The 24 Best Films of 2023 We’ve Already Seen

“Women Talking” (January 3, in theaters from UAR following limited release in December)

Adapted from Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel of the same name with fierce intellect, immense force, and a visionary sense of how to remap the world as we know it along more compassionate (matriarchal) lines, Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking” never feels like it’s just 104 minutes of bonneted fundamentalists chatting in a barn, even though — with a few memorable, and sometimes very funny exceptions — that’s exactly what it is. Toews’ book could easily have been made into a play, but every widescreen frame of Polley’s film will make you glad that it wasn’t. She infuses this truth-inspired tale with a gripping multi-generational sweep from the very first line, which puts the violence in the rear-view mirror and begins the hard work of keeping it there.

“This story begins before you were born,” the film’s young narrator (Kate Hallett in the role of Autje) announces, passing these events down to a specific child while simultaneously framing them in the terms of a timeless moral fable — one set in an eternal yesterday that allows for an ever-possible tomorrow, despite the fact that it also belongs to a specific year in the not-too-distant past. As the story unfolds, Autje’s voice will ironically also be used in tandem with the fading sunlight outside the barn to help keep time and ratchet up the tension of the men’s threatened return. “We had 24 hours to imagine what kind of world you would be born into.”

The “we” she refers to is a voluble and unforgettable quorum comprised of eight people from two different families who’ve been elected to break the tie in the colony-wide vote as to whether the women should leave or stay and fight. A third option of forgiving the men and returning to the status quo is embraced only by the taciturn and terrified Scarface Janz (producer Frances McDormand, in a symbolic role with little screen-time), and rejected due to lack of support.

The factions are neither plainly divided nor set in stone. The curious and ethereal Ona (Rooney Mara) has her head in the clouds, and discusses their predicament with a philosopher’s abstraction even though the baby in her belly — a souvenir from one of her unknown assailants — would seem to be a most concrete reminder of what’s at stake. Boiling over with impotent rage and consumed by the helplessness that comes with it, the abrasive Mariche (Jessie Buckley) provides a natural foil. Ona’s older sister Salome (Claire Foy) takes that anger to an even greater extreme, and insists that the women should exercise their divine wrath when the men return. But should her teenage son, on the cusp of becoming a man himself, be counted as one of their ranks? 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Saint Omer” (January 13, in select theaters from Neon’s Super)

For her first narrative film, French filmmaker Alice Diop brings the rhythms of her documentary background to reconstruct a heavy, ripped-from-the-headlines story. In 2013, Fabienne Kabou left her 15-month-year old baby girl on a beach in Berck-sur-Mer to be claimed by the rising tide. Diop read about the story while pregnant and felt an intimate connection, one that she has written into “Saint Omer” through an alter ego.

Rama (Kayije Kagame) is a pregnant academic who decides to watch the court case of the mother on trial, here rechristened Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), ostensibly as part of her research into the most famous baby killer of all, Medea. Despite her academic interest, the mere act of witnessing Laurence’s trial gets under Rama’s skin, and lines of association between Rama, Laurence, Rama’s unborn baby, and her very real mother are blurred until the central tragedy of it all belongs to everyone.

There is a tradition of humanizing killers that is rarely afforded to Black women in the movies. For Truman Capote’s seminal non-fiction novel, “In Cold Blood” from 1959, he befriended two death-row prisoners guilty of shooting dead a family in Kansas, and turned the resulting conversations into a journalistic doorstop of a book as compelling and detailed as any work of fiction. What made the book so haunting was Capote’s refusal to be daunted by the monstrousness of what the two men had done.

