Bikeriders, Challengers, Kinds of Kindness

It’s scarier than any horror film. It’s scarier than any other contemporary political documentary. And it’s scary because it’s all happening, which is why you need to see it. Stephen Ujlaki and Chris Jones’s epochal exposé is about how the forces of Christian nationalism have become far more powerful than most people realize in their crusade to transform America into a theocracy. (The vacation-home flag choices of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. are a tip of the iceberg.) This is exactly the kind of totalitarian political/cultural movement that the American system was built by the Founders to repel. But the film reveals the links, both upfront and hidden, between Christian nationalism and the rise of Donald Trump (the Jan. 6 insurrection was fueled, in large part, by Christian nationalists), making the prospect of a second Trump presidency take on a whole new meaning. — Owen Gleiberman

Maybe it’s the look of reckless rebellion in their eyes, or the way they’re ready to brawl at a moment’s notice. With half the guys in the (fictional, but fact-based) Vandals Motorcycle Club, you just know they’re going to die behind the wheel one day — a tragic fate that hovers over Jeff Nichols’ vibrant chronicle of that mid-’60s moment when American biker culture shifted from “The Wild One” cool to the drug-addled anarchy of Roger Corman’s “The Wild Angels.” A wild stallion bucking against straight society, Austin Butler’s Benny clearly has a death wish, which makes it all the more wrenching to observe Jodie Comer’s Kathy trying to tame him. But who can blame her? This astonishingly well-acted saga presents an odd sort of love triangle, with Tom Hardy’s charismatic gang leader taking up the third corner. The outcome seems inevitable, and yet, Nichols surprises, delivering the best ending in ages. — Peter Debruge

By all rights, Luca Guadagnino’s tennis-world love story should have been a sporty piece of romantic eye candy. It’s about three sexy young tennis pros: cool, diffident Art (Mike Faist), rapacious bad boy Patrick (Josh O’Connor), and fierce, elegant Tashi (Zendaya), who comes between them. On paper it sounds like “Twilight” with aerodynamic rackets. But Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay and Guadagino’s wizardly direction elevate it into something closer to the tennis love-triangle equivalent of three-dimensional chess. The movie doesn’t just leap around in time, charting how Tashi first hooked up with Patrick, then wound up marrying Art and becoming his coach. It surveys the rules of attraction from every side of the court; it reveals the unconscious surge of love’s push and pull. Each of the two men love Tashi, and they also, beneath their hellbent rivalry, love each other. Homoerotically or just platonically? The film says: You decide, but the difference may not be as big as you think. — OG

A decade ago, Tom Hardy’s “Locke” pulled off an incredible feat, spinning a tense, three-dimensional relationship drama around a man taking calls in his car. In her tricky, keep-’em-guessing debut “Daddio,” writer-director Christy Hall does one better, eavesdropping on two strangers (played by Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson) in a cab ride from JFK airport back to Manhattan. Penn plays the chatty taxi driver, who fancies himself an expert on human nature, attempting to psychoanalyze the understandably wary young woman in the back seat. Ever so slowly — and with just the right amount of creepiness — he draws out details about her situation. Johnson’s body language speaks volumes in a performance so good it more than absolves her for “Madame Web.” Hall has crafted a juicy artichoke of a movie, peeling away the passenger’s daddy issues one layer at a time to get at what really matters to her character: trust. — PD

There’s a moment in the original “Star Wars” when Luke Skywalker looks out on the desert horizon of his home planet and sees two suns setting in the distance. It’s a simple detail, but one that says so much about how his world is at once just like ours and unknowably different. Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” is the first sci-fi franchise to make us tingle in the same way, and this three-hour follow-up brings it all together. In the first blockbuster back after last year’s industry-stopping labor strikes, we were transported to another world as only Hollywood can. There’s a formidable new adversary in Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha (the Sting role in David Lynch’s impossible-to-follow version), blue Kool-Aid drinking tests of Timothée Chalamet’s chosen-oneness, and the incredibly satisfying payoff of Paul Atreides’ sandworm-surfing lessons. Still, it’s the relatable human moments amid Villeneuve’s awe-inspiring vision that bring “Dune: Part Two” down to earth, so to speak. Frank Herbert purists are obsessed with telling you what’s missing, but the real feat here is how dramatically the film simplifies all that arcane plotting into clear story beats, making the mythology feel almost intuitive, the way witnessing a double sunset did half a century earlier. — PD

