The 24 best films of 2023 (so far)

Writer/director Ben Affleck and his screenwriter Alex Convery think the well-known outcome of Air needs to be bolstered by the mechanics of a suspense narrative, crossed with a Rocky plot trajectory. And for a few scenes, Air feels like a gently satirical movie about corporate skullduggery. But it’s really a sports picture, where outcomes are determined by dedication, and a purity of purpose no one else can match. As Affleck has shown before, he is a marvelous director of actors—even great performers outdo themselves here, in material that could hardly be called emotive. Matt Damon’s Sonny Vaccaro is the scrappy and unlikely contender, whose love of the game gives him heart. As Nike’s marketing director, Jason Bateman is as rumpled and sleek as a small-town realtor, beautifully assaying an even less effectual version of middle-aged maleness than Sonny’s. Damon and Viola Davis are so good together that their phone conversations play like the emotional climaxes of the movie. Air is about the battle for ownership of Michael Jordan’s likeness rights—one of the great business success stories of all time—and it’s told in an entertaining light, even if it’s not quite a layup. [Ray Greene]

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is one of the holy grails of children’s literature, an emotionally complex story about faith and puberty, told from the perspective of an 11-year-old girl for an audience of her peers, that doesn’t patronize or pull punches. A film adaptation would necessarily require a deft hand, which makes writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig of Edge Of Seventeen acclaim the perfect match for this material, resulting in a film that understands Judy Blume’s 1970 novel through both an adult and a child’s lens, bridging the gap between the stages of its characters’ lives with tenderness, charm, and humor. Blume’s episodic story is a challenge of adaptation but Fremon Craig has an explicit understanding of adolescent femininity that allows her to replicate the author’s trick of communicating universal feelings through specific experiences. This is facilitated in no small part by a wealth of excellent performances. Abby Ryder Fortson is a compelling lead, portraying Margaret’s internal strife with a subtlety and grace beyond her years. On the adult side, Rachel McAdams carries most of the film’s dramatic weight with characteristic charm. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is an astounding adaptation of a beloved book, capturing the essence of what made Judy Blume such a phenomenon while speaking in a voice that resonates whether you were Margaret’s age in 1970 or are a child in the here and now. [Leigh Monson]

BlackBerry, directed by multi-hyphenate Matt Johnson, is an engaging new film that charts the incredible rise and spectacular flameout of its titular product, the world’s first smartphone—which, for a period of time, controlled 45 percent of the cell phone market and seemed unstoppable as a cultural force. Spinning off Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s nonfiction book Losing The Signal, Johnson and co-screenwriter Matthew Miller invest heartily in the story’s personalities. But instead of reverence or preciousness, they frame BlackBerry as an oddball workplace dramedy about industry gate-crashers rudely ejected from a party of their own staging. BlackBerry admirably shrinks the aperture of its story’s technical elements, and eschews the shrewd social inventorying or scrupulous myth-making that Aaron Sorkin brought to The Social Network and Steve Jobs. While the lack of a bigger look at the global mania the “Crackberry” wrought sometimes feels reductive, the characters here are interesting enough for the most part to acquit the tradeoff. The acting wonderfully abets this interpretation. There’s a nervy, dangerous energy to Glenn Howerton’s mesmerizingly icy performance, which registers in an almost animalistic way. Jay Baruchel, meanwhile, is afforded a nice chance to stretch. Johnson’s entertaining time capsule captures, in its unfussy way, one immutable truth: good times aren’t meant to last forever. [Brent Simon]