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“When You Finish Saving the World” (January 20, in theaters from A24)

A recent monologue night at New York’s Jane Hotel ended with actor Jesse Eisenberg telling a long and charmingly logorrheic story about the massive crush he once developed on a radical teenage leftist during the early 2000s. He was an ultra-neurotic Jewish kid who worshipped at the altar of Woody Allen, while she was a budding revolutionary who preferred the droll comedic stylings of Howard Zinn; her mom ran a woman’s shelter, her dad wrote fiery screeds in support of Nicaraguan liberation, and her new boyfriend memorized socialist flashcards in a cute-sad effort to hold a conversation with anyone in the family. It might be a while before he wrapped his brain around the difference between the Contras and the Sandinistas, but he desperately wanted to be the kind of person who knew what it was.

That Eisenberg obviously cared a lot more about the girl than any of her pet causes didn’t stop her from inviting him on a humanitarian trip to Central America a few months into their relationship, just as it didn’t stop her from marrying him a decade or so later, but the humiliation of trying to love someone on unilateral terms — for what you can take from them, with little regard for what they might need from you in return — seems to have scarred him all the same. That cringy dynamic was a major source of energy for the audio drama Eisenberg launched in the summer of 2020. It’s even more pronounced in the cuttingly poignant and cyanide-sweet movie he’s adapted from it, which stars Finn Wolfhard as a dopey live-streamer infatuated with the Karl Marx of his high school chemistry class, and sees Eisenberg continue a recent Sundance trend of famous actors delivering excellent debut features (Paul Dano’s “Wildlife,” Romola Garai’s “Amulet,” and Rebecca Hall’s “Passing” being three of many standout examples). 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Close” (January 27, in theaters from A24)

Thirteen-year-old best friends Leo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) don’t know it yet, but this will be the last perfect summer of their lives. It’ll be the last summer when they share the same imagination, love each other without having to think about what it means, and run or bike everywhere as fast as they can so as not to waste a minute of it.

The clock is ticking. Even now, there are already intimations that Leo — his cherubic face as clear as Caribbean ocean water — occasionally seems to be on the cusp of some deeper awareness; after calming his friend’s busy head to sleep at night, Leo lies awake in the bed they share together and searches Remi’s face for hints to a puzzle that hasn’t presented itself to him yet.

When school starts, their classmates will snicker at the boys for being too close. Leo, who appears to be the more intensely affectionate of the two, will also be the one who pushes the other away. It’s Leo who seems to be growing afraid of the friendship that used to be his greatest joy — Leo who wiggles away from Remi when they lie on the grass during recess, and Leo who starts playing hockey with the other boys as if trying to skate away from something else. For those reasons and more, it will be Leo who the film about these boys continues to follow after something happens that changes his friendship with Remi forever. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“One Fine Morning” (January 27, in NY and LA theaters from Sony Pictures Classics, following one-week qualifying run in December)

It’s a well-known fact that all French filmmakers are legally required to make at least one movie about an extramarital affair, but few auteurs have been better-suited to the task than the great Mia Hansen-Løve, whose raw yet ravishingly urbane character dramas (“Eden,” “Bergman Island,” “Goodbye, First Love”) thrive in the messy spaces where fear and excitement overlap — where loss and possibility are as inseparable from each other as a movie and the screen onto which it’s being projected. In fact, the light yet deeply affecting “One Fine Morning” isn’t even Hansen-Løve’s first crack at her national pastime, as the subject of infidelity has cropped up throughout her work, most notably in 2016’s exquisite “Things to Come.”

This time, however, she approaches that sticky situation through the eyes of the other woman, a widowed single mother whose stunning resemblance to Léa Seydoux could make any wedded man rethink their vows. A professional translator who’s come to think of herself as little more than a go-between for other people, Sandra (Léa Seydoux) has perhaps grown a bit too comfortable with her role as an intermediary; her skill at ferrying the same thought from one place to another often seems like it was developed in response to her fear of being stranded between them. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Baby Ruby” (February 3, in theaters and on VOD from Magnolia Pictures)

Despite its title, writer/director Bess Wohl’s debut feature “Baby Ruby” isn’t primarily about the titular infant. It instead takes interest in her beleaguered mother Jo (Noémie Merlant of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”), a lifestyle influencer for an online magazine. Her husband, Spencer (Kit Harington, “Game of Thrones”), is an “ethical” butcher. The pair, living in a lavish cabin, on paper, are the kind of seemingly perfect couple who put their idyllic baby pictures online to stir envy. They show the best parts of motherhood and sanitize the strain. But the bitter truth that Jo discovers is that you can’t hide the arduous parts.

