If the Bad Boys movies are mostly about the war raging in the soul of America’s ideal psychopath supercop, then Bad Boys: Ride or Die paints that war with big and shameless Fast & Furious ambition, no longer questioning if Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) should kill, but why he does. Is he a Bad Boy, or a Good Boy who is so Good at doing Bad things that he’s cosmically aligned with the nature of the Bad Boy? Is he the monolithic Good-Bad Boy, a true representation of punitive justice in its purest form? Anyway, in this one, Mike finally gets married. With Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Adil & Bilall have divined the right direction for the franchise. Doubling down on the sudsy melodrama while curbing much of their visual language from late-period Bay, they’ve found a way to branch off from the first two films without anchoring it with expansive lore. Swooping, long-take drone shots and an endlessly spinning omniscience accompany more than five obligatory POV shots from the barrel of a gun or some other inanimate object, cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert’s world a constantly moving tumbler of squelching slo-mo violence, obligation its glorious driving force. But rather than let the chaos warp the film’s sense of space, Adil & Bilall’s action scenes—with which Ride or Die is lovingly bloated—are as legible as they are earnest attempts to court a big audience. The two directors have also wisely caught on to the benefit of their actors’ ages, Smith now mid-50s and Lawrence pushing 60. Not only has Smith spent the past 20 years doing increasingly difficult stunt work alongside his dramatic roles, Lawrence has become the warm, welcome emotional center of the franchise. In fact, the true magic of this fourth installment is that somehow it has transformed Marcus Burnett, one of the most insufferable characters in late-‘90s action filmmaking, into a hilarious delight. Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a genuine crowd-pleaser, just undeniably captivating, funny and raging, neon-pink copaganda.–Dom Sinacola

Release Date: June 21, 2024
Director: Josh Margolin
Stars: June Squibb, Fred Hechinger, Richard Roundtree, Parker Posey, Clark Gregg, Malcolm McDowell
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 97 minutes

Every good action hero knows you’ve got to stick to your guns. Ethan Hunt is a marathon-running master of disguise. John Wick has never lost count of his remaining bullets. Jackie Chan’s various inspectors and agents view the world as their personal set of monkey bars. When writer/director Josh Margolin’s debut Thelma keeps its sights trained on its rogue granny on a mission (June Squibb), its hilarious geriatric reframe of action-movie tropes has a game champion. Like its absentminded hero, the film can sometimes get sidetracked right when things are getting good, wandering down schmaltzy or twee narrative paths. But when it lets Thelma (and Squibb) do her thing, the comedy is perfectly cute and a stellar showcase for what an actor’s late career can offer. There’s novelty in the comedic turns from the 94-year-old Squibb and her 81-year-old co-star, Richard Roundtree (in his final film role). These actors get to tap a well that’s unique to their age and the genre without sticking them into the boxes that generally contain old performers. They’re not utterly dignified, wisdom-dispensing elders. They’re not tragic victims of time. And they’re certainly, blessedly not the dreaded “rapping grannies” who are more punchline than performer. As the pair abscond on their quest to retrieve Thelma’s stolen savings, solicited from her cookie jar and mattress by phone scammers, they’re clearly complex, pulling off warm humor, endless charm and impressive stunts. A 94-year-old doesn’t have to ride a motorcycle off a cliff to make you gasp. Thelma’s emphasis on the unique pleasures found at different stages of life works because we can see the trust it places in Squibb as its front-and-center star.–Jacob Oller

Release Date: June 21, 2024
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Stars: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau
Rating: R
Runtime: 165 minutes

