1. I Saw the TV Glow – A pastel kaleidoscope of teen angst, gender dysphoria, Buffy the Vampire Slayer nostalgia, and general melancholy. It’s impossible not to read Jane Schoenbrun’s VHS-warped horror of persona 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 media obsession instead.

2. The Substance – Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror comedy is a fun little fable about the ageism, sexism, and self-hatred in pop culture’s obsession with the past – all embellished with surrealistic gore effects worthy of Screaming Mad George. Show up for Demi Moore’s mainstream comeback; stick around for funhouse mirror reflections on how being alive and made of meat is gross, how the things that we have to consume to stay alive are often also gross, and how the things that self-hatred drives us to do to ourselves are the absolute grossest.

3. Love Lies Bleeding – Rose Glass’s muscular erotic thriller is not one for those with queasy stomachs. It’s a hot, sweaty, ferociously vicious work that’ll have you swooning over its synths, sex, and biceps until you’re feeling just as ripped, roided, and noided as its doomed but determined lovers.

4. She is Conann – Bertrand Mandico once again transports us to a violent lesbian fantasy realm, this time reshaping the Conan the Barbarian myth into a grotesque fantasia built on ego death and the cruelty of having to make art in a decaying world. A cosmic swirl of glitter, swords, gore, fetishistic fashion, and deconstructed gender, nothing about it is logical, but it all makes perfect sense.

5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – Radu Jude made a three-hour, fussily literary 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.

6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – Large-scale, uncanny CG mythmaking from one of our finest working madmen, George Miller’s latest manic blockbuster is a visual feast and a high-octane thrill ride that’s easily the equal of Fury Road. It’s truly epic, a mutant-infested Ben-Hur that trades in chariots for chrome.

7. The Taste of Things – A sweetly sensual romance about the joy of sharing thoughtfully prepared meals. It’s absurdly cozy & warm, likely the best movie about food since Pig. Also, Juliette Binoche is in it. It’s easy fall in love with a movie when Juliette Binoche is in it.

8. Mars Express – This is a great sci-fi action blockbuster that happens to be animated & French. A noir thriller about an alcoholic detective pursuing the assassin of a “jailbreaking” hacker who liberates robots from synthetic lives of servitude, it’s just familiar enough to make you wonder why Hollywood isn’t regularly making large-scale sci-fi like Blade Runner or Minority Report anymore, but it also distinguishes itself from those obvious reference points through futuristic speculation and sheer dazzlement.

9. Last Things – Billed as “an experimental film about evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks,” Deborah Stratman’s apocalyptic hybrid doc finds infinite significance, beauty, and terror in simple mineral formations. It recounts the story of our planet’s geology through an epic poem about the emergence of life in a form we wouldn’t recognize as life, aggressively anthropomorphizing ordinary rocks until an obscured origin myth emerges. It looks to the future as well, crafting a Chris Marker-esque sci-fi narrative about rocks taking over the Earth after humans end our current, destructive reign. Good riddance.

10. The People’s Joker – An impressively funny, personal comedy framed within the grease stain that Batman comics have left on modern culture, Vera Drew’s fair-use warping of copyrighted comic book lore to illustrate her own gender identity journey is pure brilliance and pure punk. Direct, rawly honest outsider art that hosts a guided tour of the secret batcaves of its director’s brain, it’s a marvel . . . except that it’s DC.

Read Alli’s picks here.
Read Boomer’s picks here.
Read Brandon’s picks here.
Read Britnee’s picks here.
Hear Hanna’s picks here.
Hear James’s picks here.

-The Swampflix Crew