The very idea of cinema showing the horrors and travails of motherhood isn’t new. It’s a trend gaining speed with films like “Kindred,” “Umma,” and “Lamb.” And yet, what separates Wohl’s film from everything else is how it dissects the performative exteriority of maternal life by using postpartum psychosis as a means to inflict the real-life terrors, paranoia, insomnia and hallucinations experienced by new mothers. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Body Parts” (February 3, in theaters and on VOD from Shout! Factory)

It’s been almost five years since the New York Times and The New Yorker published exposés of Hollywood’s ugliest open secret, that Harvey Weinstein was a sexual predator, taking the #MeToo movement worldwide and forever shifting the conversation around the film industry’s horrifying treatment of women. The flurry of similar allegations that followed has slowed to a trickle, but there are many women in Hollywood who want to keep the issues front and center. The message is loud and clear in “Body Parts,” a clever and damning documentary about the history of nudity, sex scenes, and women’s bodies on film. Objects become subjects in Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s sweeping yet focused analysis that exposes the truth about the power of images to shape the world’s views of women.

In a brisk 86 minutes, “Body Parts” mashes together interviews with the likes of Jane Fonda and Rosanna Arquette, analysis from film historians, intimacy coordinator trainings, and whirlwind montages from both classic and contemporary films. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and Guevara-Flanagan runs a tight ship. Though each piece could easily fill more time, the filmmaker shrewdly stays focused on the portrayal of women’s bodies, earning the film’s provocative title. The quick barrage of film clips acts both as handy filler and an almost dizzying background noise, illustrating the central thesis that these images are everywhere.

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“The Blue Caftan” (February 10, in theaters from Strand Releasing)

When an aging couple operating a struggling Moroccan dress shop hire a dashing young apprentice, some of the first words out of his mouth are “I work fast.” That also describes the approach of “The Blue Caftan” director Maryam Touzani, who sets up its straightforward premise so quickly that you’d be forgiven for thinking you had the entire film figured out within five minutes. A closeted gay tailor, who fights with his wife about money, begins mentoring a young man who’s more beautiful than any item in his shop. Gee, what could possibly happen here?

But rather than use that premise to blow up the status quo, Touzani meticulously works backwards, illustrating that there was so much more to these relationships than we could have possibly guessed. Working with an intricacy that rivals that of the craftsman at the center of her film, the auteur crafts a surprisingly warm story that subverts expectations at almost every turn.

While “The Blue Caftan” is a film about a gay man exploring his sexuality, the love story at its core is really one between him and his wife. It’s about the friendship and understanding that can form over the course of a lifetime spent together, no matter how unusual the arrangement. As much as anything else, Touzani’s delightful sophomore feature is a defense of the institution of marriage, a reminder that each human soul is worth a lifetime of exploration to someone.

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Pacifiction” (February 17, in theaters from Grasshopper Film and Gratitude Films)

What do you want when you already have paradise?

That question looms over Albert Serra’s singularly mysterious cinematic immersion into Tahiti, “Pacifiction.” The indigenous Polynesians living there would likely argue that this paradise hasn’t been theirs in a long time. Serra, the Catalan filmmaker behind such boundary-pushing works of experiential filmmaking as “Honor of the Knights” and “Story of My Death,” is yet another outsider coming to their shores, but he avoids the touristic travel-porn clichés of most movies set in some tropical locale. “Pacifiction” is not a vicarious experience of luxury; it is an experience of life. Set to its own tidal rhythm, it is one of the most beautiful and rigorously introspective movies of this or any year, a film that makes you deeply ponder the fate of humanity itself.

