Hafsah Abbasi

Polley has not only left the scattered wreckage and lost autonomy of her past to author her own intricate narrative, but she endeavors to fold in the obscured narratives of women en masse into a finely woven tapestry of possibility.

Amid the film’s scattered use of a myriad of locked-in, puerile symbols, any empathy is squeezed out in favor of an overly wordy, writerly script.

It's a season marred by glacial pacing and emotional incongruity — a result of an overstuffed, ill-defined final stretch of episodes.

For a film premised upon skewering the rich, “The Menu” only succeeds in crisping the surfaces of its elite subjects when one takes a closer look.

Viewers, like Paul, are left negotiating with their own passivity, constraints and freedoms. Most strikingly, Gray doesn’t spare the audience — or himself — from this reckoning.

Ultimately, all the banshees in Inisherin are tantalizing to follow, even as their wails resound as hollow and impenetrable.

“Aftersun” is an attentive, affecting actualization of this acknowledgement of a parent’s liminality. With every frame of her past she pores over, Sophie reaches across space and time in gentle understanding of her father’s own fragile becoming, even while reckoning with the debris he left behind.

“Decision to Leave” indulges in fluidity — in ever-shifting conceptions of others and the self.

A harrowing piece of cinema, “Tár” is striking, for better or worse, for its concurrent instinct to confront and epitomize the ethos of prestige and transgression.

With “Till,” Chukwu transcends the confines of the biopic through her scrupulous shading of her characters, setting and sound, foregoing superficial bombast in favor of a quietude entrenched in substance.