“Anora” (dir. Sean Baker)

“Anora — or ‘Ani,’ as she prefers to be called — is a brassy, 23-year-old Russian-American stripper who shares a small house with her sister in Brighton Beach. Ivan — or ‘Vanya,’ as he uses interchangeably — is the 21-year-old son of a Moscow billionaire who stays in his father’s cocaine mansion on the far side of Brooklyn whenever he’s in New York, which if it were up to him would be always. She works seven nights a week at the Manhattan strip club where she’s the only Russian-speaker. Ivan, meanwhile, has clearly never worked a day in his life. She’s the child of a mom who lives in Miami and a dad who doesn’t exist, while he’s a hyper-juvenile nepo baby who may never be mature enough to graduate into a large adult son. 

“There’s probably an effervescent rom-com to be made about these two wildly mismatched kids meeting over a lapdance and falling in love with each other after Ivan pays Ani $15,000 to be his ‘very horny girlfriend’ for a week. Lucky for us, there is no way on God’s green Earth that Sean Baker — who’s devoted the better part of his career to destigmatizing sex workers across raw and frenzied and utterly exhilarating films like ‘Tangerine’ and ‘Red Rocket’ — would ever allow these characters to settle for such an inauthentic story. Not even a little bit.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“Between the Temples” (dir. Nathan Silver)

“No film this side of ‘A Serious Man” has confronted Jewish anxieties as directly as Nathan Silver’s ‘Between the Temples,’ a spiky, hilarious, and thoroughly unorthodox screwball comedy about a grief-stricken cantor who loses his voice, only to find that he’s surrounded by a chorus of well-intentioned people who are happy to speak for him. Played by a note-perfect Jason Schwartzman (the “Asteroid City” star delivering another fumblingly wistful performance as a widower trying to make sense of his pain, this one inspired by the music of David Berman), Ben Gottlieb has never been sadder than he is at the start of this story. Needless to say, he’s also never been closer to his moms.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“Close Your Eyes” (dir. Victor Erice)

“Sedate but ultimately shattering by dint of its simplicity (and its absolute slam-dunk of a final scene), ‘Close Your Eyes’ is neither an autobiographical cine-memoir à la ‘The Fabelmans’ nor a teary-eyed tribute to the magic of the movies in the vein of ‘Cinema Paradiso.’ Yet, as if by accident and divine purpose all at once, it also becomes both of those things by the end. Set at the dawn of the streaming age and shot with the funereal sterility that came with it, ‘Close Your Eyes’ openly laments the loss of a more tactile film experience (the kind that included actual film), but only so that it can honor the way certain images take root inside us when seen under the right circumstances, as inextricable from our being as a soul from its body.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“Daughters” (dirs. Angela Patton and Natalie Rae)

“An enormously moving documentary made all the more effective by co-directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s steadfast refusal to settle for easy sentiment in the face of difficult outcomes, ‘Daughters’ has as much ugly-cry potential as any film in recent memory. But the most lasting power of this film about a unique father-daughter dance for D.C.-area Black girls whose fathers are in jail comes in a final act that wipes those tears away to examine the hurt they leave behind. 

Like Garrett Bradley’s similarly lilting and delicate “Time” before it, ‘Daughters’ conveys the destructive inhumanity of America’s prison system by pointing our attention toward its collateral victims: in this case, the children denied a meaningful relationship with their dads. ‘Daughters’ doesn’t absolve the inmates of their role in that process, but it also doesn’t tell us what they’ve done to deserve their sentences. What would the specifics of Keith Smith’s crimes matter to his impossibly cute five-year-old daughter Aubrey, who practices math by counting the weeks until she can see her father again?”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“A Different Man” (dir. Aaron Schimberg)

“A caustically funny cosmic joke of a film about an insecure actor who finds a miracle cure for his facial disfigurement, only to be upstaged by a stranger who oozes self-confidence despite (still) having the exact same condition the main character had once allowed to hold him back, Aaron Schimberg’s ruthless and Escher-like ‘A Different Man’ might have felt cruel if not for how cleverly it complicates its punchline.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“Good One” (dir. India Donaldson)

“A slight but sensitive and fantastically assured debut that unfolds with the pointillistic detail of a great short story, India Donaldson’s ‘Good One’ is a coming-of-age story that jettisons all of the genre’s most familiar trappings in favor of a long walk in the woods.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“His Three Daughters” (dir. Azazel Jacobs)

