Chase Hutchinson

La Ola is far from perfect, often losing sight of its broader ideas for less well-executed narrative beats that don’t always cohere, but it still finds a tune where it counts.

Dosa’s film shouts loud and true, giving it a strong chance at enduring — even as it remains painfully aware there is no guarantee anything, no matter how much we love it, lasts forever.

A triumph of cinematography, editing, production design and visual effects, you almost wonder whether Parsons may have ventured into the real backrooms to shoot his film.

A major work played in a minor key, cinematographer-turned-director Marine Atlan’s magnificent, melancholic and moving feature directorial debut La Gradiva is one of those true discoveries that you only get a few times in life.

Minotaur is searingly political yet controlled and understated, maintaining a cold grip on its narrative as the world around it descends into chaos. Urgent and restrained, personal and political, it is one of the more pointed films about the present state of the world in recent memory.

The focused way Wollner writes and directs this ensures that the drama, much like the one memorable early shot, is restrained, never once feeling exploitative of this grief.

It takes what could be a lean, mean little zombie movie and jams in too much excess noise, when the most impactful bits came from keeping things simple. Even as it’s not without its merits, it’s a film that can’t keep getting out of its own way, constantly stacking more and more nonsense on top of itself until it nearly buckles under the weight.

Even when it does start to eventually run out of steam, Monroe never slows down, making even the quiet moments feel like they could explode at any second. It’s a truly exciting, unpredictable performance that keeps you locked in.

A film about fathers and daughters, men and monsters, mountains of food and clogged toilets, Quentin Dupieux’s farcical pseudo body horror “Full Phil” is the type of movie you’ll either find yourself eating up every minute of or rejecting entirely.

In Sachs’ spectacular, shattering vision, which he co-wrote with his longtime collaborator Mauricio Zacharias, we witness the stories and the memories that we can only hope our own loved ones will tell of us when we’re gone.