Nickel Boys, as conceived, really shouldn’t work. Yet this staggering cinematic accomplishment has me wondering why all the voluminous misguided praise for The Brutalist hasn’t been showered on this film instead.

A work as formally inventive as this one usually sacrifices character and interiority in service of that artistic leap. Nickel Boys miraculously manages to do the opposite, actually bringing the viewer closer to the eponymous black youths of the film’s title. Director RaMell Ross hasn’t necessarily created a new…

The “Filmed in VistaVision” intro screen. The Overture title card. The disorienting and impressionistic first scene that ends in an upside-down shot of the Statue of Liberty. All culminating in a slow horizontal text-crawl title sequence reminiscent of Jan Tschichold in all his Die Neue Typographie glory. I was ready to love this film.

Then. Then. Then, for the next almost four hours, The Brutalist is, well, brutal in its endless parade of pile-drivingly obvious monologues masquerading as characterization. I…

I’d be tempted to complain that All We Imagine As Light is too muted and understated if it wasn’t always so damn beautiful just when I thought my interest was starting to wane. There are strands of Indian master Satyajit Ray’s DNA coursing through Light, but it’s also starkly different in that 2024’s India is much more modernized, and director Payal Kapadia’s focus is on the feminine.

Ostensibly about two roommate-nurses making their way in Mumbai, the film also positions…

Kudos to Stefan Sagmeister for 1) his endless creativity as a designer, evidenced over and over in this film; 2) making a well-crafted, daring documentary; and 3) making a well-crafted, daring documentary that too often made we want to throw whatever was in my hand at the screen in frustration.

Full disclosure: I find this contemporary craze around finding happiness to usually be nothing more than narcissistic exercises in navel-gazing self-care. The Happy Film is no exception. I kept screaming…

Maybe the best film of the year. (So far, anyway.)

Director Hirokazu Koreeda’s real accomplishment here is his alchemic mix of the sentimental and the steely. Shoplifters never shies away from depicting the precariousness of living on the fringes of society. This is a Tokyo we rarely see in film and shoplifting is only one of many questionable survival tactics used by the characters here.

But the film is also a wonderfully shaded portrait of a family that both affirms…