Chevalier is a counterfactual history that reconstructs a man worth remembering in the same breath as Mozart. Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges was a young Black boy conceived in a plantation (a bastard, per his own father’s admission) who received his full education in Paris. He dazzled the court and Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton)—so much so that he earned the title of Chevalier. Later still, while composing a comic opera, he found himself embroiled in an illicit affair that eventually radicalized him. Such a romance tees up what is arguably a triumph of a final scene that captures what Chevalier does best: not just offering a fictionalized history worth knowing with a stellar central performance by Kelvin Harrison Jr., but also a rallying cry about the power art and artists can have in times of revolt and revolution. Michael Abels (Get Out, Nope), who helped arrange and produce Chevalier’s work for the film, and Kris Bowers (King Richard, Respect), who riffed on it with his string-heavy orchestral score, give Chevalier a bruising musical texture that comes to a climax in the film’s unforgettable final shot. It’s a moment that packs such a punch you almost forgive the oft-deployed levity that risks flattening the film’s more serious interests. Nevertheless, as a celebration of a musical genius, Chevalier is a wildly entertaining ride, a thrilling history lesson in the making that remains as timely as ever. [Manuel Betancourt]

As with the other Creed and Rocky stories, Creed III adds a personal dimension to jumpstart the rivalry and tension in the ring. In Creed II (2018), the rival was Ivan Drago—Rocky’s old foe—training his son to avenge his long-ago defeat at Rocky’s hands. This time it’s the guilt that Creed feels for what happened to his old friend, Damian “Dame” Anderson (Jonathan Majors). That backstory is obvious from the beginning but is unveiled slowly via flashbacks throughout the film. By the time the full story is revealed, though, it has lost most of its significance and the psychological payoff for the character is less impactful. It’s just one of the underwhelming choices made by screenwriters Keegan Coogler and Zach Baylin. Still, Michael B. Jordan makes an assured debut as a director. He knows how to make the story entertaining, though he’s unconcerned with making it his own. Why change something that has worked for decades across two film series? Here he uses some aesthetic flourishes in the boxing scenes, but he mostly sticks to what has worked in previous iterations. While the story of getting Creed and Anderson into the ring might suffer from too many easy narrative beats, once they get there, the film kicks into a second, better gear. Creed III captures the spectacle and ceremony of boxing, providing the audience with an entertaining thrill ride. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, owing much to its predecessors in the Rocky and Creed series in story structure and character development. The film announces Jordan as a serious filmmaker who will hopefully challenge himself with more distinct material for his next outing. [Murtada Elfadl]

With Evil Dead Rise, the fifth film in the franchise, writer-director Lee Cronin puts the Evil Dead universe back on solid footing. His blood-drenched film is scarier, his characters are far more engaging, and he offers up an abundance of goofy comedy, though not the kind of Three Stooges goofy that Raimi increasingly indulged in during his trilogy. The most noticeable difference here compared to the previous films is the setting: After four outings in the woods, the body, as it were, of Evil Dead Rise takes place in a condemned Los Angeles high-rise. As with the 2013 Evil Dead, there is no Ash in sight, not even a cameo from Campbell, who was the heart and soul of the franchise. So the new film feels more like a sequel to the remake than part of the canonical Raimi films. The amount of fake blood spilled this time around certainly feels like a record for the franchise, which is quite an accomplishment. So for fans of the franchise, Evil Dead Rises marks a welcome return to the seamless blend of humor and genuine scares and creepiness that Raimi created 42 years ago. [Andy Klein]

 Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 carries with it the weight not just of the six years it took to get it made, but of a certain sense of finality in a fictional universe that’s seriously lacking in endings lately. Yet here’s Gunn and his cast, doing their best to create some kind of satisfying conclusion to a story they started nearly a decade ago. The gravity of that intention, of Gunn’s effort to conclude his story with his original team of actors, is laced through even the most irreverent moments in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, a film that, like its predecessors, has no shortage of irreverence. It’s a juxtaposition that gives the film a different tone than its predecessors, making it the darkest in the series so far, but there’s also something else you’ll notice right away, something arguably more important. In a franchise full of earnestness and unrestrained energy, this feels like a cast and a crew who are ready to throw everything they have at us one last time. The overall impression is one of a refusal to leave anything unsaid, to abandon any opportunity to offer just one more narrative trick or clever visual. If the first film was about finding a purpose, and the second film about finding a family, then the third is about finding a legacy, and deciding what to leave behind. In true Guardians fashion, Gunn and his intrepid crew decide their legacy is to go down swinging to the very end, and that will always be both intensely entertaining and unforgettably endearing. [Matthew Jackson]

