Justin Chang

In Oliver Laxe’s desert thriller, an intensely agonizing journey reveals both the pitiless nature of fate and the stubborn persistence of compassion.

In new films from Joachim Trier and Noah Baumbach, success in filmmaking proves depressingly incompatible with success in fatherhood.

The latest reanimation of Mary Shelley’s classic tale, starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, is a labyrinthine tour of a filmmaker’s career-long obsessions.

In Yorgos Lanthimos’s film, ripe with eco-paranoia, the actress and Jesse Plemons come to physical and psychological blows.

In Kathryn Bigelow’s ensemble drama, a nuclear attack exposes more failures of screenwriting than of geopolitical-crisis management.

In Mary Bronstein’s film, Rose Byrne plays a therapist contending with a sick child, an absent husband, an uninhabitable home, and a world that seems nightmarishly bent on her failure.

In Luca Guadagnino’s film, Julia Roberts plays a Yale professor forced to choose sides when a student accuses a colleague of sexual assault.

In two new historical films, “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague,” the director explores the challenges of staying true to a creative vision.

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” the fight against American fascism is a family affair.

In Oliver Hermanus’s period drama, Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor play music lovers whose passions prove less tempestuous than isolating.