Incredible experiment with the form of digital cinema that uses distortion to convey something important.

Stunning hand-drawn animation anchors this vertiginous story about life and survival on the edge.

A beautiful film on solitude and freedom of expression. Seeking silence to be who you are.

The only Star Trek film to grapple artistically with the unknowability and incomprehensibility of space with a particular focus on conveying the sheer scale of what could be out in the cosmos. It depicts space as inherently hostile with space travel a foolhardy act: basic actions like transporting to a starship or going to warp can result in screaming agonies as our molecules are rearranged or our spacetime is wrenched apart. In stark contrast to STAR WARS released two years prior, this film shows the universe as utterly alien and beyond what human minds can take in. Even our most primitive attempts to reach out into the void of space like the Voyager probes could return with consequences and power that we can scarcely imagine. The only refuge is the sexual act and the emotion of connection.

This needed to be a few degrees closer to LIMITLESS on the magic-drug-subgenre spectrum. The core premise is interesting and I liked the film’s allusions to the racial implications of time travel but a film about time travel drugs really doesn’t need to be so dour and so bogged down in character work that really doesn’t add anything narratively or thematically. The first hour is very focused on character crises unrelated to the core premise and it all gets a little ‘when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?’. Also why didn’t Synchronic ever send him forward in time?

Interactive impossible loop of relationship break-up.

A competently-produced Catholic horror film drawing on THE OMEN, THE WICKER MAN, and THE SHINING. There’s a kernel of an interesting idea at the core of the narrative but the script needed at least one more draft and perhaps would have benefitted from leaning into schlocky rather than self-serious. There’s some stunning cinematography benefitting from the natural drama of Skye’s landscape and the use of Christian, specifically Catholic, imagery deepens the film with the weight of Christianity’s inherent horror but it doesn’t feel like it adds up to very much.

The superhero movie that Marvel won’t provide: well-lit, practical effects, strongly defined character relationships and romantic entanglements. Seemingly a commentary on a film market saturated with superhero movies: it feels like Quentin Dupieux had to make a superhero movie because nothing else gets made these days and it was the only way he could tell his absurdist stories about fish concerned with water pollution, a helmet that traps you in your thoughts, and a liquified human’s remains in a bucket.

Mark Cousins’ calm matter-of-fact narration doesn’t impose parallels between Italian fascist propaganda of the 1920s and today’s modern fascist propaganda but instead allows the obvious parallels to speak for themselves. Like Claude Lanzmann, Cousins damns fascists—Trump, Bolsonaro, Le Pen, and the UK’s transphobic movement—by showing the words they have actually said. There’s more than a little liberal equivocation and naïvety in asking what should be done with relics of fascist heritage but the methodical close reading of films like A NOI! (1922, dir. Umberto Paradisi) drew me in as a great example of reading politics from cinema.

Ellie Foumbi’s debut feature makes terrific use of light and shadow for its story of trauma, revenge, and forgiveness. Marie (Babetida Sadjo) is haunted by her past trauma and sees it in the face of the new priest, Father Patrick (Souleymane Sy Savane). Father Patrick’s face is hidden for his first few scenes and even after it’s revealed, his face is often shrouded in shadow or emerging out of darkness cultivating an air of menace even as he protests his innocence of the crimes against Marie. As things spiral out of control, it’s Marie’s face that increasingly gets shrouded in darkness as we question whose account is true.