reviews initially registered.
Eighteen months after Coralie Fargeat's prosthetic-heavy fable drew both Oscar nominations and walkouts, the strange alchemy of The Substance has only clarified. The film is less about Hollywood than it looks, and more about what we're allowed to say with bodies on screen.
Eggers' remake was received with admiration rather than fervour, a proper film from a proper filmmaker. Sixteen months later, it looks like the serious piece the year needed, and the one we were too cool to love properly at the time.
John Crowley's third collaboration with A24 runs the ten-year relationship in a non-linear shuffle, and the shuffle is what makes the film survive its cancer-drama premise. Just barely, but it does.
A year after The Brutalist swept its technical categories and divided audiences, its length has stopped looking like a gamble and started looking like the point. An argument for the long film in a short-film decade.
A year after Sean Baker's fourth feature took five Oscars including Best Picture, the predictable backlash has arrived on schedule. Here's why the Academy, improbably, got it right.
Rose Glass's second feature dragged the lesbian bodybuilder noir into A24 territory and got reviewed as a tonal mess. The case I want to make is that the tonal mess is the movie, and the movie earns it.
Eighteen months after Todd Phillips' much-hated sequel opened to a $37 million weekend and a 30% audience score, it is time to autopsy the corpse. The film isn't good. It also isn't quite what you've been told.
Two years after Challengers arrived in its pastel pressure-cooker, the film's trick is clearer: it is not really about tennis. It is about what love looks like when three people are too competitive to admit they love anything but competition.
Ten months on, Ryan Coogler's 1930s Mississippi vampire film doesn't just still hold up, it looks like the clearest sign in years that the studio auteur movie is not dead. A field report from inside the juke joint.
Chris Nash's debut takes the slasher apart from the killer's point of view, and the radical formal choice is also the reason the film divides its audience. I want to argue for it.
Almost two years on, Furiosa's $175m worldwide gross still looks like the most depressing box-office story of the 2020s. Not because the film is bad, it is not, but because of what its failure reveals about the economics of the action film.
Eva Victor's Sundance-premiering debut is the early breakout of the 2025 indie year, and a specifically careful film about a specifically difficult subject.
A year and a bit on, Hugh Grant's turn in Heretic has been canonised as the late-career reinvention of the decade. The interesting question is what reinvention actually means when the performance is, in truth, an intensification of what he was always doing.
Fifteen months after Conclave's surprise commercial run, Edward Berger's Vatican procedural still feels like an argument from another era of filmmaking. The genre it quietly revived, the talk movie, is worth examining.
Damian McCarthy's second feature is the best pure-horror indie of 2024, and the clearest argument going for what micro-budget Irish genre cinema can do when it commits to a single effect and doesn't blink.
A year after James Mangold's Dylan biopic arrived in the middle of a tired genre, the film's decisions keep looking smarter. An argument for the underrated music biopic of the decade.
Tim Mielants's adaptation of the Claire Keegan novella was reviewed as a modest Cillian Murphy vehicle. The careful reading is that the film's restraint is the indictment, and the restraint is harder to film than the indictment would have been.
Clint Eastwood's probable farewell as a director was buried by Warner Bros in a ghost release. The film is better than the release, and the release is part of the story.
Disney hired Barry Jenkins to direct a photoreal prequel to a remake of an animated film. The economic logic is intelligible. The artistic logic is not. A year on, the question is what Jenkins was doing there.
Adam Elliot's second stop-motion feature took eight years to make and collected festival prizes from Annecy to Annapurna. The Australian argument is that his particular strain of misery-claymation is one of the country's more unusual exports.
Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland's second collaboration rebuilds a 2006 Ramadi engagement from the memories of the men who survived it, and the film's claim on attention is its specific refusal to shape.
Steven Soderbergh's ninety-four-minute spy thriller is the specific kind of mid-budget adult drama American studios have stopped making. Its existence is the argument. Its execution is the reward.
Julio Torres's 2024 debut feature is a specifically strange American indie about a Salvadoran immigrant, a specifically difficult art-world widow, and a specifically failing visa petition. It is also, quietly, great.
Mike Leigh's first film since 2018 reunited him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste for a character study of sustained anger. The argument is that the film is one of his best, and the conditions that produced it are the ones his method has been waiting to find.
