I LOVED Un homme qui crie.

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun creates such a quiet, devastating portrait of fatherhood, pride, and displacement. At the center is Adam, a former swimming champion who works as a pool attendant at a luxury hotel in Chad. When the hotel changes ownership, Adam loses his position and watches his son take his place.

I miss when romantic comedies were allowed to be this unserious.

No Strings Attached is absolutely not reinventing the genre. It’s Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman having sex, catching feelings, pretending they don’t have feelings, and then inevitably realizing they have feelings. And honestly? Sometimes that’s all I need.

I loved Argo.

There’s something so satisfying about a thriller that knows exactly how long to hold onto tension. Ben Affleck keeps the film moving without making it feel rushed, and the absurdity of the fake science-fiction movie premise somehow makes the whole thing even more stressful.

Catching Fire is easily my favorite of The Hunger Games series.

What makes it work so well is that Katniss finally understands that the Games were never just about survival. She has become a symbol, and the Capitol is terrified of what that symbol represents. The second arena is also a huge improvement visually and narratively, with each section of the environment feeling like its own little trap.

Birdman is the kind of movie where I can completely understand why someone would find it obnoxious while simultaneously having a great time watching it.

Adonis Johnson has spent his entire life trying to outrun the shadow of his father, Apollo Creed, while simultaneously wanting to prove that he belongs in the same world. What I love most is that the film never makes his journey solely about becoming a great boxer. It’s about figuring out who he is when the expectations attached to his family name are stripped away.

I know Arrival is beloved, and I completely understand why. The concept is fascinating, the cinematography is beautiful, and the idea of language fundamentally changing how we understand time is genuinely cool.

But I was bored.

I wanted to love Mother! because on paper, it is exactly the kind of film I should be obsessed with: biblical allegory, psychological horror, an increasingly hostile house, and Jennifer Lawrence losing her mind. But unfortunately, I found myself more frustrated than fascinated.

Sorry to Bother You is one of the boldest, wildest pieces of Afro-surrealist cinema in the past decade, and it absolutely thrives on its unapologetic weirdness. I loved this film—part satire, part fever dream, part political scream—and Lakeith Stanfield is the beating heart of all of it. He’s magnetic, hilarious, vulnerable, and unpredictable. Honestly, he’s your modern-day Denzel in terms of range and presence, just channeled through a wholly different, surrealist lens. He eats every frame.

A tender, poetic love letter to a city that no longer exists, and a quiet elegy for the people pushed out of it. It’s one of those rare films that feels both intimate and historically significant, especially when you consider how many Black and brown communities have been displaced from the Bay Area by gentrification. The film captures that loss with a softness that hits harder than any blunt social commentary.

Don’t Look Up is a sharp, angry satire that swings hard at media noise, political incompetence, and collective denial—and while its message lands, the film itself can feel messy and uneven. Adam McKay aims for a chaotic, end-of-the-world comedy with bite, but the execution doesn’t always match the ambition.

Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme feels like a filmmaker doubling down on everything that makes him singular: immaculate compositions, a deadpan sense of humor, and a storybook world that’s slightly cracked at the hinges. It’s one of his most confident late period films and easily lands in my top three from him.

Challengers is Luca Guadagnino at his most intoxicating—sweaty, stylish, and charged with sexual tension from the first frame. It’s a sports film only in structure; emotionally, it’s a three-way power play masquerading as a tennis drama. I loved how boldly it leans into eroticism and desire, not just between players, but between ambition, ego, and control.

The Holdovers is one of 2023’s quiet masterpieces—an understated, deeply human film that slipped through the cracks of a year dominated by big, culture-consuming releases like Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Poor Things. It deserved far more attention. In a year that felt like cinema’s grand return, this small, bittersweet Christmas-set story had to fight for space, but it’s exactly the kind of film that ages gracefully.

Babylon is a chaotic, maximalist plunge into early Hollywood excess—but for all its noise, scale, and ambition, it never fully comes together. At over three hours, the film asks a lot of its audience, and the pacing becomes its biggest enemy. There are stretches that feel electric, even brilliant, but they’re buried under so much bloat that the impact fades almost as quickly as it lands.