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The nameless narrator of Claire Keegan's award-winning 2015 short story Foster is a little girl, living in rural Ireland, sent to stay with relatives she's never met while her mother has yet another baby. Too many mouths to feed already. One might expect the story to unfold in a horror of abuse, the child thrown to the wolves. But it doesn't turn out that way. The childless couple shows her the first kindness and care she has ever experienced. She says, "I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end, but each day follows on much like the one before." Keegan's writing is rooted in details absorbed by the observant child. The child pieces together the world through fragments, things overheard or glanced. Foster is masterful in evoking a child's point of view.

"The Quiet Girl," adapted for the screen and directed by Colm Bairéad , maintains this point of view admirably, for the most part, keeping the frame of reference narrowed to the world as seen through the girl's eyes. Bairéad has made some alterations to the source material, opening up the story a wee bit, with a prologue of sorts—her life at home, her bed-wetting, her tendency to wander away for hours at a time. The main change, however, is the most obvious. "The Quiet Girl" is an Irish language film, with 95% of the dialogue in Irish, and English words peppered in only occasionally (there are subtitles for both). "The Quiet Girl" (Irish title “An Cailín Ciúin”) is the first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Academy Award (this year's Best International Feature). It's a milestone for Irish-language film.

Now named Cáit ( Catherine Clinch ), the girl is a wary and watchful figure. She has survived her chaotic neglectful home life—her drunken father, her harried mother—by making herself as small and still as possible. Kate McCullough's sensitive cinematography pulls us into Cáit’s sometimes dissociated but always alert perspective. The focus is on the details: the trees whirring by outside the car in a dizzying blur, the high-flung blue sky peeping through, the inky-black darkness of a bar’s interior at midday, the way shafts of sunlight pierce through still pools of water. Adults are seen from below, or the side. They are unknowable mysteries to Cáit.

It's clear from the production design—objects, cars, televisions—that “The Quiet Girl” doesn’t take place in current-day Ireland, but the year (1981) established in the novella with a mention of the hunger strikes going on in the North, isn't nailed down (unless I missed it). "The Troubles" are nowhere in evidence, and neither is the outside world. This is the timeless rural landscape, where the hay has to be brought in, the cows milked, the meals prepared, and Mass is attended every Sunday. Cáit lives in squalor and neglect at home, with a dad too busy drinking to make sure the hay is brought in on time. The house crawls with children, all girls. Cáit’s fate is decided without her knowing. One day she is driven down to Wexford and dropped off at a cousin of her mother’s.

Eibhlín ( Carrie Crowley ) and Seán ( Andrew Bennett ) are in their fifties, and they, too, have a farm. But their farm is well-run and orderly. Cáit stands in the immaculate well-lit kitchen and stares around her. She can’t believe such cleanliness and peace exists. It’s another world. Eibhlín takes one look at Cáit‘s dirty dress, dirty hands, and legs, and instantly takes charge. She bathes the child, shows her to her room, and asks if she wants the curtains drawn at night. Her manner is gentle and pained. Cáit has never known a thoughtful adult, has never been asked what she wants. Seán is quiet and distant, harder to read at first. Is he irritated at the child’s presence? He barely acknowledged her.

Cáit's new life begins. Eibhlín teaches her how to cook, clean, and gather water from the well. The ritual of daily tasks and the care given in the running of everyday life is soothing to Cáit. The film unfolds like a reverie. Light and shadow, bird sounds, fresh vegetables, the mirror-like water of the well ... McCullough and Bairéad patiently explore the environment, allowing it space to evoke, forcing us into Cáit‘s point of view.

Not much happens on the outside surface. She’s taken to a funeral. A gossipy woman interrogates Cáit about Eibhlín. But life is not made up of dramatic events. The characters here are not expressive people. But when Seán or Eibhlín do express themselves, it is with authenticity. Every word counts. The feelings underneath are enormous.

There is a backstory for Eibhlín and Seán—an event neither can speak of (and which is easily guessed), but the film isn’t about the big reveal. It’s the little things. A cookie placed on a table—without a word—brings an explosion of feeling and meaning. A cookie is not just a cookie. A serious chat by the sea on a moonlit night is profound and potentially life-altering. It is said that even one “witness” to a neglected child’s misery can make all the difference in that child’s future prospects. “The Quiet Girl” gives Cáit two witnesses. The impact of this isn’t stated outright—and Cáit will only realize it in retrospect—but the difference has been made. How we “get” this is all due to the patient care in which Bairéad allows the characters to reveal themselves. Nothing is rushed.