Justin Kurzel's FBI procedural about white supremacist terrorism in 1980s Idaho was one of the most under-watched American films of 2024. It is also one of the best, and the under-watching is a specific commercial failure worth understanding.
Nathan Silver's improvisational comedy about a grieving cantor and his retired music teacher is the specifically strangest American indie comedy in years. I keep coming back to it.
Bong Joon-ho's first film after Parasite is a $118 million science fiction satire that Warner Bros marketed badly and audiences did not know how to process. A year on, the failure is the studio's, not the director's.
Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson's 2024 indie is the specific small American film about grief that the specific small American film is specifically built to make. And rarely does this well.
Tim Fehlbaum's procedural about the ABC Sports team covering the 1972 Munich hostage crisis narrows its field of vision to a single control room. The narrowing is the film's argument, and it holds.
Andrea Arnold's fifth feature split the reviews, and the split was real. The retrospective argument is that the film's unexpected magical turn is not a failure of the social-realist grammar, it's what the grammar was always walking toward.
Bertrand Bonello's 2023 film, released in the US in April 2024, is the strangest and most formally ambitious film I saw in either year. An argument for the specific dread of being alive in multiple decades at once.
Josh Margolin's debut feature gave June Squibb her first leading role at 94. It was not a stunt. It was a film.
RaMell Ross adapted Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel through a first-person camera almost continuously across two hours. The argument is that the formal gamble is the adaptation, and the adaptation is, so far, the film of the awards year.
Alex Garland made a film about an American civil war and deliberately stripped out the politics. A year and a half later, the emptiness in the middle of Civil War is not a choice to respect. It is the thing that breaks the film.
Osgood Perkins' follow-up to Longlegs is a better film than the hype-fatigue has let on. An argument for the adaptation that does not care about the source material.
Aaron Schimberg's 2024 comedy about an actor who gets a medical procedure and regrets it is the year's strangest mid-budget indie, and the one whose specific comic machinery I keep returning to.
Pablo Larraín's third and probably final entry in his trilogy of distressed-woman biopics is the most formally certain of the three, and the one least willing to flatter its subject.
Guadagnino's second film of 2024 was the quieter one, the one with the more difficult source material, and the one that has settled, a year later, as the more specifically strange.
Jesse Eisenberg's second film as director is a tightly written cousins-on-a-trip movie that uses its ninety minutes to say something particular about inheritance, grief, and the specific tolerances of family.
A year and a half on from the sequel, the case for Dune: Part Two is less about its scale and more about its refusal. An argument for the blockbuster that does not entertain.
Gints Zilbalodis made a dialogue-free animated feature in Blender with a team of a dozen, won the Oscar, and put the Latvian film industry on the global animation map. The patient argument is that the form, not the novelty, is the achievement.
Sean Wang's 2024 debut feature is one of the best American coming-of-age films in years. Specifically about being thirteen, Taiwanese-American, and on MySpace in 2008.
Jesse Eisenberg's second feature as director-writer is a specifically small, specifically patient Polish heritage-tour film, and the film it most resembles is a Broadway play that someone has somehow filmed correctly.
A year after Deadpool & Wolverine made $1.3 billion and saved a bad year for the MCU, the film looks less like a triumph and more like the last thing Marvel is going to get away with.
A Latvian animated feature made on Blender with a team of fifteen people won the Oscar and beat DreamWorks, Pixar, and Netflix. The reason is not budget. It is silence.
A year on from Lanthimos' three-part anthology, the film reads cleaner than the reviews made it sound. An argument for what happens when a director stops worrying about being liked.
Colin and Cameron Cairnes's Australian indie horror, shot as a 1977 late-night TV broadcast gone wrong, is the rare genre exercise whose formal commitment pays off at every level.
Mohammad Rasoulof shot the film in secret, fled Iran during post-production, and arrived at Cannes with a three-hour domestic thriller about a judiciary father and his protesting daughters. The retrospective argument is that the long cut is the cut.
A year on from Hit Man's Netflix release, the film is a quieter argument than it first appeared. Richard Linklater made a star-launcher for someone he knew would not, in the end, need launching.
Ti West closed his X/Pearl/MaXXXine trilogy in July 2024 with a film that tries to be several kinds of movie at once. A year later, only some of them worked.