Yorgos Lanthimos is sorry that his movies won all those awards. He hasn’t said as much, but that feels like the subtext buried not so far beneath the warmly shot, chilly-affect surface of Kinds of Kindness – perhaps easier to excavate than the movie’s actual thematic concerns. The triptych of dark, minimalist fables that comprise Kindness share actors, an unnerving Twilight Zone tone, and a series of rhymes and echoes that sometimes feel like a chorus repeatedly transposed into different keys. But they most immediately, obviously share a lack of interest in being liked. At times, it more resembles the kind of untoward poking, prodding, libidinous-yet-grotesque project Bella Baxter herself might wind up writing and directing. So call it Sad Jesse Sad, because the movie keeps reincarnating recessive everyman Jesse Plemons. First, in “The Death of R.M.F,” he plays a man who strives to serve his boss (Willem Dafoe) to a maniacal degree of absurdity, surrendering control of every aspect of his life, until he finally reaches a line that he doesn’t feel comfortable crossing. In “R.M.F. Is Flying,” a new Plemons character becomes fanatically devoted to his own idea: the conviction that when his wife (Emma Stone) returns after being lost at sea, she is not actually who she claims to be. Finally, the cultish behavior of the first two segments becomes more explicit in “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” where Plemons takes a secondary role to Stone – both playing cult members looking for someone with the power to resurrect the dead. The stories in Kinds of Kindness, by virtue of appearing in quick and cast-linked succession, feel more like poking, sometimes poky, conspicuously constructed experiments – even though, if anything, the characters speak with somewhat less hushed, formalized detachment. Maybe this is his weird, Martian version of a cinema of sensations, where characters pursue their beliefs relentlessly, and the filmmaker indulges a kind of kindness by letting them, no matter how destructive. Or maybe it’s just a series of elaborate reminders that awards, in whatever form, aren’t everything.–Jesse Hassenger

Release Date: June 21, 2024
Director: Agnieszka Holland
Stars: Jalal Altawil, Maja Ostaszewska, Behi Djanati Atai, Tomasz Włosok, Mohamad Al Rashi, Dalia Naous, Maciej Stuhr, Agata Kulesza
Rating: NR
Runtime: 152 minutes

Green Border is at its most effective when its medium is the message. Stilling, frantic images shot through a bird’s-eye lens in black-and-white recall war films such as Schindler’s List, imbuing the contemporary conflict at the center of the film with a larger, historicist scope. Perhaps more importantly, these images toe the line between an observational and experiential subjectivity, in which we are both inundated by a documentary-style realism as well as an acutely focused, first-hand experience of bodily movement—particularly within the contested border that threatens migrants’ ability to do so. We both understand the precarity of their very existence and embody their immediate, multisensory experiences of danger. In a world marred by the tragedy of displacement—casualties of myriad geopolitical, colonial and economic interests—Green Border’s resonance speaks for itself. Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border chronicles the sweeping, myriad effects of the Belarus-European Union border crisis of 2021. A panoramic view of the crisis, the film initially centers a group of refugees whose origins span from countries in the Middle East and Africa. The multinational group is lured into border crossing by the rhetoric of Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, who promises migrants easy access into the European Union. The group of refugees are rendered a vehicle for the whims and machinations of Poland and Belarus, with officers of both countries tossing them from border to border. Disorder and disorientation is harrowingly depicted in sharp, sensory fashion, with the refugees’ agility and perseverance being steadily, gradually beat down. Holland’s lens portrays dislocation as multipronged, the physical, spatial and psychological implications of it all bleeding into each other. Holland’s choice of black-and-white cinematography is a striking one, an indication of a filmic and ideological continuity with her previous works Angry Harvest and Europa Europa, each of which relate Holocaust-set stories. In Green Border, her images of the present are coded with the pain of years past, if only to say—in compassionate, non-instructive fashion—that we ought not to repeat the machinations of death and destruction.–Hafsah Abbasi

Release Date: June 14, 2024
Director: Alex Thompson, Kelly O’Sullivan
Stars: Keith Kupferer, Dolly de Leon, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Tara Mallen, Matthew C. Yee, Lia Cubilete
Rating: R
Runtime: 115 minutes