There is a monotony to some of the presentation—the repeated shots of the kitchen, the walk to the well, the daily chores, and Cáit’s wariness slowly melting into trust. The monotony is there for a reason and does serve a purpose, but a little goes a long way.

How little and how long it goes is made perfectly clear in the final sequence, which completely knocked me flat. It was only then I realized just how effectively “The Quiet Girl” did its work. The film works by stealth.

The Irish language is mandatory in Ireland’s school curriculum, but its history is one of suppression. Road signs in Ireland are bilingual, and there is an effort to keep the tradition intact, encouraging a cultural continuum. The history of Irish language films began in cinema’s first decades, with Robert Flaherty’s “Oidhche Sheanchais” (1935), the first Irish language sync sound film. (Long thought lost, it was recently discovered, and a fragment can be seen on YouTube.) Flaherty, famously, directed the “documentary”—quotation marks necessary—“Man of Aran” (1934), which is criticized to this day for Flaherty’s fictionalized version of Irish life, particularly the characters all speaking in English. Other notable entries in Irish-language films are George Morrison’s “Mise Éire” (1959)—a real documentary, this one about the 1916 Easter Revolution—Bob Quinn’s crime drama “Poitín”(1978), the first Irish-language narrative feature, and, more recently, Robert Quinn’s “Cré na Cille” and “Foscadh,” directed by Seán Breathnach. Other Irish films have used the Irish language alongside English, making them essentially bilingual.

“The Quiet Girl” goes all the way and is groundbreaking for its language, as well as its success within a recent movement of accomplished Irish cinema. “An Cailín Ciúin” is significant for these cultural reasons but its power is encapsulated in the small insert shot of a cream-filled cookie placed on a table. In that moment, everything changes. Nothing will ever be the same again.

Available in theaters on February 24th.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film Credits

The Quiet Girl (2023)

Rated PG-13 for some strong language and smoking.

Catherine Clinch as Cáit

Carrie Crowley as Eibhlín

Andrew Bennett as Seán

Michael Patric as Da

Kate Nic Chonaonaigh as Mam

Joan Sheehy as Úna

Colm Bairéad

Writer (based on the story "Foster" by)

Claire Keegan

Cinematographer

Kate McCullough
John Murphy
Stephen Rennicks

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Movie Reviews

This tender irish drama proves the quietest films can have the most to say.

Justin Chang

Catherine Clinch plays Cáit in The Quiet Girl. Super Lt hide caption

Catherine Clinch plays Cáit in The Quiet Girl.

The late film critic Roger Ebert once wrote, "What moves me emotionally is more often goodness than sadness." It's a sentiment I've always shared, and I thought about it again while watching the beautifully crafted Irish drama The Quiet Girl .

There's plenty of sadness in this tender story about a withdrawn 9-year-old who spends a fateful summer with two distant relatives. But the movie, adapted from a Claire Keegan story called Foster , doesn't rub your nose in the character's unhappiness. What brought me to tears more than once was the movie's unfashionable optimism — its insistence that goodness exists, and that simple acts of decency really can be life-changing.

Book Reviews

With 'foster,' claire keegan asks that readers look outward.

The story is set in 1981, although given the remoteness of its rural Irish setting, it could easily be taking place decades earlier. The dialogue is subtitled, because the characters speak mostly Irish, a language we rarely hear in movies. The quiet girl of the title is named Cáit, and she's played with aching sensitivity by a gifted first-time actor named Catherine Clinch.

Cáit is the shyest and most neglected kid in her poor farming family. Her short-tempered mother has her hands full taking care of Cáit's siblings, and her father is a gambler, a philanderer and an all-around lout. At home and at school, Cáit does her best to stay under the radar. It's no wonder that the first time we see her, the camera has to pan down to find her hiding beneath tall blades of grass.

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Quiet, please: unleashing 'the power of introverts'.

With too many mouths to feed and another baby on the way, it's decided that Cáit will spend the summer with relatives. Her mother's older cousin, Eibhlín, and her husband, Seán, live a three-hour drive away; they're played, wonderfully, by Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett. From the moment Eibhlín welcomes Cáit into their house, she lavishes the girl with kindness and attention. She engages her in conversation, involves her in household chores and responds in the most loving way when Caít wets the bed on her first night.

Seán is gruffer with Cáit at first, but he warms to her soon enough. There's a lovely little moment when, after angrily scolding her for wandering off by herself, Seán silently leaves a cookie on the table for her — an apology extended entirely without words. In their way, Eibhlín and Seán are as reserved as Cáit is, especially compared with some of their cruel, gossipy neighbors.