Michael Sarnoski's Quiet Place prequel is a studio horror release built to break the franchise's scale rules, and the smaller it stays, the better it works.
RaMell Ross adapted Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer novel by refusing the one thing most literary adaptations insist on. The camera is the character, and the choice changes what the film can do.
Halina Reijn's erotic drama returned a genre the American studios had given up on, and gave Nicole Kidman the kind of role the mid-budget adult film had stopped being able to produce.
A year after Longlegs' extraordinary marketing run turned into an extraordinary opening weekend, the film looks smaller than the hype suggested and stranger than the backlash allowed.
M. Night Shyamalan's August 2024 thriller had a genuinely great first act and two acts that could not sustain the premise. A year later, the unevenness is worth thinking about.
Annie Baker's film debut is the rare coming-of-age film that refuses every coming-of-age convention. Just a specific eleven-year-old and her specific mother, one summer in western Massachusetts, 1991.
Payal Kapadia's Cannes Grand Prix winner was received, on its US release, as the decade's strongest import from Indian indie cinema. The re-reading is that the film is even stranger, and more formally considered, than the initial reception allowed.
Steven Soderbergh shot a haunted house film entirely from the ghost's point of view. The formal constraint should not work. It does, and the reasons are technical.
Two Oscar nominations, a slow-burn awards run, and a second viewing at home. Celine Song's debut keeps revealing itself. An argument for the film that refuses its own climax.
Mike Cheslik's 108-minute silent slapstick about a 19th-century fur trapper fighting mascot beavers is one of the strangest American indie films of the decade. It is also one of the funniest.
Ridley Scott made Gladiator II twenty-four years after the original and repeated most of the first film's beats without any of its conviction. The problem is not age. The problem is a director who no longer believes the genre.
Jacques Audiard's Spanish-language narco musical swept the Cannes awards and collapsed in the awards season that followed. The collapse had less to do with the controversies than with the film's formal failure to decide what it wanted to be.
Jane Schoenbrun's sophomore feature played small in theatres, spoke loudly to the audience it was made for, and kept speaking afterwards. A year later, it is still teaching viewers how to be seen.
I took my younger sister to see Megan Park's second feature thinking it would be a throwaway, and we walked out crying. The retrospective case is that it is the sharpest coming-of-age indie of the year, and I'll fight about it.
Jon M. Chu's Wicked was the studio musical that worked, and the reasons it worked are specific to the form. A year on, its choices look like a template.
Almodóvar's first English-language feature is the film he has spent his whole career preparing to make. A year later, the patience was worth waiting for.
Alice Rohrwacher's 2023 film about a British grave-robber in 1980s Italy is the kind of quiet, strange, specifically rewarding film that the American art-house circuit was once built to deliver. It still can.
Jonathan Glazer's Holocaust film works by almost never showing us the Holocaust. Two years out, the sound design is still one of the most radical formal choices of the decade.
Hirokazu Kore-eda's 2023 film, released in the US in late 2023 and on streaming through 2024, is a specifically disciplined three-act structural experiment. Also, quietly, one of the most important queer films of recent cinema.
Ali Abbasi's Trump origin story arrived in American theatres three weeks before the 2024 election, flopped, and has barely been discussed since. The film deserved better.
Steve McQueen's first feature since Small Axe attempts a sprawling wartime mural of London. The mural mostly works. The boy at its centre is the reason it sometimes does not.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2024 thriller about a Tokyo reseller whose customers track him to a mountain cabin is the closest his cinema has come to an argument about the economy we are actually living inside.
Aki Kaurismäki's 2023 film, out of retirement and better for it, is one of the shortest great films of the decade. An 81-minute case for the romantic comedy as serious cinema.
Walter Salles's adaptation of Marcelo Rubens Paiva's memoir won Brazil its first Best International Feature Oscar in March 2025. The win matters. The film matters more.
Gia Coppola's third feature hands Pamela Anderson a role that asks almost nothing performative of her, and asks everything else. The restraint is the thesis.
Nora Fingscheidt's adaptation of Amy Liptrot's memoir arrived in autumn through Sony Pictures Classics. It is a recovery film that keeps reaching past the recovery, out into the weather on the islands.
