Long lost works of art from the West African kingdom of Dahomey make their way home after being plundered by French colonizers in Mati Diop's quietly extraordinary documentary, Dahomey. Following 26 historical artifacts as they journey from French museums back to their homeland in modern day Benin, Dahomey explores the surprisingly complex politics behind this historic transfer through the eyes of those facilitating their arrival, concerned citizens of Benin, and even the artifacts themselves.

Adam Elliot's 2009 film, Mary and Max, felt like something of a minor miracle at the time, a work of stop-motion animation that dealt, both seriously and humorously, with decidedly grown up themes of depression, loneliness, and mental illness. Memoir of a Snail is Elliot's first feature since his acclaimed feature debut, and while it doesn't quite reach the heights of Mary and Max, it's still a lovely film in its own right.

It's hard to talk about Clint Eastwood's Juror #2 without talking about the shameful way it's been treated by Warner Bros., who gave the film an incredibly limited run with no plans for expansion, despite Eastwood being a consistent moneymaker for the studio with his midbudget, adult oriented dramas such as The Mule and Sully, and American Sniper. Eastwood, now 94 years old, is an American legend, and while he isn't the only aging filmmaker who's struggled to find financing for their late period projects, it is somewhat shocking to see such a reliable, no-nonsense filmmaker get pushed aside in this manner.

On paper, the mixture of Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in the first English language feature by Pedro Almodóvar sounds like a can't miss prospect. The basic ingredients are all there, bright colors (that red lipstick!), women in crisis, a sensually moody score by Alberto Iglesias, but The Room Next Door feels strangely cold and distant, a germ of an idea that never seems to fully get off the ground.

Director Robert Zemeckis was arguably one of the biggest filmmakers of the 1980s and 90s, delivering mega-hits like Back to the Future (1985), Romancing the Stone (1984), Forrest Gump (1994), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1992), Contact(1997), and Cast Away (2000) throughout those two decades. Things changed in the 2000s, however, as he became fixated on mo-cap animation, as films like The Polar Express (2004), Beofulf (2007), and A Christmas Carol (2009) came to dominate his filmography.

A paranoid thriller set in the cutthroat world of Vatican politics, Edward Berger's Conclave follows an intrepid cardinal named Father Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) whose solemn duty to help select the next pope finds him ensnared in a web of lies, intrigue, and corruption as ambitious cardinals jockey to become the new head of the Catholic Church.

The Terrifier franchise is a fascinating cultural phenomenon. It originated in a 2011 short film by director Damien Leone, about a series of murders committed by a psychotic mime named Art. Leone later used Art the Clown as the connective tissue for a 2013 anthology film called All Hallows Eve before adapting Terrifier into a low-budget feature in 2016.

If Todd Phillips' Joker (2019) was the origin story of the Joker, then his latest film, Joker: Folie à Deux is the story of his deconstruction. It's an admittedly bold move for a comic book movie to spend its entire running time dismantling the character it just spent a whole movie setting up, and there's certainly some interesting thematic ground to cover here; unfortunately, Folie à Deux suffers from some of the same issues of self-importance that plagued its predecessor.

Pre-production for Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis began in 2001. Based on a screenplay Coppola began in the 80s that got put on the back burner, this is a film that has been decades in the making, delayed by 9/11 along with mounting debts leading Coppola to eventually bankroll the production himself to the tune of $150 million. It has all the trappings of an epic disaster, and while it has divided critics and failed to make an impression at the box office, Megalopolis is arguably one of the most ambitious and fascinating films of the 21st century.

There is no doubt that Coralie Fargeat's The Substance is a stylish film. It is one of the boldest and most outrageous films to receive a wide release in recent memory, and to that end, it is something worth celebrating. Fargeat is taking huge swings here, and regardless of how one responds to those swings, it feels like something of a minor miracle to see a film that takes such risks playing at the local multiplex.

It's difficult not to get personal writing about a film like Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers. I didn't really write about it when I first saw it back in December of last year. I managed a half-hearted piece for my top ten write-up (where it came in at number five), but it somehow felt too close, too raw, for me to fully grapple with.

In the days since I first saw Kazik Radwanski's Matt and Mara, I've found myself reflecting on it quite a bit. It's an unassuming film, small in scale and short in length, but its impact is something quite lovely and lingering: an unexpectedly profound reflection on loneliness and the human connections and disconnections that result from it.

Coming out some 36 years after the original Beetlejuice, Tim Burton's new sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn't exactly striking while the iron was hot. While the first film was a hit in the 80s, its reputation has only grown over the following decades, becoming a cult classic and Hot Topic staple.

Taken on its own, Alien: Romulus is a solid film. It is difficult, however, to analyze franchise films like this in a vacuum, especially when this is the seventh film in the venerable Alien series (ninth if you count the Alien vs. Predator films). To paraphrase Kamala Harris, Alien: Romulus exists within the context of all that came before it.

I often found myself thinking about Agnes Varda's Daguerreotypes and Tsai Ming Liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn in the way Filho examines the power of cinema to preserve while also using it to document its own death; faded movie palaces now replaced by towering high rises, replaced by ramshackle churches, the temples of cinema swapping one religion for another.

There are few mainstream filmmakers working today who have as keen an eye and a mastery of the cinematic language as M. Night Shyamalan. Sure, it became cool to poke fun at his work in the late 2000s when he became known as the "twist" guy, which left audiences expecting surprises and trying to outsmart his movies. Thankfully, it seems we have mostly moved past all that, and Shyamalan has smartly reframed expectations around his films since the soft reboot of his career in 2015's The Visit.

Like its spiritual predecessor, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1978), Billy Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts focuses on a black working man in the African American Watts district of Los Angeles. Except in this case, Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman) is more of a *not* working man, because he finds himself perpetually un and under employed, spending his days at home with his harried wife, Andais (Kaycee Moore) and their children.

Upon its release in 1993, Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine became the first Chinese film to win the coveted Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, a prize it shared with Jane Campion's The Piano in a rare tie. The film was banned and censored both in its native China and in the United States thanks to Miramax's Harvey Weinstein, who reportedly cut around 20 minutes from the film's theatrical cut, only to release the complete version on home video, which remains intact to this day.

It's almost surprising that it's taken almost 30 years to make a sequel to Twister, since that film was a runaway hit and the second-highest-grossing film of 1996 (behind Independence Day, which didn't get a sequel until 2016). Perhaps it was the failure of director Jan De Bont's Speed 2: Cruise Control or the fact that it was such a self-contained story, but whatever the reason, it's taken a surprising amount of decades for the studios to return to this particular well.

When I was younger, growing up the 1990s, Batman movies were some of my earliest inklings of my trans awakening. I distinctly remember seeing Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman (I wasn't allowed to see Batman Returns at the time, but I was obsessed nevertheless) and thinking "I want to be just like her." While the other little boys wanted to be Batman on the playground, I was always Catwoman.