Benoît Magimel plays De Roller, the High Commissioner for French Polynesia, still one of the “overseas territories” ruled from Paris as a vestige of France’s empire. He’s in virtually every one of the 163 minutes that make up “Pacifiction,” and he’s into everything: meeting with activist leaders, twisting the arm of a priest to endorse the opening of a casino, overseeing a surfing contest, giving advice to the dancers at a nightclub, serving as the welcoming committee for a visiting French admiral.

He’s all awkward charm, trying to be “one of the people” even as he serves a different master. De Roller wears his white suit, flowered shirt, and horn-rimmed sunglasses like armor: casual enough not to stand out too much in Tahiti but formal enough to show he means business. When an indigenous politician on another island tells him he should embrace the local culture more and wear a pareo, it’s obvious he will never do so. In another place, our High Commissioner would be wearing a pith helmet. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Return to Seoul” (February 17, in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics, following one-week qualifying run in December)

Few movies have ever been more perfectly in tune with their protagonists than Davy Chou’s jagged, restless, and rivetingly unpredictable “Return to Seoul,” a shark-like adoption drama that its 25-year-old heroine wears like an extra layer of skin or sharp cartilage. The film spans eight years over the course of two hours, but you can feel its bristly texture and self-possessed violence from the disorienting first scenes.

Played by plastic artist and first-time actress Park Ji-Min (who gives a towering performance worthy of the same attention that Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh will receive for their work this fall), the French-raised Freddie arrives in Seoul without context, which leaves us the fool’s errand of trying to “solve” her identity over a few too many glasses of soju with her new friends. Some clues are easier to decipher than others. While Freddie may have been born in the country — and carry what some of her drinking buddies agree is “a typical Korean face” from “ancient, ancestral” times — it’s clear that this is her first trip back since she was adopted as a child, and that she neither thinks of it as home nor speaks a word of the native tongue.

Less obvious is the agenda behind Freddie’s sudden return. Her flagrant disregard for local customs suggests that she isn’t there to get in touch with her roots, and when someone suggests that she contact the local adoption agency, Freddie doesn’t just change the subject, she completely transforms the energy of the film itself. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Emily” (February 17, in theaters from Bleecker Street)

Despite writing one of the most rugged and enduring novels in all English literature before her 30th — and final — birthday, Emily Brontë spent the whole of her life in a suffocating environment that saw her brilliant imagination dampened at every turn. It was dampened by the patriarchy scared of her talent (“Wuthering Heights” was of course published under a pseudonym), by the individual men who knew her personally, and even sometimes by her own sisters, two of whom survived childhood to become accomplished writers themselves. Vindicating as it might be that Brontë’s one great book is still read widely some 200 years later, her remarkable victory over death pales in comparison to the poetic irony of her legacy: Few authors of any age have ever so inflamed public imagination by the mere fact of their existence.

In that light, it’s easy to appreciate why Brontë’s life so naturally lends itself to the sort of film that long-time actor (“Mansfield Park,” “Bedazzled,” “A.I.”) and first-time filmmaker Frances O’Connor has made about her in “Emily,” a ravishing period drama that plays fast and loose with the facts in order to paint a portrait of the author that bleeds with the same heart-in-its-hands emotionality she had to suffuse into her work. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Palm Trees and Power Lines” (March 2023, in theaters and on VOD from Momentum Pictures)

Lea knows the difference between wrong and right. Wrong: The way dudes treat her mom. Wrong: Her friends running out on their bill at a local diner. Wrong: Getting into a strange man’s truck. But, as has forever been the human condition — and in the case of Jamie Dack’s uncomfortably honest “Palm Trees and Power Lines,” the teenage human condition — knowing is only half the battle, and Lea (a breakout Lily McInerny in a remarkable first feature role) is about to endure quite a battle indeed. Dack, making her feature film debut by expanding her 2018 award-winning short of the same name, uses a familiar tale to shed new light on the coming-of-age drama, and while many of the film’s beats are predictable, that often speaks to the discomfiting universality of the story at hand.