“‘His Three Daughters’ doesn’t just grow, it grows more generous. As the trio [of sisters gathered to care for their dead father, and played by Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon, and Elizabeth Olsen] — plus the various caregivers who cycle in and out of the apartment, from the no-nonsense nurse who still radiates energy to the hospice worker who can only say so much about what’s to come, plus a gobsmacking appearance from Rachel’s boyfriend, played by an incandescent Jovan Adepo — orbit each other in the apartment, it’s only natural that emotions will get heated. Not everyone’s coping mechanisms work: Katie’s need to control everything certainly doesn’t, but neither does Rachel’s weed-soaked avoidance. Christina? She’s off in a corner, doing yoga.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by Kate Erbland.

“Megalopolis” (dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

“As personal and egoless as you could ever hope to expect from an $120 million self-portrait that doubles as a fable about the fall of Ancient Rome, Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ is the story of an ingenious eccentric who dares to stake his fortune on a more optimistic vision for the future — not because he thinks he can single-handedly bring that vision to bear, but rather because history has taught him that questioning a civilization’s present condition is the only reliable hope for preventing its ruin. Needless to say, the movie didn’t arrive a minute too soon.” 

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“The Outrun” (dir. Nora Fingscheidt)

“‘The Outrun’ is far too grounded a film to get swept away by the magical-realist spirit that fringes Rona’s existence, (a spirit kept alive by flights of fancy, quirks of nature, and a few euphoric microdoses of colorful animation), but this rugged character study is nothing if not a story about the human capacity for transformation — even if Rona only turns into herself. If that process is as subtle and violent as watching the sea erode a rock into a cliff, Fingscheidt’s nonlinear approach allows the film to ride the tidal rhythms of addiction, while Ronan’s committed performance churns those ebbs and flows into a widescreen journey that earns its epic backdrop.” 

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“Rebel Ridge” (dir. Jeremy Saulnier)

“The films of Jeremy Saulnier have staked out a unique space in film culture over the last decade. They’re not supernatural or overtly horrific enough to be classified as ‘Elevated Horror’ (that once-proud moniker that now garners nearly as much derision as fawning), but calling them ‘Elevated Suspense’ feels about right. And Saulnier’s films even share a favorite trope with Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense himself: that of the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

That’s the initial grip of Saulnier’s latest thriller, the Netflix film ‘Rebel Ridge,’ which stars Aaron Pierre as Terry, a man who runs afoul of local law enforcement in a small Louisiana town after he commits the crime of riding a bike while Black. The officers who stop Terry illegally search him and find over $30,000 in cash, which they seize even after Terry explains that he got the cash from selling his truck, and he’s on his way to the courthouse to bail his cousin out of jail.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by Daniel Joyaux.

“The Substance” (dir. Coralie Fargeat)

“An immensely, unstoppably, ecstatically demented fairy tale about female self-hatred, Coralie Fargeat’s ‘The Substance’ will stop at nothing — and I mean nothing — to explode the ruthless beauty standards that society has inflicted upon women for thousands of years, a burden this camp-adjacent instant classic aspires to cast off with some of the most spectacularly disgusting body horror this side of ‘The Fly’ or the final minutes of ‘Akira.’”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“The Beast” (dir. Bertrand Bonello)

“Compelling evidence that every major arthouse director should be required to make their own ‘Cloud Atlas’ before they die, Bertrand Bonello’s sweeping, romantic, and ravishingly strange ‘The Beast’ finds the French director broadening — and in some cases challenging — the core obsessions of his previous films into a sci-fi epic about the fear of falling in love.” 

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“The Breaking Ice” (dir. Anthony Chen)

“A sweet and shimmeringly beautiful film about how life can flow and then freeze and then thaw into something entirely new if you let it, Anthony Chen’s ‘The Breaking Ice’ finds hope in the most frigid of places. In this case, that place is the small Chinese border city of Yanji during the depths of its endless winter, when people’s breath is as thick as the gray fumes that spew out of the factory smokestacks, and the snowy peak of Changbai Mountain looks closer to heaven than it does to Pyongyang. More than half a million people live there (many of them ethnic Koreans), but few of them seem to think of it as home. It’s as if they got stuck there on their way to somewhere else, and — in the wake of a pandemic that restricted travel and imperiled the economy — are still waiting to be defrosted. Still waiting for the warmth they need to become liquid again.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“Challengers” (dir. Luca Guadagnino)

“If, as Blanche Dubois once said, ‘The opposite of death is desire,’ then Luca Guadagnino will live forever, and his latest film — a transcendently sweaty tennis love triangle so turned on by the heat of competition that its sex scenes feel like foreplay and its rallies feel like porn — is possibly the most unbridled portrait of resurrection since ‘The Passion of the Christ.’