How To Blow Up A Pipeline starts like a heist movie. Set to rhythmic music, a team of activists in West Texas separately go about their tasks, then gather together. Slowly and deliberately, each character and what they do is revealed. There’s an emphasis on work and preparation. Each character is moving, doing something, or taking care of someone. Obviously, they are getting together to perform the act that’s in the movie’s title. The “why” is held back for the time being. Propulsive and with a hint of mystery, these early scenes set the film up like a thriller. However, How To Blow Up A Pipeline has many ideas on its mind. This is a story—urgent and of this moment in time—about the climate crisis, the personal toll it takes on a few people, and the drastic measures they employ to try and make a meaningful impact.  It plays like a taut thriller that tells an unusual story. Its strength lies in making a topical issue palatable and highly watchable. It offers no judgment and no easy answers yet it firmly engenders empathy for its characters’ actions. This is a climate crisis story told in a matter-of-fact way that would be dispiriting if it wasn’t for its ever-present hopeful tone. [Murtada Elfadl]

For his third feature, director David Cronenberg’s son Brandon doesn’t ape his father’s style so much as he expands upon it. With Infinity Pool, starring Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth, you could even say he’s perfecting it. In his previous films, Antiviral and Possessor, and more so with his latest, Brandon leans into whatever mysterious genetic mutation stirs his fascination with body horror, social paranoia, sexual deviance in a group setting, and the counter-intuitive allure of self-destruction. If you’ve watched David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash, probably the most extreme movie under his belt, then Brandon’s new one is for you. It does not shy away from physical and emotional violence. There are a few moments where it may be necessary to shield your eyes from the gore on screen. But the unsettling aspects of the movie are what lingered. Everyone, even the most well-adjusted person, dances with self-destructive behavior. This impulse has been well-explored in film and literature, but what Cronenberg has done here spins the centrifuge to such a degree that we’re left face-to-face with its most fundamental elements. And you may not like what you see. [Jordan Hoffman]

Willem Dafoe puts to work every angular muscle and wrinkle of his visage to unnerving effect in Inside, writer-director Vasilis Katsoupis’ resourceful and immersive survival tale, one that puts a gradually tortured protagonist through the wringer in unimaginable ways. In fact, Dafoe is pretty much the only character in this unexpectedly thrilling psychodrama, save for a maid that his character sees through the intercom of the luxury high-rise apartment he’s stuck in, and a poor pigeon with a grim fate as wretched as his. As with most works of art, the message of Inside is in the eye of the beholder. It’s possible to read this original exercise as a critique of extreme wealth and pretentiousness in the art world, neither of which can nourish one’s body or save a human from their eventual demise. It’s also possible to get overwhelmed, bored or feel unmoved by the repetitiveness of it all as time and seasons pass, Nemo’s feces accumulate and the once stonily elegant flat becomes uninhabitable. This critic firmly leans towards the former reading—it is in fact admirable that Katsoupis leaves Inside open-ended without getting heavy-handed or preachy. Still, the greatest asset of the picture is Dafoe’s finesse in a part that’s both physically demanding and fiendishly fun to witness. It’s like someone dropped him in the middle of an antique shop with a baseball bat and said, “Go to town!” And that he does. [Tomris Laffly]

So how well did M3GAN hold up to the hype? Remarkably well, though folks expecting a film as gonzo as screenwriter Akela Cooper’s previous horror sensation, Malignant, aren’t going to get quite the same left-field intensity this time around. For as patently silly and self-aware as M3GAN is about the absurdity of its premise, it actually presents a fairly prescient thesis on the dangers of offloading parental responsibility onto babysitting technology. Allusions to limited screen time and post-traumatic attachment would be throwaway lines in a lesser film seeking to cheaply capitalize on technophobic fears. But here they feed powerfully relatable character arcs that the film treats with appropriate gravity, threading a tonal needle so specific that it’s a testament to not just the talents of stars Allison Williams and Violet McGraw, but to director Gerard Johnstone’s ability to coordinate them to sell these tragic characters as the protagonists of a horror comedy. M3GAN is a blast, especially with a crowd that’s game to laugh along with a doll’s ominous stare and her inhumanly humorous attempts to be the perfect best friend. Though the contortionist-level juxtaposition of an American Girl murderbot should probably be more viscerally satisfying, Cooper’s offbeat humor and Johnstone’s ability to build tension with her characters make for a potent combination. M3GAN may have been iconic before we ever heard her utter a word, but seeing her in action cements her as a worthy addition to the movie monster pantheon. Long may her franchise slay. [Leigh Monson]