There’s not much going on in Lea’s life when we first meet her. Caught in the liminal space of a suburban high school summer — no school to worry about, but plenty of adult decisions looming — she spends her days listening to music, wandering her dusty neighborhood, and hanging out with her vivacious pal Amber (Quinn Frankel). Her mom (a heartbreaking Gretchen Mol) isn’t exactly a stellar role model, often sleeping in past her own wake-up time (it’s Lea who tries to wake her up), and her dad is nowhere to be found. The boys her age are self-obsessed, silly, even boring, and while Lea isn’t inexperienced when it comes to sex, it doesn’t seem like something she particularly enjoys, instead turning to it as yet another snoozy pastime. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Chevalier” (April 7, in theaters from Searchlight Pictures)

For a man who was very nearly lost from history — forcefully erased during his time and long after he’d passed away — Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges still managed to leave quite a footprint. Good luck choosing which of his many accomplishments to recognize first: his prodigious fencing talent, his exploits as the colonel of the first all-Black regiment in Europe, his incredible skill as a virtuoso violinist, the list goes on and on. In Stephen Williams’ “Chevalier,” it’s Bologne’s awe-inspiring work as a composer — so talented that he was often referred to as the “Black Mozart, an even funnier moniker considering the pair were contemporaries — that forms the center of an alternately raucous and staid biopic.

Born in the French “overseas department” of Guadeloupe in 1745, Bologne’s life was complicated from the start: he was born the son of a wealthy planter and an enslaved teenager who served as his own maid, and though his father acknowledged him and even supported him, the younger Bologne was always doomed to be an outsider no matter where he was. As Williams’ film — only the director’s second after his 1995 debut “Soul Survivor” and an enviable run of TV directing gigs — kicks off, our on-screen Joseph (played by the always-electric Kelvin Harrison Jr.) is busy beating back his outsider status with insane talent and a brash attitude to match.

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“R.M.N.” (April 7, in theaters from IFC Films)

Chekhov’s gun has seldom fallen into hands as steady and menacing hands as in Cristian Mungiu’s poorly titled, expertly staged “R.M.N.,” which finds the elite Romanian auteur extrapolating the personal tensions that gripped his previous work (e.g., “Beyond the Hills” and the Palme d’Or-winning “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days”) across an entire Transylvanian village. The result is a socioeconomic crucible that carefully shifts its weight to the same foot that Mungiu always loves to rest on your throat; a slightly over-broad story of timeless xenophobia baked full of local flavor and set right on the cusp of a specific moment in the 21st century.

The film begins far away from the snowy hamlet where most of it takes place, as the bull-headed Matthias (Marin Grigore) unceremoniously quits his job at a German slaughterhouse by head-butting his boss for calling him a “lazy Gypsy.” And so, with few other options and the cops on his tail, Matthias returns to the financially dispossessed hometown where he left his young wife Ana (Macrina Bârlădeanu) and their young son Rudi (Mark Blenyesi), who’s refused to speak ever since he saw something in the woods outside their house.

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Master Gardener” (May 19, in theaters from Magnolia Pictures)

Paul Schrader proudly has little concern with how likable he, or his work, is. For his fans this is part of the joy, finding delight in his prickly Facebook posts and reveling in the black, gnarled heart beating at the center of much of his oeuvre. After the recent existential nightmare of “First Reformed” and last year’s stunningly cruel psychodrama “The Card Counter,” which also premiered on the Lido, Schrader returns to Venice to receive an Honorary Golden Lion award and regale the audience with another gritty tale of redemption. He spoke about “Master Gardener” with his signature nihilist wink and told IndieWire, “This one is going to piss people off. Obama’s not putting it on his top 10 list.”