One of the most refreshing things about The Quiet Girl is that it doesn't treat silence as some problem that needs to be solved. When someone criticizes Cáit early on for being so quiet, Seán gently defends her, saying she "says as much as she has to say." And yet we see how Cáit gradually flourishes under her guardians' loving attention. Clinch's luminous performance shows us what it's like for a child to experience real, carefree happiness for the first time, whether it's Eibhlín offering Cáit a drink of crystalline water from the well near their house or Seán pressing a little pocket money into the girl's hands.

How Parents And Teachers Can Nurture The 'Quiet Power' Of Introverts

Seán and Eibhlín are clearly delighted by this temporary addition to their household, in part because it chases away some of the sorrow they've experienced in their own lives. The source of that sorrow isn't made clear right away, though you'll likely figure it out if you're paying close attention. When the truth does come out, it's treated with a gentle matter-of-factness that — much like the unfussy natural beauty of Kate McCullough's cinematography — deepens our sense of immersion in these characters' lives.

The Quiet Girl was written and directed by Colm Bairéad, an Irish filmmaker whose background is in documentaries. That may account in part for how exquisitely observed his first narrative feature is. Bairéad trusts the power of understatement, and that's a rare thing, given how prone so many films are to noise and over-explanation. Not many movies would focus on a character as unassuming as Cáit, but there's nothing small or insignificant about her story. Sometimes, it's the quietest movies that turn out to have the most to say.

Correction Feb. 24, 2023

An earlier version of this story misspelled the main character's name Cáit as Caít.

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‘The Quiet Girl’ Is One of the Most Heartbreaking Movies in Ages

By David Fear

The girl is named Cáit. She’s 12 years old, doesn’t like attention, stays hidden and silent when she can. Living in the rural Irish countryside in the early 1980s, she’s the youngest of a brood belonging to parents that seem one perpetually short fuse away from exploding. Or rather, she was the youngest — her Ma is six months pregnant. As for her Da, he’s a largely absent, mostly glowering presence capable of inspiring a dread-inducing hush into the household upon entering. Even when he brings Cáit with him to a pub, he’s still just an ominous figure to her, yet another adult downing pints and yet another incentive to be neither seen nor heard.

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There is a sense that a clock is ticking somewhere, and this feeling of familial love is regrettably finite. The Quiet Girl knows this, and it knows that you know this. How it gets to where this story needs to end, however, is what separates it from every other melodrama that’s used the whole notion of angelic surrogate parents as a way of wringing your tear ducts dry. By the time we get to the climax, we can see that these three have changed, even if the notion of a permanent reset becomes a pipe dream. It’s also not giving anything away to say that it ends on a display of total and utter grace that’s also devastating, and may require theaters to thoroughly waterproof their floors before showings.

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The Quiet Girl Reviews

The film offers a unique experience as Cáit delves into this unknown world [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jan 3, 2024

This is filmmaking at its most alchemical, turning every ingredient to gold -- even if it is green, the vivid color of the lush trees everywhere on the Kinsellas’ farm, that is the color lingering behind your eyelids as the credits roll.

Full Review | Oct 21, 2023

In "The Quiet Girl", an adaptation of a short-story about a girl who is taken in by distant relatives, director Colm Báiread manages to reproduce a delicate melancholy without falling into melodramatic bullshit. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 3, 2023

The Quiet Girl is a really moving drama that knows how to communicate beyond words. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 7, 2023

The Quiet Girl is a small film that gets rid of dialogue and moves us through a refined cinematic language. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Aug 31, 2023

The Quiet Girl is an intellectual film but by no means ascetic. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 17, 2023

Like its protagonist, the movie is also calm and quiet. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 17, 2023

For as gentle and earnest as The Quiet Girl is, the film is full of rage. An angry plea to give a damn about kids and to treat them with as much kindness as humanly possible. That is the bare minimum.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

There are no heavy hands here, from the thoughtful and poignant work of the cast to the dramatic beats of the story; it stirs up base questions about nature and nurture... and asks pointedly where Cait – and possibly any of us – truly belongs.

Full Review | Jul 10, 2023

... A film made up of details, little moments that encapsulate the internal emotional currents of its characters. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 8, 2023

The Quiet Girl is an impeccably made film, mysterious and harsh in its revelations, among which a disenchanted idea stands out... "you don't always find happiness with your biological family." [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | May 15, 2023

What’s most remarkable about “The Quiet Girl” is the detail Bairéad imbues to the Irish country life, and the emotional specificity he delivers in every scene.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 23, 2023

The film really shows a sense of realism as the girl adjusts to her surroundings and the relatives go about their day. It is also beautifully shot.