“It’s definitely the horniest story ever set within the purgatorial concrete nothing of New Rochelle, NY, which is where this movie’s three main characters all happen to cross paths during the final match of a dingy U.S. Open qualifier that’s being sponsored by a local tire store. They’ve been fucking each other on and off the court for more than a decade by the time ‘Challengers’ unleashes its first serve, and yet, despite winning on every level of their chosen sport, these long-limbed athletes have lost their lust for life at some point along the way. At this point, their lust for each other might be the only force on Earth powerful enough to get their heads back in the game.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“Chicken for Linda” (dir. Chiara Malta)

“Animation has the power to make even the simplest emotions feel as infinite and expressive as our most sacred memories, which — despite the edifying nuance and eye-popping flair of recent films such as ‘Encanto’ and ‘Across the Spider-Verse’ — can make it frustrating that American studios have largely been trending toward overcomplicated plots and realistic design. Sébastien Laudenbach and Chiara Malta’s extremely French ‘Chicken for Linda’ is the clearest possible reminder of what we’ve been missing. It’s about an eight-year-old girl named Linda who wants to eat chicken for dinner. Delightful mayhem ensues.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” (dir. Radu Jude)

“It takes flair to concoct visual-gag-after-visual-gag within episodic riffs on the raw deals suffered by the gig-economy-classes in modern day Bucharest. Radu Jude blends absurdist humor with keen social integrity, like a sharper Romanian riposte to Ruben Östlund, as the trials of a dangerously overworked production assistant named Ange (Ilinca Manolache, sensational) builds to a 40-minute final shot in which tragicomedy is heaped upon tragicomedy to unbearably brilliant effect.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by Sophie Monks Kaufman.

“Evil Does Not Exist” (dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)

“‘Evil Does Not Exist,’ the title of the latest film from ‘Drive My Car’ director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, is a bold statement to make in the year 2023 [the year the film premiered at Venice]. As it turns out in this eerie and elusive ecological tone poem about man, nature, and man’s nature, the statement is not necessarily something the Japanese filmmaker believes.

“This made-in-secret and gently lilting film set in a bucolic village on the outskirts of Tokyo seems like a call for compassion on the surface — it centers on how the village’s inhabitants tangle with a corporation trying to set up a glamping site in their forest, only for the two opposing sides to eventually find common ground. But that entente proves a foil for a much darker twist Hamaguchi pulls in the film’s last act.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by Ryan Lattanzio.

“Femme” (dirs. Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping)

“In our cancel-happy times, there’s hardly room for an empathy-for-all approach to identity-based violence and abuse. Enter Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s ‘Femme,’ a bruiser of a British queer revenge thriller that plunges straight into the gray areas that can form between attacker and victim.

“Retrofitting the pages of ‘90s erotic suspense films to a 2023 sensibility, ‘Femme’ stars Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (breakout of ‘Culprits’) as a Black drag queen who, after being assaulted by a white, closeted street thug played by George MacKay, reaps revenge by seducing his attacker, who later doesn’t recognize him out of drag. But in the process, fraught tenderness and attraction form between Jules (Stewart-Jarrett) and Preston (MacKay), making Jules’ calculated act of vengeance — and the film itself — that much more complicated.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by Ryan Lattanzio.

“The First Omen” (dir. Arkasha Stevenson)

“What to expect when you’re expecting … the Antichrist? Filmmaker Arkasha Stevenson delivers her gleefully gruesome answer to that increasingly popular question in 20th Century’s terrifying and triumphant ‘The First Omen.’ It’s a nominally named soft franchise reboot and the vastly superior (if accidental) answer to Neon’s ‘Immaculate’ with Sydney Sweeney.

“Yes, both horror films explore what happens when a child of Christ is involuntarily forced to carry a demon baby to term. And yes, both movies have some merit; trite but true, Damien just doesn’t have that ‘Cassie from “Euphoria”‘ pull. But only Stevenson’s spin on ‘The Omen’ can tie its borderline NC-17 terror to a multi-decade genre legacy suddenly feasting on noticeably improved visual artistry and a narratively satisfying revamp of stale IP.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by Alison Foreman.