It is with those expectations, and knowing how dark Schrader is capable of going, that his loyal audience will be bracing themselves for cruelty when “Master Gardener begins. But, while the central character’s arc will likely launch a dreaded “discourse,” there is a tenderness to “Master Gardener” that may prove its biggest surprise.

Joel Edgerton plays the title role as Narvel Roth, a reserved and meticulous gardener who runs the grounds of the grand Gracewood estate along with a small but committed team. The estate is owned by Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver) who swans into every scene with a perfectly coiffed helmet of hair and WASPy panache. Their concerns may seem of little consequence, talking about preparations for a gala and the orchids they plan to auction off, but the oedipal tension between them is immediately unnerving. Outside of the opening credits, which feature time-lapsed flowers vividly blooming against a black backdrop, the gardens themselves seem cold and drained of color. Even trips to supposedly spectacular gardens feature dusty-toned hedges and the browning stems of conspicuously pruned roses against an overcast sky. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“The Blackening” (June 16, in theaters from Lionsgate)

“The Blackening” is the first great horror parody of the post-“Get Out” era. The scares may be underserved, but the laughs and Blackness commentary make this a thrilling rollercoaster of a film. Based on 3-PEAT Comedy’s 2018 Comedy Central digital short of the same name, it asks a simple question: If the Black character is always the first to go in a horror movie, what happens when the whole cast is Black?

In the original short, a serial killer forces the group to sacrifice whoever is Blackest in order to save themselves. Directed by Tim Story (“Shaft”), the film expands the concept to lampoon every other horror trope and cliché. We start with a remote house in the woods — not a cabin, it’s a gorgeous home — with, of course, a creepy basement. There’s a horribly racist board game, The Blackening, which has a big blackface figure as a mascot. The game is simple: Answer questions about Blackness or die. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Showing Up” (TBD 2023, in theaters from A24)

“First Cow” may not have been anywhere near as soul-devouringly sad as “Wendy and Lucy,” but that bittersweet frontier comedy about two friends who get milked to death while trying to make an honest buck was still bleak enough to leave me very scared for the heroine of Kelly Reichardt’s latest film about desperate people and the animals with which they run afoul. Or, fowl, as the case may be in the director’s feathery “Showing Up,” a slight knowing smile of a movie starring Michelle Williams as a stressed-out Portland ceramist with a pageboy haircut who reluctantly finds herself nursing an injured pigeon during the most important week of her not-quite career.

The good news is that nobody gets buried with their best friend or has to leave them behind; this isn’t the kind of movie in which people die so much as one where everyone wears overalls and André Benjamin plays the patient kiln master at an Oregon arts college. The bad news is that a deadline might be even more distressing for certain types — namely, an insecure sculptor whose landlord (Hong Chau) is so busy rocketing to local fame with her large-scale installation work that she doesn’t seem to care about fixing the hot water. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“De Humani Corporis Fabrica” (TBD 2023, in theaters from Grasshopper Film and Gratitude Films)

A metal pincer travels through a dark red tunnel tearing at a foggy white membrane, reminiscent of a futuristic space vehicle burrowing through the bowels of a stylishly realized alien planet. In reality, this is inner space not outer, with minute cameras within the human body bridging the gap between documentary and arthouse sensibility.