In a twist few born in the relatively conservative 20th century could have anticipated, gay representation has gravitated so far into the mainstream that it’s lost much of its capacity to shock. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in terms of the cultural conversation (“Milk” helped defeat Prop 8, after all, and once-punk Pedro Almodóvar is now one of your mom’s favorite filmmakers), and yet, “Femme” boldly leans into the edgier aspects of queer lust, unpacking the twisted attraction between a drag performer (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) and the closeted scally lad (George MacKay) who brutally attacks him outside the club. Several months later, they cross paths at a gay sauna and begin hooking up in secret. Who has the power now? It’s deeply uncomfortable, psychologically rich and mad-sexy territory to explore, which first-time feature directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping approach with the confidence of career-high Brian De Palma. — PD

All hail the triumphant creative return of Pixar. Nine years ago, the glory of “Inside Out” is that it was a prankish digitally animated fairy tale that really did present an astonishing model of the human personality (our emotions in a tug-of-war, even as we need each one of them). It was a profoundly moving story of the universal passage out of childhood innocence. The beauty of “Inside Out 2” is that it comes close to matching the high of “Inside Out.” With Riley, now 13, ruled by new emotions as she tries to fit in with the cool kids at hockey camp, the movie is a roller-coaster that asks primal questions: When happens when our Anxiety becomes greater than our Joy? And what does it mean, in the age of social-media competition, to be “embraced by our peers” if we have to lose who we are to do it? — OG

With the exception of “The Favourite,” I’ve never been a fan of the director Yorgos Lanthimos. I found “Dogtooth” drab. I didn’t even like “Poor Things,” a movie that, to me, was overlong and didactic. So you might take it with a grain of salt when I say that “Kinds of Kindness,” a theater-of-the-absurd allegorical Twilight Zone mind game about our brave new world of power and deception, is the best movie that Lanthimos has made. Yet for two hours and 46 minutes, I watched it in a state of spellbound amazement. Each of the film’s three episodes, with the same cast members floating through them like figures out of a dream, is a puzzle that we slowly fill in, whether it’s Jesse Plemons as a dweeb whose boss (Willem Dafoe) makes quixotic demands that are a logical extension of corporate fascism; Plemons as a cop whose wife, played by Emma Stone, resurfaces as a subtly different person; or Stone as a distraught woman who has left her family to follow a kinky cult leader (Dafoe) in a tale that tracks our obsessive compulsion to belong. I’m astounded by all the critics who crusade for adventurousness in mainstream cinema yet have greeted a movie this visionary in its radical storytelling bravura with a collective “Eh.” But don’t take my word for it. Buy a ticket, check yourself into the Hotel Lanthimos, and see if you can ever leave. — OG

An underground/midnight/guerrilla-cinema sensation. Vera Drew, who directed and co-wrote this scandalous IP-on-acid comic-book psychodrama, plays the title character, a mentally fractured aspiring stand-up comedian who bills herself as Joker the Harlequin. She’s the maniacal Joker of DC legend, as well as an outlaw parody of the Joker and also a discordantly sincere trans heroine who’s using the Joker’s persona to present who she is to the world. The movie takes place in a diabolically playful free-associational media zone that suggests the channel-surfing hall of mirrors of “Natural Born Killers” crossed with a public-access knockoff of “Network.” It toys with the notion that those who are driven to extremes of cosplay are truer to the spirit of comic books than anyone else. Drew’s performance is her own variation on Heath Ledger’s cuckoo pain-freak depravity and Joaquin Phoenix’s miserablism-turned-prancing-homicidal-clown vengeance. The movie is about Joker the Harlequin saying, “This is how far I’m forced to go to express who I am.” It’s about the demonization of trans consciousness creating a criminal. — OG

There was never much suspense about what would win last year’s international feature Oscar (“The Zone of Interest” was nominated in five categories, including best picture, after all). And yet, there were at least half a dozen other masterpieces among the other countries’ submissions: Bhutan’s “The Monk and the Gun,” Mexico’s “Tótem,” Denmark’s “The Promised Land” and Wim Wenders’ Japan-set “Perfect Days” were all standouts that held off till early 2024 to play U.S. theaters. Slipping quietly beneath the radar was director Ena Sendijarević’s sly critique of Dutch colonialism, which examines the spectacular implosion of a white-owned sugar plantation in the East Indies after the patriarch dies, leaving his property not to his “legitimate” heirs, but to the servant woman who bore him a love child. Named one of Variety’s Directors to Watch, Sendijarević represents a bold new voice, like a cross between Ruben Östlund and Wes Anderson, but with fangs. — PD