Full Review | Apr 22, 2023

I'd assumed this was a story about a girl who doesn’t speak. ... That isn’t, thank goodness, the case! This is a movie about the extraordinary power of people who have the patience and generosity to listen to the soft-spoken, the uncertain, the insecure.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Apr 11, 2023

Beautifully restrained yet emotionally resonant...a lovely, touching little film that says more through hushed understatement than most do with frenzied melodramatic excess.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Apr 4, 2023

simple and beautiful in its moving evocation of human experience and the depth of its belief in the transformative power of human kindness

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 27, 2023

... akin to the literary source... Bairéad has created on screen a sparse and sensitive rendering of Keegan’s story, camera shots that are calm storytelling and restraints that convey emotional depth.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 25, 2023

The very accurately titled The Quiet Girl is a meditative drama about how an introverted Irish girl spends a life-changing summer away from her troubled home and learns some poignant lessons about grief and family love.

Full Review | Mar 19, 2023

It's been a while since I have been touched by such a beautiful coming-of-age film. Catherine Clinch delivers an unforgettable and tender performance. Stephen Rennick’s dreamy score with lush melodies provides an ethereal atmosphere. A must-see.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 19, 2023

A delicate, lyrical film that says much more with silence than with words.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

‘The Quiet Girl’ Review: A Heartfelt, Beautifully Homespun Tale of a Lonely Irish Childhood

Colm Bairéad's well-crafted feature debut follows a summer of hesitant growth for a neglected girl from a rural farming background.

By Jessica Kiang

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There are different types of quiet. There’s the quiet of peace and serenity, and the quiet of repression and shame. There’s the quiet of contented, absorbing work. And there’s the quiet of fear, the kind of lonely silence a bullied child might retreat into when she hears the heavy tread of an impatient adult on the stairs, or the catcalling of other, brasher kids. Colm Bairéad ‘s gentle, straightforward, largely Irish-language “The Quiet Girl” has an ear finely attuned to all those types of hush, and to the tender feelings they can contain.

Turns out, Eibhlín and Seán are almost as un-talkative as Cáit, though Eibhlín especially gives her a warm welcome and a much-needed bath. “If there are secrets in a house, there is shame in that house. There are no secrets in this house,” she tells Cáit kindly, brushing out her hair, forgiving her bed-wetting, doting on her in a way the girl has clearly never experienced. But while nothing is a secret, a lot goes unspoken, like the reason Cáit’s bedroom has choo-choo train wallpaper, and why the clothes she’s given are all shirts and trousers, such as a little boy might wear.

Set to Stephen Rennick’s sweet score, which tiptoes round the edges of the film’s airy sound design, the simplicity of the story and the desire to do right by all the characters (except perhaps a prying neighbor who is sketched rather cattily) is an undoubted strength. But this is also a romantic vision of the sadness that can settle around a solitary kid like a shawl on her shoulders, and on occasion the deep investment in the long silences and sorrowful gazes that mostly make up Cáit’s life can teeter close to preciousness. When it does, though, there’s always Clinch’s superbly modulated performance, and the way the compassionate camera lavishes on Cáit all the attention that quiet, nice kids like her rarely receive, to bring us back onside.

At a stretch, we could see in Cáit’s reticence some sort of analogy for her native Irish tongue — there’s a certain eloquence in having such an inarticulate character speak a language that was, and still is, in danger of being silenced. But the unwavering focus of Bairéad’s impressively controlled debut feature doesn’t really allow for much subtext, nor for much surprise. Even that doesn’t really matter: Though you can foretell the way the story must end right from the moment Seán bids Cáit a curt goodnight without even turning his head from the TV, the cumulative power of “The Quiet Girl” means that when that ending duly comes, it’s remarkably moving. For all the things that can be lost in the quiet, sometimes people can find each other there.