The moving image has always existed in parallel in both art and science. “2001: A Space Odyssey” told of humanity’s potential across the solar system and, a year later, cutting-edge technology captured Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. But, as a doctor in “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” reminds us, art has its limits and “the challenge is not to foresee the future but to make it possible.” While filmmakers for over a century have experimented with narrative structure, computer-generated imagery and the boundaries of imagination science to map distant planets and tunnel through organs, giving us a new understanding of our anatomy and facilitating surgical procedures with godlike capabilities. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Carmen” (TBD 2023, in theaters from Sony Pictures Classics)

Located somewhere between a classic opera, a modern dance piece, and a deadly fever dream — between the timeless beauty of ancient myth and the modern nightmare of America’s current immigration policies — Benjamin Millepied’s “Carmen” is stretched across a few too many borders to ever feel like it’s standing on solid ground. And yet, it’s undeniably exhilarating to watch one of the world’s most accomplished choreographers team up with one of its most virtuosic composers (Nicolas Britell) for the kind of aggressively unclassifiable movie that would never exist if not for these two artists reaching beyond their disciplines to create it themselves.

Loosely inspired by Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera of the same name — so loosely, in fact, that Millepied thinks of his film as less of a re-telling or adaptation than he does a version of Bizet’s tragedy from a parallel universe — this “Carmen” moves the action from the southern tip of Spain to the northern cusp of Mexico, pares the source material’s busy story down to the brink of abstraction, and transmutes its soaring arias into defiant ballets of freedom. Imagine watching Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” and Julie Taymor’s “Titus” double-projected on the same screen and you might have a vague idea of the strange no-man’s land that Millepied’s debut feature begins dancing across from the moment it starts.
We begin in the Chihuahuan desert, where a proud flamenco dancer named Zilah (Marina Tamayo) summons a ferocious storm from the flimsy wooden board underneath her feet as cartel goons draw their guns on her.

A few moments later, Zilah’s thundering steps — the wild heartbeat of the film to come — are replaced by the sound of a single gunshot. Newly orphaned, her beautiful daughter Carmen (“In the Heights” breakout Melissa Barrera, more than cementing her star appeal) has no choice but to make a break for the border in the desperate hope that she might find refuge at a California nightclub owned by her godmother. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Rodeo” (TBD 2023, in theaters from Music Box Films)

Julia (an astounding Julie Ledru) has no interest in half-measures. Her dirt bike gets stolen? Time to steal someone else’s. She needs gas for that new bike? Take it off the first dude who looks her way. She wants some quick cash? Smash and grab a truckload of fancy bikes and literally just ride away with her new fortune. Nothing is out of the reach of her sticky fingers, but even lone wolf Julia hungers for companionship, and in Lola Quivoron’s visceral “Rodeo,” she gets it — at a price.

“Rodeo” is a heart-pounding, wholly unique ride, punctuated by incredible stunt work from Ledru and the rest of the cast — shepherded by veteran stunt expert Mathieu Lardot, who has worked on everything from the Jason Bourne franchise to the “Mission: Impossible” films — and possessed by a kinetic, high-energy drive. Some crafty Hollywood executive will likely pitch an Americanized version as one part “Titane,” one part “Fast and Furious,” and one part “Girlhood,” but Quivoron’s feature debut is so singular, so thrilling, that it will hopefully escape without being sucked into the remake machine. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Am I OK?” (TBD 2023, streaming on HBO Max)

Mid-way through Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne’s warm-hearted feature directorial debut “Am I OK?,” stars Dakota Johnson and Sonoya Mizuno, playing long-time BFFs in the middle of a crisis, take part in the kind of knockdown, drag-out argument that only people who really love each other could have. The expletives fly fast, the needling remarks about sensitive subjects come quick, and absolutely no one leaves the fight happy. It’s the sort of experience anyone who has a best friend is likely familiar with, though the details of how and why Lucy (Johnson) and Jane (Mizuno) are arguing are very specific, the result is immediately recognizable, understandable, and heartbreaking.

