In actor/cinematographer/film critic Carson Lund’s directorial debut, it’s Sunday October 16 in mid-1990s1 suburban Massachusetts. It’s a sunny day, but the hint of a chill in the air already has residents minds turning to the long dark winter ahead. Between radio reports — voiced by master documentarian Frederick Wiseman — of a coyote terrorizing the area and the “New Hampshire Justice” that awaits the poor creature, we hear that a beloved park will soon be the site of a new elementary school.

Thunderbolts* opens with a shot of Florence Pugh on the ledge of the 2,227-foot-tall Merdeka Tower in Kuala Lumpur. From this harrowing start to the film’s last scene, the expression on her face perfectly tracks the feeling of watching a Marvel Cinematic Universe film in the year 2025. As the film opens, it’s one of absolute dejection and dutiful dread. Her character Yelena Belova has yet another job to do, but the thrill is long gone, and she’s questioning whether it’s still worth the paycheck.

Following his indie debut, Ryan Coogler was launched into a string of astronomically successful films built on longstanding intellectual property: Marvel’s Black Panther and the Rocky franchise’s Adonis Creed. That the up-and-coming Oakland-based director was able to play in these existing worlds and make films that were both commercially viable and artistically satisfying is a rare feat. With Sinners, it feels like he’s working with a blank check to tell a wholly original story. Here, he again teams-up with his perpetual leading man to answer a question the world’s long been pondering: are two Michael B. Jordans better than one?

After embedding audiences with fictional photojournalists covering a Civil War yet to come, director Alex Garland has teamed up with that film’s battle coordinator (himself a Navy SEAL veteran) Ray Mendoza to bring viewers into the heart of a 2006 surveillance mission gone sideways in Ramadi, Iraq. Constructed from the memories of the soldiers themselves, it’s an inarguably impressive feat of technical filmmaking, immersively told, and unfolding in nerve-rattlingly real-time.

Stay in a shopping mall for a whole week without getting kicked out by security? Sounds like an initiation rite for a fraternity pledge, but in 2003 it became an all-consuming immersive project for eight artists in Providence, Rhode Island, that stretched on beyond the initial prank for four years.

Hulks are red, Captains are Blue,
Marvel’s comeback remains long overdue.

For his entire life, second-generation Palestinian activist Basel Adra has lived under threat of the permanent erasure of his small West Bank village in the Masafer Yatta region by the Israeli military. Declared a region of importance for training, the series of small cliffside villages has suffered multiple generations of destruction and resistance.