Missing is an attempt to replicate the success of 2018’s Searching by the previous film’s editors, Nicholas D. Johnson and Will Merrick, and though this is their first foray into feature screenwriting and directing, they prove to be extremely capable storytellers within the screenlife niche. Indeed, Johnson and Merrick have a few tricks up their sleeve that make the film less predictable than it initially appears. The film builds a pretty potent conflict around the boundaries of parental trust and the adolescent realization that one’s parents aren’t always who they appear to be, nor are a person’s motives always as simple as the outcome of their actions. This wouldn’t come across nearly as well without a very convincing performance by Storm Reid, who conveys the inner turmoil of a sullen young adult in a time of crisis without tipping over into obnoxious, melodramatic parody. Admittedly, Missing relies on one’s ability to suspend disbelief, yet it’s a thrilling enough ride that it incentivizes the audience to just go along with it. Johnson and Merrick have handily created a film on par with Searching, translating their skills as editors and virtual cinematographers into a compellingly pulpy story that’s all their own. Screenlife may never be one of the primary ways we tell cinematic stories, but Missing is a prime example of what the format is capable of, tapping into our increasingly digital humanity to excellent effect. [Leigh Monson]

One Fine Morning is consistent with actor-turned-noted director Mia Hansen-Løve’s canon in tone and narrative. It’s quiet, languidly paced, and beautifully composed; it’s saturated with primary colors by veteran cinematographer Denis Lenior, who shot all of Hansen-Løve’s previous films. One Fine Morning is about people, family, friends, lovers, their disappointments, and their passions. It’s bitter and sweet, but mostly bitter. It’s lovely, but mostly not autobiographical. As we work our way through the story of Sandra (Léa Seydoux) and her affair with a married man (Melvil Poupaud), along with the story of her beloved father, the characters, tensions, and dramas we encounter are scaled to recognizable sizes. They are the circumstances and conditions of life. A spouse dies, parents age and fade, and marriages fade and die, too. Love is lost and found and lost and found again. As noted, Hansen-Løve does not think of her films as autobiographical, however much they mirror her life. Perhaps she’s right. Making films about subjects so fundamental as these may inevitably make them feel biographical to all of us, whether intentional or not. In any case, One Fine Morning is a fine addition to a body of intimate, understandable, and familiar films that are well made and well done. [Tim Cogshell]

In the mostly delightful farce Paint, Owen Wilson proves he knows the difference between a comic actor and a comedian who acts. The frequently riotous script by writer-director Brit McAdams feels like it was written with Will Ferrell in mind, circa Anchorman. There’s a savagely satirized and archetypal central character, loosely based on public TV painting instructor Bob Ross; a workplace power struggle nominally embedded in what used to be called the Battle of the Sexes; and ceaseless mockery aimed at the badly aged hairstyles and vehicle habits of the Scooby-Doo era. It’s possible to quibble about the weirdly sci-fi mix of period signifiers (white boy afros exist beside cellphones), and to look askance at Paint’s rather too blithe approach to sex-in-the-workplace power dynamics, but few comedies in recent memory come by their laughs more honestly than Paint does because, like all the best comedies, the laughter is based on a genuine unease. There’s slapstick comedy here too, including a belly laugh of a scene where Carl smashes his paint covered ‘do into a wall in a desperate attempt to expand his range and save his reputation by painting something other than Vermont’s Mt. Mansfield. Poor Bob Ross’ reputation may not recover. Then again, it tarnished rather quickly once he was gone. But while Carl Nargle may not be much of an artist, thanks to Wilson and McAdams’ care and craft, his own image is indelible. [Ray Greene]

