In the days since I first saw Kazik Radwanski's Matt and Mara, I've found myself reflecting on it quite a bit. It's an unassuming film, small in scale and short in length, but its impact is something quite lovely and lingering: an unexpectedly profound reflection on loneliness and the human connections and disconnections that result from it.

Coming out some 36 years after the original Beetlejuice, Tim Burton's new sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn't exactly striking while the iron was hot. While the first film was a hit in the 80s, its reputation has only grown over the following decades, becoming a cult classic and Hot Topic staple.

Taken on its own, Alien: Romulus is a solid film. It is difficult, however, to analyze franchise films like this in a vacuum, especially when this is the seventh film in the venerable Alien series (ninth if you count the Alien vs. Predator films). To paraphrase Kamala Harris, Alien: Romulus exists within the context of all that came before it.

I often found myself thinking about Agnes Varda's Daguerreotypes and Tsai Ming Liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn in the way Filho examines the power of cinema to preserve while also using it to document its own death; faded movie palaces now replaced by towering high rises, replaced by ramshackle churches, the temples of cinema swapping one religion for another.

There are few mainstream filmmakers working today who have as keen an eye and a mastery of the cinematic language as M. Night Shyamalan. Sure, it became cool to poke fun at his work in the late 2000s when he became known as the "twist" guy, which left audiences expecting surprises and trying to outsmart his movies. Thankfully, it seems we have mostly moved past all that, and Shyamalan has smartly reframed expectations around his films since the soft reboot of his career in 2015's The Visit.

Like its spiritual predecessor, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1978), Billy Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts focuses on a black working man in the African American Watts district of Los Angeles. Except in this case, Charlie Banks (Nate Hardman) is more of a *not* working man, because he finds himself perpetually un and under employed, spending his days at home with his harried wife, Andais (Kaycee Moore) and their children.

It's almost surprising that it's taken almost 30 years to make a sequel to Twister, since that film was a runaway hit and the second-highest-grossing film of 1996 (behind Independence Day, which didn't get a sequel until 2016). Perhaps it was the failure of director Jan De Bont's Speed 2: Cruise Control or the fact that it was such a self-contained story, but whatever the reason, it's taken a surprising amount of decades for the studios to return to this particular well.

When I was younger, growing up the 1990s, Batman movies were some of my earliest inklings of my trans awakening. I distinctly remember seeing Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman (I wasn't allowed to see Batman Returns at the time, but I was obsessed nevertheless) and thinking "I want to be just like her." While the other little boys wanted to be Batman on the playground, I was always Catwoman.

While Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis may have captured much of the attention at this year's Cannes Film Festival, another self-financed passion project by an old-school Hollywood filmmaker made its debut on the Croisette to a much more muted response. Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 is the first part of planned series of four films, one of which, Chapter 2, has already been shot and was planned for release in August before it was unceremoniously delayed due to Chapter 1's underwhelming performance at the box office.

If movies were defined solely by their marketing campaigns, then Osgood Perkins' Longlegs would easily be one of the best of the year. Movies are quite a bit more than their marketing campaigns, however, and my feelings on Longlegs are much more muted.

Schanelec's films are often defined by their silences. Often outright defiant of traditional "plot," much of the action occurs between what is actually said, leaving the audience to fill in the gaps as the film jumps through space and time without warning.

On the surface, Janet Planet has all the trappings of a quirky indie comedy from the early 2000s. It's filled with awkward silences, deadpan humor, and characters who do a lot of standing and staring, creating an air of disaffection that creates both an unusual rhythm and a sense of ironic disconnection with the audience.

In theatre, the term "ghostlight" refers to a light left on in an empty theatre to provide illumination when the building isn't occupied. That ghostlight was, in essence, a safety mechanism meant to prevent people from walking off the edge of the stage and into the orchestra pit below. In Ghostlight, we are introduced to an emotionally distant construction worker named Dan (Keith Kupferer), a man of few words but big feelings - feelings that he usually keeps bottled up inside only to burst forth as explosive anger when pushed to the limit.

Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow is ostensibly a film about the bonds created by the communal act of watching favorite TV shows. These are the kinds of deeply personal cult hits that feel as though they're made just for you; like a secret shared amongst friends that not only defines you but gives you an identity as a member of an exclusive club in which minutiae and trivia become a kind of language only the initiated can understand.

One need not be particularly interested in sports to find Luca Guadagnino's new tennis drama, Challengers, compelling. Guadagnino frames his tennis matches as either gladiatorial blood sports or sex, and sometimes both at the same time. Tennis is a relationship, Zendaya's Tashi Donaldson explains; and indeed, the tennis matches here are often thinly veiled stand-ins for dialogue the characters are either unwilling or unable to have.

Love Lies Bleeding is perhaps the horniest, most aesthetically electrifying film I've seen in a multiplex in very long time. It's a sweaty, sweltering, heady mix of queer eroticism, crime thriller, magical realism, and dark comedy that feels genuinely rebellious in a way films rarely do anymore.