“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” (dir. George Miller)

“Inveterate madman George Miller has followed the most spectacular action movie of the 21st century not with a sequel that continues where ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ left off (though he hopes to make one of those someday), but rather with a prequel that paves the way to where it began. By the same token, it also stands to reason that Miller hasn’t tried to outdo the orgiastic mayhem that brought his Ozploitation franchise screaming into the 21st century all shiny and chrome — the guy might be insane, but he isn’t stupid. 

“Nor is he willing to settle for diminishing returns. Rather than reaching for — and failing to clear — the impossibly high bar that he set for himself, Miller has chosen to do something even crazier and more rewarding: He’s created a symphonic, five-part, decades-spanning revenge saga so immense and self-possessed that it refuses to be seen as the mere extension of another movie, even though it manages to deepen the impact of ‘Fury Road’ at every turn.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“I Saw the TV Glow” (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)

“Sinister and liberating in equal measure (and often at the same time), Jane Schoenbrun’s ultra-lo-fi ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’ leveraged the inherent loneliness of webcams and the performative danger of online creepypasta into a haunting portrait of the potentially dysphoric relationship between screens and identity in the internet age. The kind of sui generis shot in the dark that feels like it could only have been made by someone who wasn’t sure if anyone would see it, Schoenbrun’s first movie is one of the rare coming-of-age films that manages to embody the full dread and possibility of self-recognition, and for that reason it almost immediately resonated with an audience of people — trans people in particular — who’d been waiting for something like ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’ since before they had the language to know how much they needed it.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Ehrlich.

“Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” (dir. Phạm Thiên Ân)

“An intimate three-hour epic of deliberate pacing, Vietnamese writer-director Thien An Pham’s debut feature, ‘Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,’ is a spellbinding tale of the soul’s unfathomable desire for the other-worldly, that does itself border on transcendental in its filmmaking and gradual blurring of apparent truth and suggested fantasy.

“The film premiered in the Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight section, where the filmmaker was previously recipient of the Illy Prize in 2019 for the short ‘Stay Awake, Be Ready,’ in which a roadside accident at a street corner interrupted a conversation between three friends having a meal. That short seems loosely remade for the new feature’s opening scene, which expands the idea to explore a man’s attempted overcoming of a deeply unsatisfied life, taking him from urban Saigon to the hinterland of Vietnam, out of both familial necessity and a quest to make sense of where and how to proceed with his life going forward.”

Read IndieWire’s review by Josh Slater-Williams.

“Janet Planet” (dir. Annie Baker)

“In the opening moments of ‘Janet Planet,’ Annie Baker‘s understated miracle of a directorial debut, a young girl runs across a darkened field into a seemingly abandoned structure. She picks up the phone in the dimly lit wooden room and makes a shocking claim: She’s going to kill herself.

“It’s a disorienting statement that makes the viewer immediately question what exactly this film is or may become. It also turns out to be a wry joke that serves as an introduction to Lacy (newcomer Zoe Ziegler), the wonderfully peculiar preteen whose perspective is the movie’s engine.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by Esther Zuckerman.

“Last Summer” (dir. Catherine Breillat)

“Nothing in this sick, sad world is simpler or more complicated than sex, a principle that helps to explain why the ever-provocative Catherine Breillat — whose films so often consecrate female desire by rendering it violently indefinable — was drawn to remake a 2019 Danish movie about a middle-aged lawyer who dedicates her life to defending young rape victims, only to begin a torrid affair with her own 17-year-old stepson. 

“May el-Toukhy’s ‘Queen of Hearts’ spun that stark hypocrisy into a melodrama ridden with shame and secret darkness. Breillat’s ‘Last Summer’ is much lighter in every way, and all the more revealing as a result; it leverages the same premise into a rich exploration of the inadequate judgment such a premise exists to invite.

Read IndieWire’s review by David Ehrlich.

“The Last Year of Darkness” (dir. Ben Mullinkosson)

“American director Ben Mullinkosson started filming ‘The Last Year of Darkness’ to document the lives of his friends, a ragtag assortment of DJs, ravers, drag performers and skaters who all found themselves and each other in the pulsating world of Funky Town, a queer underground club hidden away in Chengdu. Shot across five years and distilled from 600 hours of footage, Mullinkosson’s second feature intimately captures the euphoric joy of China’s alternative club scene, a place where outsiders, and queer people especially, can be who they want to be. And yet the end result is so much more than just a mere rave documentary.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Opie.

