8 pieces
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.
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.
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.
Jac Schaeffer's Agatha limited series did what Marvel's TV slate had mostly stopped doing: it knew what it was, and it finished.
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.
House of the Dragon's second season ended earlier this month. After eight episodes that often circled material without advancing it, the season is a specific diagnostic.
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.