Michael Gracey's Robbie Williams biopic cast its subject as a CGI chimpanzee and posted one of the worst wide-opening results of the year. The film is still better than its box office.
Tran Anh Hung's 2023 film, released theatrically in February 2024, is the best film about food and cooking since Babette's Feast. It is also a deeply disciplined romance in disguise.
Parker Finn's follow-up to his 2022 hit arrived through Paramount in October. It takes the original's thin premise and pushes it into something stranger, harder, and more formally specific.
Raine Allen-Miller's 2023 debut is the rare contemporary British romantic comedy that actually commits to its register. Specifically a London film in a way very few London films are.
Drew Hancock's debut strips its premise to a weekend-house structure and one central idea. The discipline is the film's argument, and the argument lands cleanly.
Marvel's fourth Captain America opened in February 2025 to middling reviews and soft legs. The visible seams on screen tell the bigger story about what the studio spent the second half of 2024 doing to the film.
Leigh Whannell's follow-up to The Invisible Man arrived in January through Blumhouse and Universal. It is a smaller, stranger film than the one the marketing sold, and the smaller film is the better film.
Lawrence Lamont's debut landed in January 2025 with SZA and Keke Palmer centred inside a rent-day comedy that remembered how buddy pictures actually move.
Azazel Jacobs built a three-hander around a Manhattan apartment, three sisters, and a dying father in the next room. The film is much better than Netflix's release pattern suggested.
Marielle Heller's adaptation of Rachel Yoder's novel arrived through Searchlight in December, and the thing it cannot decide is how much of the dog to show. The indecision is the film.
Jason Reitman's compressed account of the ninety minutes before the first SNL broadcast is the rare backstage film that trusts the chaos to be its own argument.
Damien Leone's third Art the Clown picture opened wide in October 2024 and outgrossed the usual horror release pattern by a factor most distributors would not have underwritten. The craft is why.
Morgan Neville's LEGO-animated Pharrell Williams biography arrived in October 2024 as a formal provocation: a documentary rendered in plastic bricks. The film solves a specific genre problem, and creates a different one.
Chris Sanders' adaptation of Peter Brown's novel is the best animated feature of the year and an argument for DreamWorks doing specifically what Pixar has stopped doing.
Francis Ford Coppola self-funded his first film in thirteen years. It is nearly unwatchable in specific places and almost-great in others. The project is the point.
Tim Burton returns to Beetlejuice after 36 years and makes a legacy sequel that actually works, mostly because he refused to make a serious one.
The Crow remake, after two decades of failed attempts, finally arrived in August and confirmed every reason the attempts should have stayed failed.
Tilman Singer's second feature is one of the weirdest mid-budget horror films of the year, and one of the least bothered about making sense. An argument for the horror film that works on dream logic.
JT Mollner's non-linear indie thriller has a gimmick and knows it. A case for the film that uses its structural trick as an actual argument.
Fede Álvarez's Alien entry is a competent piece of horror filmmaking that wants, urgently, to remind you of other films. The reminders are where it falters.
Lee Isaac Chung's Twisters sequel-slash-reboot should not have been any good. It is, instead, one of the strongest American genre films of the summer.
Pixar's ninth sequel turns out to be, surprisingly, one of the studio's best films in a decade. An argument for the animation that grew up with its audience.
Jeff Nichols' motorcycle-club drama was held up by distribution chaos for a year, then released in a summer that did not know what to do with it. A case for the slower film.
Wim Wenders' film about a Tokyo toilet cleaner is the quietest great film of the year. An argument for the discipline of the ordinary.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi's follow-up to Drive My Car is the quietest major film of the year. An argument for the patience the film requires and rewards.
Cord Jefferson's debut feature is two films trying to be one. The surprise, two months into its run, is that both films work.
Andrew Haigh's film is a queer ghost story, a family reconciliation, and a grief piece. What it does with all three in 105 minutes is astonishing.
Emma Stone's performance as Bella Baxter does something almost no leading actress is allowed to do in a studio film: she becomes less polite, less articulate, less easy to root for, and the film rewards her for it.
Emerald Fennell's second feature wants to be a class-war satire and a Brideshead pastiche and a body-horror provocation. It pulls off one of the three, sometimes two.