“Am I OK?” isn’t just a smart comedy about a pair of pals upended — sort of — by the admission that one of them is gay, it’s also a generous examination of female friendship, a dead funny skewering of L.A. culture, and a refreshing new spin on the sex comedy to boot. It’s got something for everyone, a crowd-pleaser with the kind of plotline that might scare off a handful of audience members (too bad for them, really). Aided by Johnson’s very charming comedic turn and Mizuno gamely taking on a prickly role (plus Notaro as, and this would be hard to make up, the doyenne of a retreat dedicated to a hammock-based lifestyle), “Am I OK?” joins a growing body of female-focused friendship films (“Bridesmaids,” “For a Good Time, Call…,” “Girls Trip,” just to name some recent standouts) without backing down from its interest in exploring sexuality, pleasure, and identity. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Sanctuary” (TBD 2023, in theaters from Neon’s Super)

A sharp and silly and deliriously romantic single-location saga about a hotel chain heir (Christopher Abbott) who’s blackmailed by his long-time dominatrix (Margaret Qualley), Zachary Wigon’s “Sanctuary” unfolds like a kinky cross between “Punch-Drunk Love” and an Off-Broadway play. The results are delightful and exasperating in almost perfectly equal measure until a last-minute hail Mary ends the movie on such a high that even its hoarier stretches seem like they were worth the walk in hindsight.

It starts with color swirls and a heart-stirring Ariel Marx score that sounds like it could be the overture of a musical; it ends with a rush of blood to the head. In between, it’s sustained by its performances. Not just the go-for-broke performances from two of the most inherently watchable young actors of their time, but also those of their characters, both of whom are so trapped by their parts in life that their kinky role-playing sessions together have become a lifeline that neither one of them may be able to live without. At a certain point, who they pretend to be with each other might be more honest than who they are on their own. 

Read IndieWire’s full review.

“Enys Men” (TBD 2023, in theaters from Neon)

A woman walks along a clifftop towards a stone cottage, the only structure as far as the eye can see. Struggling against the wind, she inches her way up a hill, trudging through the undergrowth, a reminder that grief slows the world down. Time and liminal space stretch and strain, minutes take longer to pass, the horizon reaches further away. It is lonely, it is mundane, and it is cruel. “Enys Men,” the latest film from British arthouse director Mark Jenkin, manifests grief as a a literal island, with its sole resident walking through its rituals with grim determination.

The film, for all its experimental form, wears its central allegory on its sleeve. One of its few lines of dialogue is heard through a crackling radio explaining, “The abandoned island of Enys Men has become a monument of grief,” and our protagonist known only as The Volunteer (Mary Woodvine) walks through each day’s routine with eerie detachment. The film begins in April 1973, and we meet The Volunteer checking on a bunch of long-stemmed white flowers with glowing red stamen, all growing from an otherwise barren clifftop.

Each day, The Volunteer notes the status of the flowers with “No Change” jotted down in a ledger, but as the first day of May approaches, it is evident that something is shifting. With each passing day, the dread is subtly amplified, the flowers grow, the presence at the bottom of the well becomes more tangible. Much like with Jenkin’s striking tale of Cornish fishermen “Bait” and parenthood dramedy “The Midnight Drives,” the films operate based on a dreamy internal logic that is never made explicit. 

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“Biosphere” (TBD 2023, in theaters from IFC Films)

Toward the beginning of “Jurassic Park,” while debating the efficacy of the rigid confines of Isla Nublar’s foolproof dinosaur containment and control system, chaos theorist Ian Malcolm ominously intones the now iconic line, “Life finds a way.” This line is referenced numerous times, first directly and later more obliquely, throughout “Biosphere,” the directorial debut of producer Mel Eslyn (“The One I Love,” “Room 104”). Led by Sterling K. Brown and Mark Duplass, it follows two men as they cope with being the last humans alive on the planet and the evolutionary changes that nature throws their way.

Ray (Brown) and Billy (Duplass) are the only residents of an apartment-sized bio-dome after some unknown catastrophe appears to have annihilated all other life on Earth. It’s implied eventually that Billy, once the American president during a time of crisis, may have had a hand in whatever it was that went down before the start of the movie. Ray, on the other hand, is haunted by the memory of a birthday party magician who made a bowling ball appear out of thin air.

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