“Love Lies Bleeding” (dir. Rose Glass)

It’s [Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian’s] crackling chemistry — which Glass funnels into a series of genuinely hot sex scenes that more than prove the necessity for such sequences in films that hinge on actual human romantic relationships — that drives ‘Love Lies Bleeding,’ an alternately alluring and excruciating crime thriller that also smacks of body horror and midnight movie thrills. Glass, who previously earned scads of instant fans with her ‘Saint Maud,’ again tackles the human body as a vessel for pain, pleasure, and so much more, though the brutally blunt imagery that comes to dominate the film loses its power over time.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by Kate Erbland.

“MaXXXine” (dir. Ti West)

“With Ti West’s visceral and moody ‘MaXXXine,’ that ultra-modern trend [of brat-ification] has been crystallized as a sharp yet gawdy deconstruction of so-called female empowerment — arriving in theaters just in time for your cute little summer. A24’s reigning scream queen Mia Goth makes her fashionable and, yes, distinctly bratty return as Maxine Minx in this gruesome and vital last chapter for the ‘X’ trilogy. If nothing else, the dazzling finale feels like a hyperviolent ‘80s period piece tailor-made For the Girls. It delivers some of the series’ most extreme kills as well as its best uses of glittery costumes, bloody testicles, and feminist subversion for a whirlwind joy ride that doubles as a societal lambasting.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by Alison Foreman.

“Pictures of Ghosts” (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho)

“If you went to Cinema São Luiz today, instead of finding the most celebrated theater in Recife (the capital of Brazil’s state of Pernambuco), you would find closed doors and a now-iconic sign that reads, ‘We’ll see each other again soon.’ Because of the pandemic and a seemingly endless renovation job on the government’s part, this hallowed ground has been sealed for all but three months since March 2020.

For locals such as myself, that’s partly why seeing it through the lens of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s incredibly personal new documentary ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ feels so poignant. Through a mix of archival footage and new recordings, ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ sees its director — whose filmography is already rich with deep, complex portraits of his hometown, such as ‘Neighboring Sounds’ and ‘Aquarius‘ — revisiting the places that made him. Recife’s movie theaters are chief among them.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by Guilherme Jacobs.

“Solo” (dir. Sophie Dupuis)

“‘Solo‘ isn’t so much about belonging as it is the desperate need to belong, and it’s this pain that [drag queen] Simon (Théodore Pellerin) is forced to work through when his life twists into something happier (at first) with the arrival of a new drag colleague named Olivier (Félix Maritaud). But this isn’t a typical coming-of-age story or a typically romantic queer movie, either. For her third feature, Canadian writer/director Sophie Dupuis taps into something more fluid, much like queerness itself, that interweaves drag as artistry with the kind of toxic relationship dynamics that Fran Rogowksi brought to life so vividly last year in Ira Sachs’ ‘Passages.’ And of course, what would any discussion of queer French-Canadian cinema in particular be without mention of Xavier Dolan, whose fixation on unhealthy mother/son dynamics is also echoed here, too.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by David Opie.

“Sometimes I Think About Dying” (dir. Rachel Lambert)

“Sometimes Fran pictures herself lying in a quiet forest, dead. Sometimes, Fran imagines herself being lifted, probably by the neck, by a massive crane, dying. Sometimes, there’s a big snake or a desolate beach. Sometimes, yes, Fran thinks about dying. And that’s OK because Rachel Lambert’s whimsical ‘Sometimes I Think About Dying‘ and the complicated woman at its center also think about other things, good things. Like, well, not dying. Maybe even, perhaps, living. For a film about the pull of death, there sure is a lot of life in this low-key charmer.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by Kate Erbland.

“Stress Positions” (dir. Theda Hammel)

“The summer of 2020 shouldn’t project beautiful memories onto the brain maps of those who endured it, but Theda Hammel’s anxiety-addled screwball feature debut ‘Stress Positions,’ set around that COVID Fourth of July in New York, asks you to relive the scary days of sheltering in place, banging pots and pans in solidarity with health care workers, and social distancing whenever it was convenient or made you look like you stood for something.”

Read IndieWire’s full review by Ryan Lattanzio.