1. She is Conann – My favorite working director reshaped the Conan the Barbarian myth into a lesbian fantasia built on ego death and the cruelty of having to make art in a decaying world.  No one else alive has dared to hijack the movie-making dream machine for their own perverse pleasure in the way Bertrand Mandico has.  He’s perfectly attuned to the medium’s ability to evoke powerful ideas & feelings out of pure, hand-crafted imagery.  There are allusions to luminary provocateurs here that indicate Mandico thinks of himself as the modern equivalent of a Kenneth Anger or a Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but he’s actually our modern Méliès: an illusionist who’s pushing a still-young artform to its most fantastic extremes.

2. I Saw the TV Glow – The melancholy dark side of the Brigsby Bear moon. It’s impossible not to read this VHS-warped dysphoria horror as a cautionary tale for would-be trans people who are too afraid to come out to themselves, but it hits home for anyone who’s ever avoided authentically engaging with their life, body, and community by disappearing into niche, obsessive media consumption instead.  It made me so sad that I felt physically ill, and then I immediately retreated into another movie screening so I wouldn’t think about it for too long.

3. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – A three-hour Romanian art film about labor exploitation in the global gig economy . . . One that communicates through vulgar pranks & memes, setting aside good taste & subtlety in favor of making its political points directly, without pretension.

4. Mars Express – A great sci-fi action blockbuster that happens to be animated & French. It’s just familiar enough to make you wonder why Hollywood studios aren’t regularly making large-scale sci-fi like Minority Report & Terminator 2 anymore, but then its third act shoots for the stars in a way that distinguishes it from its obvious reference points through sheer dazzlement.

5. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – George Miller’s action blockbuster sequel gives me the RRR tingles more often than it gives me the Fury Road tingles, which is honestly just as good. It’s large-scale, uncanny CG mythmaking from one of our finest working madmen.

6. The People’s Joker – This fair-use Joker parody is the kind of direct, rawly honest outsider art that hosts a guided tour of the inner sanctums of its director’s brain. It’s not Vera Drew’s fault that the secret batcaves of her particular brain are wallpapered with copyrighted corporate media. We’ve all been mentally poisoned by pop culture iconography in that way, but most artists are too timid to engage with it in their work with this level of fearless vulnerability. It’s an impressively funny, personal comedy framed within the grease stain that Batman comics have left on modern culture.

7. Last Things – Billed as “an experimental film about evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks,” the most exciting thing about this apocalyptic hybrid-doc is finally getting to experience what it’s like to be Björk for an hour: finding infinite significance, beauty, and terror in simple mineral formations.

8. Memoir of a Snail – A stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness from the director of Mary & Max: a stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness. There’s a tangible, darkly comic sense of despair to Adam Elliot’s work that’s matched only by fellow snail’s pace animator Don Hertzfeldt, except Elliot thankfully borrows a little Jean-Pierre Jeunet whimsy to help cut the tension. 

9. Cuckoo – Tilman Singer’s teen-angst freakout escalates the verbally conveyed psychedelia of his debut Luz to something more traditionally thrilling. He genre-hops from demonic possession to creepy asylum horror but maintains the same screenwriting ambition of pulling brain-melting ideas out of simple, stripped-down tools. It’s also a major triumph for audiences who’ve been waiting around for Dan Stevens & Hunter Schaeffer to be handed meatier material; our time is now.

10. Love Lies Bleeding – I went into this muscular erotic thriller expecting to swoon for its synths, sex, and biceps. I’m surprised to say that I was also emotionally invested in its central romance beyond those surface aesthetics, which was not as much of a given. Rose Glass amplifies everything that was exciting about her debut Saint Maud to grander effect, once again getting away with one of my least favorite genre filmmaking tropes (contextualizing all supernatural fantasy elements as dreams & delusions instead of them “really” happening), somehow making it feel like audacity rather than cowardice. It’s ripped, roided, and noided.

11. The Substance – There was a movie called Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo at Cannes a few years ago that got unanimously rotten reviews complaining that it’s just four relentless hours of young people’s gyrating butts.  It never got US distribution, but Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror comedy is exactly what I imagined it looked like, except now with positive reviews and surrealistic gore effects from Screaming Mad George.

12. Aishiteru! (Safe Word) – A semi-pink mockumentary about a pro-wrestling pop idol who gets recruited as a dominatrix because she can’t stop playing heel.  Whatever dramatic authenticity is lost in its sub-professional production values is made up for in its intense fixations on sexual power dynamics & subcultural detail. If you have any entry-level interest in wrestling, pop, or kink, this is a thrilling, endearing journey through their backrooms & dungeons.

13. Kinds of Kindness – The sinister absurdism of this New Orleans-set anthology drama convinced me that Yorgos Lanthimos would be just as effective as a playwright as he is as a filmmaker, which I can’t believe never occurred to me before. More urgently, a lot of it was shot in the immediate area where I work & live, which was uncomfortable because I don’t want any of the creeps he’s dreamed up anywhere near me.

14. A Different Man – Aaron Schimberg ventures further into the ethical & psychological labyrinth of rethinking onscreen disfigurement & disability representation that he first stepped into with Chained for Life, this time with less third-act abstraction.  Sebastian Stan does incredible work building complex layers in the lead role until Adam Pearson completely wrecks the whole thing in the funniest way possible.  It’s a great dark comedy about the tensions between internal & external identity.

15. The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed – Joanna Arnow delivers the driest humor you’ll find outside a Roy Andersson film, which is funny to say about an autofictional BDSM romcom where no single scene lasts longer than a minute.

16. Anora – This sex-work Cinderella story is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour notes of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. Both films are equally funny & frantic, but Baker has clearly decided he wants audiences to love him again after his brief heel era, and it’s impressive to see him face-turn to this opposite tonal extreme of his work without losing his voice.

17. The Beast – A sci-fi fantasy horror about falling for the same entitled fuckboy over & over again in each of your past & future lives, and all that changes is the temporal context in which he sucks. It’s one of those purposefully cold, inscrutable Euro provocations that you’re not sure if you’re supposed to take entirely seriously, until director Bertrand Bonello tips his hand a little by making you watch pop-up ad clips from Trash Humpers in a brilliant throwaway gag.

18. Nosferatu – Robert Eggers has softened his alienating approach to narrative structure so that he can escalate his exquisite, traditionalist images to a grander, major-studio scale.  As a result, this cracked costume drama doesn’t add much to the ongoing ritual of restaging Dracula (except for accidentally making the argument that Coppola’s version is the best to date).  It’s a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, though, which obviously goes a long way in a largely visual medium.

19. Longlegs – This supernatural serial killer thriller feels convincingly Evil and gives Nicolas Cage free rein to be erratically Intense. Call me a simple man, but that’s more than enough for me.  The Oz Perkins directorial project continues an upward trend.

20. In a Violent Nature – A corny 80s bodycount slasher shot & edited with modern slow-cinema arthouse distancing.  It’s very funny in how it gives horror-convention gorehounds exactly what they want (the most annoying idiot youths to ever disgrace the screen being gruesomely dismembered) while also being stubbornly withholding (shooting the stillness of the woods with an Apichatpongian sense of patience).

-Brandon Ledet