Ghostlight opens with darkness smothering the rustle and whispers of an audience making its way to their seats before the show starts. Then: The rattling hiss of the stage curtain opening. We expect to see actors, a set, props. Instead, we just see a suburban backyard, the property of Dan (Keith Kupferer), who’s awake much too early for his or his wife’s liking, but helpless to do anything about his REM cycles apart from stare forlornly outside. Life, the film tells us up front, is a show we all perform in, but in the rest of the telling, Ghostlight argues that acting specifically, and the arts broadly, are necessary tools for understanding it. Like Saint Frances, Ghostlight was written by Kelly O’Sullivan, who played the lead in the former and went behind the camera with Alex Thompson to co-direct on this one. Dan is haunted by a year-old tragedy that goes unspecified for the film’s first hour; the choice to dole out pieces of that lingering incident, which weighs on Dan as surely as his wife Sharon (Tara Mallen) and their daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), gives the filmmakers scaffolding that mimics the way Dan dances around his grief rather than face it. It’s a heartbreaking bread crumb trail leading us bit by bit to the worst possible ordeal a family can endure, an injury inflamed by an insult to Dan’s self-esteem: Mandatory leave from his construction job following a volcanic physical outburst on site. Happily, misery loves company, and though Rita (Dolly de Leon), an erstwhile Broadway actress now doing community theater, isn’t miserable herself, exactly, she can pick a miserable soul out of a crowd like a hawk tracking mice through grass. She invites Dan to join her troupe; they’re putting on a production of Romeo and Juliet, and they’re down a man. Ghostlight could easily cultivate these characters as guides to one another, a group of lost souls who find redemptive catharsis through their friendships; this is, after all and in fairness, the role Rita plays to the reluctant, chagrined Dan. But the film’s thesis is about not human connection but humans’ connection to art, how we benefit from the presence of art in our lives, and what lonely, repressed existences we’d be damned to lead without it. Ghostlight’s argument in favor of art as essential to the soul is also a statement honoring creative endeavors as noble professions. — Andy Crump

Release Date: June 21, 2024
Director: Annie Baker
Stars: Zoe Ziegler, Julianne Nicholson, Sophie Okonedo, Will Patton, Elias Koteas
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 113 minutes

Janet Planet immerses the audience in the boonies of Western Massachusetts during the summer and early autumn of 1991, allowing the viewer to absorb countless details of the period, mood, and relationships. Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), who will enter middle school in a few weeks, lives with her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and doesn’t have real friends of her own, which places her uncomfortably close to the adult orbit of failed romances and rootless non-careers. Mother and daughter both have what Janet later refers to as “forthrightness” while seeming, to some extent, at a loss for how to make each other happier. Baker’s (and Ziegeler’s) portrait of Lacy as the film continues is frequently stunning in its heartbreaking preadolescent candor. The bespectacled redheaded girl in oversized t-shirts expresses a sober self-analysis (“I usually have a hard time making friends”) that barely masks her sadness and ongoing neediness. She seems perpetually on the hunt for kids her own age, and simultaneously terrified that she’ll find them and be forced to pull away from Janet. Nearly every one of Lacy’s scenes is uneasily compelling – a coming-of-age story unbound by genre clichés. Why, then, does Baker insist on multiple scenes that grind the movie to a halt, even taking into account its deliberate pacing? Maybe Baker’s patience and empathy simply exceed my own. Shooting on 16mm celluloid, she captures moments that will become comforting memories, whether they should be or not: Lacy’s race through a local mall with a sadly temporary friend becomes a bucolic romp. The theme music of Clarissa Explains It All watched on a sick day becomes hypnotic. The many great scenes in Janet Planet underscore the frustrations of its few bad ones: Even an emotionally tumultuous childhood can be a lot more absorbing than the indulgences of the adult world.–Jesse Hassenger

Release Date: May 3, 2024
Director: David Leitch
Stars: Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Winston Duke, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Hannah Waddingham, Stephanie Hsu
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 125 minutes