Reviewed in Berlin Film Festival (Generations), Feb. 22, 2022. Running time: 94 MIN. (Original title: "An Cailín Ciúin")

Production: (Ireland) A Screen Ireland, TG4 and The Broadcasting Authority of Ireland presentation of an Inscéal production. (World sales: Rosa Bosch Films, Valencia.) Producer: Cleona Ní Chrualaoi. Executive producers: Dearbhla Regan, Máire Ní Chonláin.
Crew: Director: Colm Bairéad. Screenplay: Colm Bairéad, based on the short story ‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan. Camera: Kate McCullough. Editor: John Murphy. Music: Stephen Rennicks.
With: Catherine Clinch, Carrie Crowley, Andrew Bennett, Michael Patric, Kate Nic Chonaonaigh. (Irish, English dialogue)

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‘The Quiet Girl’: Irish Oscar nominee is eloquent in its silence

In a world of noise — and noisy, jumbled films — this story of found family speaks loudest when saying nothing.

In a world of noise — and noisy, overstuffed movies, nowhere better epitomized than in this year’s crop of Oscar nominees — the Academy Award-nominated “The Quiet Girl” stands out. Pitted against such other soft-spoken gems as “ Close ” and “ Eo ” in the relatively hushed and meditative corner-category of best foreign language film, this lovely Irish drama, featuring a bit of English but mostly told in the lilting Irish tongue, won’t overwhelm you with subtitles, for no other reason than its most powerful moments are unspoken.

One of those moments occurs not long after the title character, a young girl named Cait (Catherine Clinch, making an astonishingly assured debut), has been shipped off to stay with relatives by her parents: Da, a surly, boozing philanderer (Michael Patric), and his pregnant, put-upon wife (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh), Mam, neither of whom is ever identified by a name. Cait’s older sisters will stay with this dysfunctional dynamic while Mam prepares to deliver her latest child. Presumably, Mam and Da want Cait, known as the Wanderer, out of their hair.

Dropped off at the farm of Mam’s cousin Eibhlin Cinnsealach (pronounced like Eileen Kinsella and played by Carrie Crowley) and her husband, Sean (Andrew Bennett), an older, childless couple who are still grieving a loss, Cait soon lets it be known where she gets her nickname, meandering out of Sean’s sight one day while helping him with his chores. When he scolds her in alarm — out of not anger but buried pain — it tells us so much about what might have happened to this couple, without articulating precisely what the trauma is, at least not just yet. And when Sean apologizes to Cait the next day, not in words, but by silently placing a cookie next to her breakfast plate and then hurrying out of the kitchen, mute with inarticulate emotion, “The Quiet Girl” is, ironically, at its most eloquent. Cait may not understand what just happened, but we do.

Directed by Colm Bairead, and based on the short story “Foster” by Claire Keegan, this is a tale in which, by the standards of Hollywood, at least, not terribly much happens. Yet in her short sojourn with the Cinnsealachs, Cait discovers a way of life — a way of loving and of being loved unconditionally — that is utterly foreign to her. And in this quiet girl, her foster parents find something, too: a kind of healing.

For viewers, the film also might have a wholesome effect; it’s a tonic to the chaos and jumble of “ Avatar: The Way of Water ,” “ Elvis ,” “ Everything Everywhere All at Once ” and their ilk.

Much of this magic transpires in the silences, which Bairead fills with shots of sunlit green grass and telling glances. “The Quiet Girl” is that rare thing: a work of storytelling that speaks most loudly when it is saying nothing.

PG-13. At area theaters. Contains some strong language, smoking and mature thematic material. In Irish and some English with subtitles. 94 minutes.

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The Quiet Girl review – exquisite debut drama set in rural Ireland

A young girl sent to live with relatives for the summer blossoms in Colm Bairéad’s beguiling first feature

I t seems a modest little story at first, a cinematic wallflower content to cling to the corners of its tight, boxed-in aspect ratio, rather than thrust itself on to the audience. But while The Quiet Girl , Colm Bairéad’s multi-award-winning Irish-language drama, might be small in scale, it’s one of the most exquisitely realised films of the year. There’s a kinship with Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman in the crystalline delicacy of the storytelling – an adaptation of Claire Keegan ’s acclaimed short story Foster – and the way it plays on the heartstrings like a harp. It also calls to mind the earliest work of Lynne Ramsay – her first feature, Ratcatcher , and short film Gasman – in the way Kate McCullough’s curious camera latches on to the small details that are magnified in the eyes of a child.

The quiet girl is Cáit (the remarkable Catherine Clinch), one of an ever-expanding brood of neglected kids on an impoverished smallholding in early-80s rural Ireland. With her mother expecting yet another baby, and her father skulking sullenly in the background like an unspoken threat, Cáit is sent to stay with distant relatives: warm, wise Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) wraps her in love immediately; Seán (Andrew Bennett) is taciturn and reserved but no less bonded to the child. Under their care, Cáit blossoms. “All you needed was some minding,” says Eibhlín.

