It's easy to be excited by a thriller, especially an erotic one. The genre is designed to elicit that response in us. But with Babygirl, writer-director Halina Reijn has delivered an erotic thriller so confident and so fully formed that it also left me excited for it. I can't wait to see this movie released in the world. It feels calibrated exactly right to its time. 2j185m

Mariamakes its intentions clear early. In September 1977, legendary opera singer Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) is in her final days, and her grasp on reality is tenuous at best. She rearranges the world with herself at the center, though where once entire crowds were subject to her whims, now there remain only her loyal butler (Piersco Favino) and maid (Alba Rohrwacher). They worry over her declining health. By abusing her medication, she hallucinates entire conversations. She detests doctors, who feel compelled to disrupt her with their facts.

The Order is about hate, though not quite in the way you'd expect. It seems an obvious theme, given the story follows a white supremacist terrorist cell and the FBI's effort to stop them, and some space is given to the hateful doctrine they live by. But the movie is less interested in hate ideologically as it is in the feeling. And director Justin Kurzel is less interested in explaining that feeling than he is in observing it and its effects. Surround that goal with across-the-board quality, and you have a consistently tense crime thriller that leaves a lasting mark.

I haven't read the William S. Burroughs novel that Queer is adapted from, but if you told me Luca Guadagnino had gutted it and started from scratch, I'd believe you. His latest movie seems to me to be in clear conversation with his previous work, as if the sensibilities of his four previous features were combined in one movie. It's an enigmatic experience that I desperately want to spend this space interpreting. But I will refrain from going into too much detail and just offer up the lens I saw it through.

When Joker premiered here in Venice in 2019, one of the prevailing narratives was that the movie could be dangerous. The film's embrace of Arthur Fleck's perspective, the thinking went, might inspire disgruntled young men to commit acts of real-life violence. In reality, what toxicity it generated emerged as memes instead of movements, but this seems to have impacted the filmmakers enough to make Joker: Folie à Deux about that very idea. This film seems targeted directly at the audience a little too into Joker – and made special to antagonize them.

At the Venice International Film Festival, a jury of industry professionals decide on how to dispense the prizes to the movies in Official Competition, including the prestigious Golden Lion. This year’s group of nine includes filmmakers from across the world, with French actor Isabelle Huppert serving as Jury President. However, since I was Screen Rant’s sole representative at this year’s edition, the 81st, these awards are mine to hand out.

I’ll be honest, I don’t entirely understand Kevin Costner’s Horizon project. I’m not really one to judge whether it makes business sense to make a multi-part Western saga for theatrical release in 2024; as a critic, my stake isn’t in the world of profits and losses. When Costner used all his pull to put a project like this on the big screen, I should be able to applaud him, purely out of my love for the cinematic experience. Instead, after seeing Horizon: Chapter 2, I’m still scratching my head and wondering why this wasn’t television.

Broken Rage (2024) has put me in a difficult position. On the one hand, I want you to have the same experience with it that I did, and I went in completely blind. On the other, I don't quite have the courage to pull a Jack Torrance and fill several more paragraphs with the same sentence repeated ad nauseam. So, I'll say now that you should see Broken Rage, preferably with people. If you're not sold yet, read on, but know there's no shame in stopping as soon as you are. You can always bookmark this and come back later!

There are different ways for a movie to execute a slow burn, but the ones I ire most withhold not their stories, but their identities. Stranger Eyes has a straightforward thriller premise and a clear interest in surveillance, both of which are clear from the outset, but its shape is hardly a straight line. As it leads us around corners into places we didn't expect to be, what the movie has to say about surveillance slowly comes into view. For those with the patience to sit mired in uncertainty, Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua's film offers unexpected rewards.

It's always fascinating to see a master filmmaker work in a different language, especially when their work is singular. Tone, personality, and rhythm can come across very differently, and sometimes be difficult to recreate, in a new cultural context. Some take to it right away, others require time to find their footing. Pedro Almodóvar's first feature-length film in English, The Room Next Door, is somewhere in between. The Spanish director's fingerprint is there, undoubtedly. But the movie feels strangely incomplete, as if made with one hand tied behind his back.