Written by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia, Raine Allen-Miller’s first feature film, Rye Lane, is a seemingly simple story of two people romantically coming together during an adventure through South London that’s elevated by direction and performances that capture the absurdity of lost loves and first dates. At first, it seems that Rye Lane is going to fall into the common romcom trap of only fully realizing the personality of one half of the prospective couple, with Yas (Vivian Oparah) serving solely as a quirky impetus for the reserved Dom (David Jonsson) to shed his emotional baggage. Thankfully, Yas turns out to have her own baggage, with obfuscation baked directly into her character. Jonsson and Oparah have a natural chemistry, so not only does it never get old spending time with them, they feel like people who should get together because they bring out the best in each other. Allen-Miller presents this feature-length meet-cute with tongue planted firmly in cheek, as Dom and Yas’ revealing conversations give way to purposely stagey flashbacks that amplify their emotional states through the skewed lens of their broken hearts. Rye Lane never tips over fully into cartoonish exaggeration, but the playful presentation of ids and egos through the dreamlike perspectives of its leads goes a long way toward making the film stand out as more than just a showcase for freewheeling chemistry. [Leigh Monson]

Saint Omer haunts from its first image. A woman holding a baby walks on the beach towards the sea while the loud waves overwhelm the soundtrack. In another place, another woman wakes up from a nightmare calling for her mother. In two precise scenes, director Alice Diop establishes the stakes of her story with clarity and confidence. In the beginning, Diop lulls the audience into thinking we are in a textbook familiar courtroom drama. But as we settle in for the expected, Diop and her cinematographer Claire Mathon pull the rug from under the audience and throw us into emotional turmoil. Diop never judges Coly (Guslagie Malanda), accused of killing her infant daughter by abandoning her on a beach in the small town of Saint-Omer in Northern France. Nor does she try to wring sympathy for her. Rather, she invokes compassion for her circumstances by linking her to Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist and academic attending Coly’s trial. The portrait of Rama’s relationship with her depressive mother is slowly and masterfully revealed as the reason she’s so taken with Coly. The screenplay, alongside Kagmae’s restrained performance, takes its time to connect the dots, making Saint Omer’s payoff even grander. Diop fills so much detail into Rama’s life and relationships but with minimal storytelling, finally revealing lifetimes of generational trauma. This is a rich text, bracing for the minutiae it includes and for what it excises. Its power comes from a director who knows exactly what story they want to tell and how to tell it well. [Murtada Elfadl]

Up until the killer’s reveal in its third act, Scream VI is one of the franchise’s best sequels and the series’ most inventive and character-driven entry. The Scream movies, like the Fast And The Furious films, have mostly gotten better (or, at least, more entertaining) with each installment. This follow-up is directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who were behind 2022’s creatively and financially successful Scream. Their latest is another timely and clever exploration of slasher movie tropes—which the witty and violent script by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick deconstructs like layers of a meta Russian nesting doll. Fueled by a seemingly endless appreciation for how enjoyable it can be to subvert horror conventions and audience expectations, Scream VI is one of the most fun (and funniest) modern horror experiences one can have at a movie theater. So it would seem that another sequel is all but guaranteed, especially with Scream VI having something no other movie in the series has had: Melissa Barrera front and center. Somewhat underused in 2022’s Scream, here she reconciles her character’s familial ties to one of the first Scream’s killers, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), and then uses that “killer instinct” to the Core Four’s advantage. This is the first time a Scream film has featured someone as dangerous as a Ghostface on the side of good—or, at least, good-adjacent. How our heroes could wield this compelling and complex addition to their arsenal in future sequels holds significant potential, as Scream VI ends in the way all good horror movies should: With fans dying for more. [Phil Pirello]

