Into the limelight: in settings both grim and glamorous, Sean Baker's Anora repeatedly shows how despair is the bedrock for the false-front distractions of American kitsch
Body doubles: David Cronenberg's The Shrouds and Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door find both auteurs still playing around the permutations of the flesh, but in a decidedly retrospective mood
If you build it: a pervading sense of mourning is the most coherent thing about Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, an otherwise largely unfocused and self-important movie
Trick mirror: The Substance seems inescapably in thrall to the seductive, glossy surfaces of Hollywood beauty standards that it is supposedly skewering
Righteous outlaw: The Goldman Case is a brilliant example of a courtroom drama that eschews familiar tropes, placing an individual subject into the context of a larger, historical subject in scrupulously open-ended fashion
Bird in the hand: in Tilmann Singer’s new alpine horror flick Cuckoo, an onslaught of contrived plot twists and uneven performances undermine an ambitious pastiche of genre tropes
Look both ways: three new publications of Chris Marker’s texts expand our understanding of him as a multimodal artist, as attentive to the formal qualities of cinema as to matters of prose, graphic design, and civic issues