It’s an accomplished work from first-time feature director Bairéad, who, appropriately, has the knack of telling us everything we need to know without words: a tense momentary standoff over some sticks of rhubarb, for example, is more eloquent than pages of dialogue could ever be.

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Screen Rant

The quiet girl review: poignant, impactful oscar-nominated drama is a must-watch.

A standout of this year's awards race, The Quiet Girl is an earnest depiction of family and sweet connections that lingers long after the credits.

In every awards season, buried underneath the biggest and most hotly-debated titles, there are some truly incredible hidden gems that might escape people's notice. While perhaps far from underrated, director Colm Bairéad's The Quiet Girl is certainly a treasure. The beautifully understated film is nominated in the Oscars' Best International Feature category for Ireland, and for good reason. This is a title that sneaks in and wiggles its way into viewers' hearts with its simple, uncomplicated story and manages to leave a searing impact. A standout of this year's awards race, The Quiet Girl is an earnest depiction of family and unexpected connections that lingers long after the credits roll.

Nine-year-old Cait (Catherine Clinch) is viewed as something of an oddity to those around her. One child of many within her over-sized family, Cait is withdrawn and has a tendency to wet the bed. With her mother expecting yet another child, Cait is sent to live with two distant relatives for the summer, the kindhearted Eibhlín Kinsella (Carrie Crowley) and her taciturn husband Seán (Andrew Bennett). Eibhlín welcomes Cait with open arms and the old clothes from the wardrobe, whereas Seán is less appreciative of Cait's presence. However, genuine, meaningful bonds soon emerge between Cait and her foster parents, leading to the reveal of a long-buried secret.

Related: Emily Review: Mackey Soars In Dreamy, Gothic-Inspired Twist On Typical Biopic

The Quiet Girl is a sparse production. Bairéad, who also wrote the screenplay (itself based on the short story Foster by Claire Keegan), never overloads a scene with excessive dialogue or action. In the beginning, this serves to highlight Cait's loneliness. Bairéad stages scenes so that even when she is sitting among her siblings, she is clearly isolated. Director of photography Kate McCullough aids in this with wide, unmoving shots that make the most of the space, giving a clear sense of Cait's world. The juxtaposition of Cait's family home and the house Eibhlín and Seán inhabit — one dark and cramped, the other bright and open — tells the viewer which place brings the eponymous heroine more comfort. Editor John Murphy brings it all together in a way that gives the impression of distant memories of a childhood long past, evoking thoughts of another recent critical darling, Aftersun .

Nevertheless, The Quiet Girl is a very different movie, though both films are anchored by a strong performance from a young actor. Clinch makes her onscreen debut here, and it's impressive to see how much she can do with so little. Cait doesn't always speak, leaving it up to the actor to convey her thoughts and feelings through physical gestures. Over the course of The Quiet Girl , she starts to open up. Remarkably, though, the title of the film never becomes inaccurate. Instead, Bairéad sends the message that Cait's newfound comfort doesn't erase her inherent shyness. Eibhlín and Seán accept her for who she is in a way her primary family does not. Bairéad makes the development of Cait's relationships with the two adults feel organic and earned. There's no dramatic coming together, but instead a series of soft, poignant moments. A cookie left as a treat, a makeshift competition involving chores. The little things that make up the domesticity of a quiet life.

The most dramatic part of The Quiet Girl (save for a brief moment that could've gone in a devastating direction) lies in Eibhlín and Seán's past, with the secret the two keep from Cait for some time. Bairéad doesn't telegraph the reveal ahead of time, but when the realization comes, it makes several scenes fall into place like pieces of a puzzle. Eibhlín and Seán become full-fledged characters with vulnerabilities and wants, and it only serves to enhance their bond with Cait. The Quiet Girl steadily builds that relationship up, right until its gut-punch of an ending. There's an ambiguous note to the final scene, one that allows the viewer to dream up what comes next.

The Quiet Girl is far from a showy drama, which could give the impression it is slight and unmemorable. The opposite is true, and in fact, its strength lies in its unfussy approach to telling Cait's story. Like its protagonist, The Quiet Girl is quiet, sensitive, and not to be underestimated in the Oscars race . It reaffirms the idea that there is a place for everyone in this world. It's a comforting notion after the recent years of unease and disconnection.

Next: The Blue Caftan Review: Bakri & Azabal Are Fantastic In Nuanced, Touching Drama

The Quiet Girl releases in theaters Friday, February 24. It is 94 minutes long and rated PG-13 for some strong language and smoking.