The deceptive difficulty of action movies, comedies, and their intersection is being able to do something completely stupid with total straight-faced commitment. Like so many easily dismissed parts of film production, a punchline delivered with invested emotion is just as hard to pull off as a pratfall performed with total abandon. If either misses its mark by a hair, you fall flat on your face and leave the audience hating your smug performance or hyperactive flailing. It’s all the more impressive, then, that Ryan Gosling does it all in The Fall Guy. He plays stuntman Colt Seavers, living bruise, returning to action One Last Time in order to help his old flame Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt) on her first directorial effort, Metalstorm. That’s the simple set-up, designed to showcase the jock rock of filmmaking: A stunt spectacular combining the technical prowess and meathead charm of the dirtbag daredevils behind every awesome car crash and killer fight scene. And, thanks to Gosling—playing his role like his schmuck detective from The Nice Guys accidentally found himself in a Mission: Impossible—the film breezily flits between a savvy behind-the-scenes pastiche and a committed action rom-com. Ok, The Fall Guy owes its success to far more people than its leading man. That’s kind of its point. Directed by longtime stuntman David Leitch (with this film, distancing himself from solely being the less impressive half of the John Wick team) and written by Drew Pearce (one of Leitch’s Hobbs & Shaw scribes), The Fall Guy works best as an anti-blockbuster. It wants to blow shit up and wow us with its ballsy choreography, but it also wants to take the shine off these feats of movie magic. Funnier and more effective than most movies built upon a foundation of car chases and fistfights, The Fall Guy is smart enough to showcase its dumb action in a new and exciting way. Its affection is infectious, whether that’s for the art of filmmaking, the haywire pleasures of being on set, the adrenaline rush of a well-made gamble, or for finding someone special to share your simple corner of the world. The ambitious meta-film overcomes the baggage of trying to be both the movie of the summer and the movie that comments on those kinds of movies, hitting a cinematic sweet spot and singing the praises of stunt performers everywhere.–Jacob Oller

3. I Saw the TV Glow

Release Date: May 3, 2024
Director: Jane Schoenbrun
Stars: Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman, Helena Howard, Fred Durst, Danielle Deadwyler
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 100 minutes

I Saw The TV Glow takes filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s canny observations about how pop culture can create identity and applies them to a warped world of dysphoric digital nightmares. On its face, the film follows the stunted Owen (an incredible, committed Justice Smith), who bonds with fellow outcast Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over a Buffy-ish genre show. As the movie and its inhabitants evolve, changing but perhaps not growing up, it becomes like a bad trip to Twin Peaks’ Roadhouse, where the grim setlist is composed of neon static. The film features performances from Phoebe Bridgers and Kristina Esfandiari, as well as small appearances by two men who are discomfort personified: Conner O’Malley and Fred Durst. Just typing their names so close together gave me a little anxiety. Interconnected with the film’s crushing reality is that of the campy series its characters obsess over, its haunted creatures (one of which looks a bit like if Mac Tonight was a sex offender) allowing real-world problems to be mapped onto their cartoonish make-up. If I Saw The TV Glow doesn’t awaken something in you, you probably didn’t grow up hiding your personality behind your favorite pieces of media. The result is a captivating feat of audiovisual style, unconventional storytelling, and pervasive emotional pain.–Jacob Oller

Release Date: April 26, 2024
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Stars: Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist
Rating: R
Runtime: 131 minutes

