So much of literature, cinema, and religion contemplate the afterlife. What happens to us when we die, where do we go, how are our lives judged? Less spiritual attention — at least in the west — is paid to how and why we get to be alive on this planet in the first place. Something must be in the air: just as Pixar’s holiday release Soul introduced The Great Before as the first episode in a trilogy ending with the Great Beyond, Edson Oda’s festival favorite Nine Days contemplates a process by which souls come to inhabit a life on Earth.

Arriving in theaters this weekend more than a year’s pandemic delay, The Green Knight might be the closest thing to “pure cinema” that I’ve seen in a very long time. David Lowery’s lyrical adaptation of the fourteenth century anonymously-written epic poem sprawls across the screen using all the tools at its disposal, making it it easy to see why A24 held out to assure that audience first experienced it as a theatrical experience. It was worth the wait. 

Although director Tom McCarthy borrows heavily from the Amanda Knox story, Stillwater is hardly a ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama. Instead, he wisely takes inspiration from the situation of a daughter whose study abroad ends with imprisonment for a gruesome murder she claims not to have committed as the jumping-off point for a different kind of tragedy in three acts.

With his feature film debut about one man’s love for his prized pig, writer-director Michael Sarnoski has harnessed Nicolas Cage’s latent intensity and made what might be my favorite film I’ve seen so far this year.

With Roadrunner, kind-hearted documentarian Morgan Neville virtually reunites many of Bourdain’s dearest friends and collaborators to contemplate his life and legacy while working through their still-raw grief on film. Whether the documentary’s subject would have approved of the project (probably not) is perhaps beside the point.

Despite having appeared in six Marvel Cinematic Universe features and having ascended to the leader of the Avengers by its Endgame audiences never really got to know Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. Whereas other core team members like Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and even multiple Hulks were the subject of multiple standalone stories to flesh out their backstories, the history and motivations of reformed Russian spy Natasha Romanoff was always left to a series of offhand allusions to a vaguely dark, cryptically complicated past. Alas, it took a tragic sacrifice (and then a pandemic delay) to give her the spotlight she deserved, albeit in flashback form to fill in the long-missing pieces.

The latest entry in the globe-spanning multi-billion dollar Fast and Furious Saga is the most hilariously stupid thing I’ve seen by a hundred dozen carlengths. Whether you see this as awesome or awful will almost certainly depend on the expectations that you bring to the racetrack.

A common dictum of storytelling is “show, don’t tell.” With his new documentary about brothers Ron and Russell Mael, self-professed superfan Edgar Wright can’t resist doing a whole lot of both when it comes to Sparks, his favorite band. It is an indication of their relentless productivity that two and a half hours is barely enough time to scratch all the surfaces of a lifelong musical collaboration with roots in another band they formed back in 1967 as undergrads at UCLA all the way to a present day re-discovery and revival.

As theaters re-open, I wondered how long “the magic of cinema” would add its shine to new releases. I was on the edge of my seat for A Quiet Place: Part 2 and was thoroughly dazzled by the choreography that filled the screen with magic realism throughout In the Heights. I am sure that more than a small part of my exuberance for those films was seeing them projected in a dark room with a good sound system and a receptive audience. Could that spell extend to an unnecessary sequel to a pretty bad action comedy? Alas, it’s a no from me, dawg.