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The Quiet Girl

In rural Ireland, a quiet, neglected girl is sent away from her dysfunctional family to live with relatives for the summer where she blossoms and learns what it is to be loved. In rural Ireland, a quiet, neglected girl is sent away from her dysfunctional family to live with relatives for the summer where she blossoms and learns what it is to be loved. In rural Ireland, a quiet, neglected girl is sent away from her dysfunctional family to live with relatives for the summer where she blossoms and learns what it is to be loved.

Colm Bairéad
Claire Keegan
Carrie Crowley
Andrew Bennett
Catherine Clinch
136 User reviews
135 Critic reviews
89 Metascore
30 wins & 45 nominations total

Mac Gearailt
Ó Cathasaigh
Woman of the Shop

Cáit's Half-Twin
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Trivia The first-ever film in the Irish language to be shortlisted for an Oscar (Best International Film).
Goofs The film is set in 1981, but the Jim McCann song "Grace" is on the radio. That song was written in 1985.

Seán Cinnsealach : Many's the person missed the opportunity to say nothing, and lost much because of it.

Connections Featured in EE BAFTA Film Awards (2023)
Soundtracks Grace Written by Frank O'Meara and Seán O'Meara Performed by Jim McCann Published by Asdee Music Ltd. Administered by Peermusic (Ireland) Ltd. Licensed by IML Irish Music Licensing Ltd.

User reviews 136

Sep 8, 2022
How long is The Quiet Girl? Powered by Alexa
May 13, 2022 (Ireland)
Screen Ireland site for film
Irish Gaelic
The Quiet Girl an Cailín Ciúin
Moynalvey, County Meath, Ireland
Broadcasting Authority of Ireland
Fís Éireann / Screen Ireland
See more company credits at IMDbPro
Feb 26, 2023

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 35 minutes

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Review: Irish Oscar nominee ‘The Quiet Girl’ speaks clearly

This image released by Super shows Catherine Clinch, left, and Carrie Crowley in a scene from “The Quiet Girl.” (Super via AP)

This image released by Super shows Catherine Clinch in a scene from “The Quiet Girl.” (Super via AP)

This image released by Super shows Andrew Bennett, left, and Catherine Clinch in a scene from “The Quiet Girl.” (Super via AP)

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Though gently restrained and delicately crafted, “The Quiet Girl” has managed to make plenty of noise. Colm Bairead’s modestly scaled drama, his narrative directorial debut, is the highest-grossing Irish-language film of all time. It bested “Belfast” at the Irish Film & Television Awards. And it’s nominated for best international film at the Academy Awards, a first for Ireland.

It’s not hard to see why. Bairead’s sensitive and heartfelt film, which is debuting in many theaters Friday, is a stirring testament to what’s possible on a modest scale with a few well-chosen words. Set in 1981 rural Ireland, “The Quiet Girl” — a clever tweak to the title of John Ford’s Ireland-set “The Quiet Man” — comes from Claire Keegan’s short story “Foster,” and it preserves much of the rhythm and concision of a good short story.

A willowy and taciturn 9-year-old, Cait (Catherine Clinch, a newcomer of staggering poise), is mostly overlooked in her cacophonous and coarse working-class family. Her mother (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) is exhausted from raising another baby and has another on the way. Her gruff father (Michael Patric) has abandoned tending to their farm and mostly spends his time drinking and gambling. Cait’s older sisters don’t have much affection for her, either. “Which one is she?” someone asks her father. “The wanderer,” he answers.

To ease life at home, they ship Cait to her mother’s cousin for the summer. The sisters don’t bother saying goodbye. Her father peels out forgetting to even leave her bags. Cait’s never even met the couple that takes her in: Eibhlin and Sean Cinnsealach (Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett), an older pair who live far more peacefully on a sun-dappled and well-tended farm. Eibhlin, played beautifully by Crowley, is immediately tender with her.

This image released by Columbia Pictures shows, from left, Mckenna Grace, Logan Kim, Dan Aykroyd and Patton Oswalt in a scene from "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire." (Jaap Buitendijk/Columbia Pictures/Sony via AP)

“If there are secrets in a house, there is shame in that house,” she tells Cait. “There are no secrets in this house.”

Some things go unspoken. The bedroom Cait sleeps in has train wallpaper but there’s no mention of them having had a child. Sean is initially standoffish with Cait, and you wonder if here, again, is a father-figure without any love for her. But their relationship warms and Cait falls into the daily routines of the farm and the blessed quiet harmony of their home. “The Quiet Girl” unfolds as a nurturing idyll that couldn’t be sweeter even though we know it can’t last forever. A calf is weaned on her mother’s milk, Cait is told, but then is fed powdered milk. Nourishment, for all creatures, can come from outside the home.