A sharper is someone who “lives by their wits,” as the opening onscreen text of Sharper informs us. The term could describe nearly every character in this twisty thriller, as well as director Benjamin Caron and writers Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka, who repeatedly, but fairly, con the audience with deceptive storytelling. The cast all deliver in spades. Julianne Moore, being by far the biggest star, gets top billing, though she doesn’t show up until nearly the halfway mark. Sebastian Stan, best known for playing the Winter Soldier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, just radiates sleaziness. He makes no attempt to enlist the audience’s sympathy. While the construction and the succession of reversals and revelations are cleverly executed, this doesn’t rise to the level of the really great puzzle films—The Usual Suspects, The Last Of Sheila, or The Sting (to which it bears the closest resemblance). But it is wholly satisfying and keeps us on our toes until the final moments. Caron, a veteran music video and TV director (The Crown and Sherlock), makes an impressive fictional feature debut. Screenwriters Gatewood and Tanaka (who also penned David Gordon Green’s The Sitter) likewise show an inventiveness and steady hand in balancing their complex structure. This is a film that paints a pretty negative picture of modern life ... or, at least, life in New York. Nearly everybody gets hustled, even as they are running their own hustles. In the end, the irony is that the sharpest of them all is the only one who isn’t a sharper. [Andy Klein]

Like many of Kelly Reichardt’s previous collaborations with Michelle Williams, Showing Up is a quiet character study. In this case, filmmaker and actress have turned their attention to the understated life of Lizzy, a sculptor who is but a week away from having a gallery showing of her small figural pieces. Set in Oregon amid a small if bustling community centered around the city’s art school, Reichardt’s meditation on what it means to create and to live (and to avoid feeling like one has to choose one over the other) finds her yet again perfecting a cinema-as-short-story sensibility she’s been honing for years. If Lizzy is a stand in for the kind of working artist who rarely gets to be celebrated, it is because the focus here is neither on talent nor on “genius” but on work. Even in the moments when we spend time with Lizzy at her studio, Reichardt never lets us think we’re witnessing a moment of inspiration. Here again is where Williams’ gift for conjuring up wholly ordinary people under Reichardt’s gaze should be rightfully celebrated. Her Lizzy moves through the world almost wanting to take up less space—as if she’d wanted to atomize her own self into her work. The final image may not offer too much closure but it does suggest an opening up. That it comes after close to two hours of a wayward, grounded journey where we really haven’t gone far (if anywhere at all) may irk some viewers. But, like Lizzy’s sculptures, there’s a wounded tactility at work here. What you get out of it will depend on your patience for such thoughtful if prickly work, the kind that may get under your skin almost against your will and which will find you wondering whether you really did watch an entire film whose plot was anchored by a wounded pigeon, a broken water heater and a gallery showing. [Manuel Betancourt]

Skinamarink presents something experimental and often stunningly mesmeric, an unconventional take on a very conventional, near-universal fear. From shot to shot and on a grander, more existential scale, it’s a singularly nightmarish piece of horror filmmaking and one of the year’s must-see genre films. Skinamarink is, at its heart, firmly and gleefully experimental, and that means leaving more traditional forms of narrative arc building behind in favor of a darker, more mercurial approach. Any filmmaker telling this story would likely get at least some horror mileage out of its premise. But director Kyle Edward Ball is not interested in a direct and logical exploration of events. He takes the nightmare scenario of his screenplay and, with the help of cinematographer Jamie McRae, pushes things into the realm of childlike, disorienting wonder. The camera does not give us a straightforward version of events as its two main characters scrounge for food and look for solutions to their various problems. It lingers in doorways and down halls and looks up at strange shadows thrown across ceilings. It all gives the viewer the sense of being lost in something impenetrable, something forbidden, a nightmare that won’t end not just because we can’t find the end, but because there simply isn’t one. But if you’re willing to follow Ball and company down these dark corridors, into this twisted view of primal childhood fear and how easily we get lost in that fear, you’re in for an absolutely unforgettable horror experience. [Matthew Jackson]

Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse is one sequel that’s not content merely to riff on what’s come before. The ability of certain central characters—like Gwen and a villain called The Spot (Jason Schwartzman)—to travel through the multiverse means that co-directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson can transport the viewer to an array of imaginatively conceived, visually stunning dimensions, thereby upping the sci-fi genre quotient this time out. The script, co-written by Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and Dave Callaham, goes in similarly heady directions, acquiring a layer of self-referentiality when the shape and order of the “spider-verse” is dubbed “the canon,” which, as nitpicking fans know, is comprised of the tropes essential to every Spider-Man story. It makes for a narrative as meta as that of Lord and Miller’s Chosen One myth-skewering The LEGO Movie. In addition to expanding the series’ visual artistry and offering some amusing new characters, Across The Spider-Verse retains the rapid-fire wit and thrilling action of its predecessor. [Brett Buckalew]

Suzume, written and directed by Makoto Shinkai, came out in the wake of the earthquake and resulting tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011, but this is the first Shinkai film where the event becomes an actual plot point. The movie doesn’t belabor it, though. Suzume is more concerned with what’s left behind in the wake of a horrific disaster like that—both physically and spiritually—than it is with the disasters themselves. Suzume is full of empty villages, dilapidated schools, even strained relationships, but it never dwells on devastation. Like Weathering With You, it’s about making a choice; not to fall in love this time, but simply to stick around, like a lone door standing in the middle of an abandoned bathhouse. Suzume is Shinkai’s most explicitly Studio Ghibli-esque film, and maybe the most impressive thing about it is that it doesn’t suffer that much in that comparison. Its mythology feels reminiscent of the matter-of-fact presentation of the bathhouse in Spirited Away; its reluctance to color anyone or anything as “evil” (as opposed to “misguided”) is right out of Princess Mononoke; and one character even directly calls out Whisper Of The Heart when they see a talking cat (see also: Kiki’s Delivery Service) riding a train. So Suzume is Shinkai’s biggest and possibly most complex movie, and parts of it feel more personal due to the invocation of real history. [Sam Barsanti]

Tetris sets out to tell the story of one man’s tireless quest to bring the iconic game to the masses amid a swirl of cutthroat dealmakers, Soviet agents, and Cold War tensions. Set amid a tumultuous time for the USSR and the video game industry, the film frames itself as a combination of origin story, biopic, and conspiracy thriller. It doesn’t always work, and sometimes the film gets boxed in by its own conceit, but the story of how one of the world’s favorite games landed on a global stage is fun enough, and tense enough, that it’s still worth playing. Taron Egerton, a reliably game actor who seems to dive headlong into every role he gets, is the driver of the film’s energy, giving Tetris evangelist Henk Rogers the twitchy aura of a man with his back to the wall who is nevertheless still looking to the stars. Everything in Tetris works and director Jon S. Baird’s command of the story’s thriller elements helps push the film into the realm of pure entertainment, even when the cultural observations and thematic punches the film’s trying to land don’t connect perfectly. There’s a great deal of fun to be had here, even if the story is never quite as addictive as the game that inspired it. Tetris doesn’t cast the same spell as its namesake, but it will at least make you look at those falling blocks in a new way. [Matthew Jackson]

You Hurt My Feelings stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a writer named Beth sent into an existential tailspin over a negative response to her latest work. There is, however, a twist. The pan does not come from a stranger in an online pop culture journal, but, instead, from her husband. What’s worse—or, at least, what makes this an unusual situation—is that Beth’s husband Don (Tobias Menzies) is supportive and says “the right thing” to her face, but when he’s having what he thinks is a private conversation while shopping for socks, he tells his buddy that he thinks Beth’s book stinks. This movie is very good. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a treasure as always, basically plays it straight and is terrific. It’s impossible not to like her. The character is also smart enough to know that she shouldn’t be so wounded by her husband’s slight, but lack of intent doesn’t prevent the outcome. What director Nicole Holofcener has created is the ne plus ultra of low stakes cinema. The lives of Beth and Don—a burned out therapist who has begun getting his patients’ problems mixed up—are in no peril. They are wealthy New Yorkers who live in a brownstone and get their bagels at Zabar’s. But you know very well that little things can eat away at your brain and cause just as much consternation as real problems. As such, a movie like You Hurt My Feelings is a work of art that is probably more reflective of our actual lives than 99 percent of what we watch. And thank God for that! [Jordan Hoffman]