There’s no need to know, or even enjoy, anything about the sport of tennis to find enjoyment in director Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. Still, tennis is inextricably knotted to its sensuous love triangle, which evolves over the course of 13 tumultuous years, climaxing with a match between two estranged players whose love story eclipses the more overt romance between the pair and Zendaya’s tennis prodigy, Tashi Duncan. But it is a story of desire, love, power and co-dependency between three gifted young athletes who all hold that nagging fear, even in their early 30s, that their best years are behind them. The only thing that can reinvigorate their lost sparks is base, animalistic competition, like that which fueled their chaotic threesome over a decade prior to the lowly Fire Town challenger tournament in New Rochelle, New York. We first meet Tashi and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), married and with a mostly neglected young daughter, after Tashi’s best tennis-playing days are behind her (due to a consequential leg injury) and Art is all but bereft of his mojo. In an effort to get his head back in the game and out of early retirement, Tashi enrolls him in a challenger: A small, U.S. Open qualifier that should be beneath an athlete whose face adorns ads the size of building facades. The goal is to have Art compete against players who are obviously below him in order to loosen him up and regain his confidence. The only problem is, it’s the same kind of minor sporting event that attracts a hard-up guy like Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). Thirteen years earlier, Patrick and Art were both just two young tennis studs who once jerked off together (what guys can’t say the same?), in love with the same beautiful woman. Thirteen years later, one of them got the girl, the other is cosplaying as poor, and the former two haven’t spoken to the latter in years. The film is just as dynamic as its stars. Rapid cuts give the film a cohesive, kinetic rhythm that keeps the story in a near-constant state of momentum, and none of the frames the camera cuts to are superfluous compositions. This is matched by the occasionally dizzying camerawork from Gudagnino’s Suspiria cinematographer (also Apichatpong Weerasethkul’s on Memoria) Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. Challengers surprised me. It’s a grandiose, propulsive, erotic follow-up to the dull, Tumblr-core emo of Bones and All, and I found myself enthralled by Guadagnino’s latest, in which three of our hottest young actors convincingly, tantalizingly explore alternating dynamics of power and sexuality. Challengers isn’t really a film for tennis fans—it’s a film for fans of guys being a little gay for each other, and also fans of the kind of explosive yearning that’s even hotter than the sex scenes we all like to complain don’t exist anymore.–Brianna Zigler

Release Date: May 24, 2024
Director: George Miller
Stars: Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne
Rating: R
Runtime: 148 minutes

If you ever took a class on the Greek classics, you might remember that the epics of Homer are defined by their first words. The Odyssey is the story of a “man,” while the Iliad is a story of “μῆνις,” which is often translated as wrath, rage…or fury. The epics of George Miller barely need words at all, yet Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the Iliad to Fury Road’s stripped-down Odyssey. The latter’s elegant straight-line structure is replaced with lush chapters, documenting the interconnected systems of post-apocalyptic nation-gangs through the years. Through it all, a Dickensian hero clings to this world’s seedy undercarriage. Reducing Furiosa down to a single word does it as little justice as it does the sagas it scraps, welds and reuses like its countless Frankenstein vehicles. But understanding George Miller’s Fury Road prequel as the story of war—of sprawling futility, driven by the same cyclical cruelty that turned its deserts into Wastelands—makes it far more than a satisfying origin story. (Though, it’s that too). Furiosa speaks the language of epics fluently, raging against timeless human failure while carrying a seed of hope. What we learn, we learn through the eyes of Furiosa, from the moment she’s ripped from the Green Place of Many Mothers as a child, to the second before she tears out of Immortan Joe’s Citadel, smuggling Fury Road’s stowaways. As Furiosa grows from traumatized child (Alyla Browne) to damaged adult (Anya Taylor-Joy), she survives the slave-labor bowels of the Citadel, claws her way into a position aboard a trade caravan and waits for the perfect moment to enact revenge upon her initial captor, the chaotic, power-hungry biker warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Pushing back on the various men who hunt them, Browne and Taylor-Joy’s performances work in stunning tandem, steadily heating the steely young girl’s resolve until it turns molten. When you match the most powerful eyes in the business with Miller’s evocative framing (Furiosa is shot a bit like Galadriel’s brush with evil in Lord of the Rings—somewhere between avenging angel and Frank Miller cover), you get all the character you need. Each action scene, whether another amazing chase or a desperate rescue mission deep in enemy territory, is driven just as deeply by visual logic as by spectacle. These stunning visions of neo-medieval torture in Hell’s junkyard only work if we can make sense of it all. Furiosa is a film well-planned and deeply dreamed. Miller’s movies strip folkloric epics down to their basic mechanical parts, functional skeletons that run on raw emotion like the war machines running on piss and guzzolene.–Jacob Oller

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

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