There’s much to soak up in “The Quiet Girl,” including Kate McCullough’s radiant cinematography and Emma Lowney’s graceful production design. Sentimentality is always close at hand but never barges in. Bairead, who’s worked previously in documentary, coaxes the story out sensitively, sticking almost entirely to Cait’s perspective. As a portrait of a child’s resilience — and the damning view of adulthood that can be spied from young eyes — it could sit comfortably alongside Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s similarly affecting “The Kid With a Bike.”

“The Quiet Girl,” a Super release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for some strong language and smoking. In Irish. Running time: 94 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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In ‘The Quiet Girl,’ an Irish Loneliness Rarely Seen Onscreen

The first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Oscar, directed by Colm Bairéad, tells a gentle story of cultural reticence.

A young girl with bright blue eyes sits at a kitchen table looking intently past the camera.

By Roisin Lanigan

Reporting from London

This article contains spoilers for the film “The Quiet Girl.”

For the first 55 minutes of “The Quiet Girl,” the film’s audience does not know why the titular child has been sent to live with strangers in the Irish countryside. Cáit (Catherine Clinch), 9, does not know either. Her parents do not talk to her, and they barely speak to each other.

Cáit eventually learns the truth from a nosy neighbor: While her parents prepare for the birth of yet another baby, she has been shuttled from her chaotic family home to spend the summer with some middle-aged relatives, Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) and Seán (Andrew Bennett), who have their own silent sorrow.

This uneasy, unanswered isolation is at the heart of “The Quiet Girl,” which arrives in U.S. theaters on Friday, and is the first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Oscar. A “hushed work about kith and kindness,” as Lisa Kennedy wrote in her review for The New York Times, the film tells a quintessentially Irish story, yet one that is rarely seen by international audiences on the big screen.

Irish cinema often features a cast of gregarious men and pious, conservative women, like in Ken Loach’s “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”; “Brooklyn,” starring Saoirse Ronan; and Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-nominated “Belfast.”

“Irish people are always known for the gift of the gab,” said Cleona Ní Chrualaoí, the producer of “The Quiet Girl.” “It becomes almost a caricature.” But in Chrualaoí’s film, Cáit and her new guardians cautiously try to connect through their loneliness and pain.

The depiction of such struggles to communicate has resonated deeply with Irish audiences. The feature — called “An Cailín Ciúin” in Ireland — was named the best film of 2022 by the Dublin Film Critics’ Circle, and screenings in the country have regularly left viewers in tears.

For Colm Bairéad, the film’s director, miscommunication is at the heart of both “The Quiet Girl” and its source material, Claire Keegan’s novella “ Foster .”

“So much of it is under the surface,” he said in a recent video interview, noting that Keegan’s prose was able to capture an Irish inability to open up. “There’s this emotional reticence that hangs over everything,” he added.

Irish people “don’t talk about our feelings in the way other cultures do,” said Siobhan O’Neill, a professor at the University of Ulster, whose work focuses on intergenerational trauma . “People who are traumatized,” she added, “don’t want to talk about it.”

In both Cáit’s fictional childhood — set in the ’80s, in the countryside — and my own, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the two subsequent decades, the effects of the historically religious and conservative society hung in the air. Like Cáit, as a child I attended wakes and was aware of the way gossip moves in small communities.

This social history had wider implications: I was 4 when the last “ Magdalene laundry ” — abject institutions usually run by the Catholic Church where thousands of women worked without pay — closed. Like many children of the “ cease-fire baby ” generation, born just before the end of the Troubles , I struggled to communicate with my parents through an atmosphere of generalized anxiety.

The same intergenerational malaise permeates “The Quiet Girl.” While most of the film’s dialogue is in Irish, Cáit’s cold father (Michael Patric) is the only character who speaks exclusively in English, reflecting the distance between him and Cáit.

The film’s preference for Irish dialogue has been widely praised in Ireland, as a wider so-called Celtic revival across music, politics and fashion has recently been celebrating the language. Less than 2 percent of the Irish population speaks the country’s native language on a daily basis, but recent Irish-language interviews from Paul Mescal and Brendan Gleeson on the red carpet at the British Academy Film Awards attracted much attention online, including Mescal’s praise for “The Quiet Girl.”

When Bairéad, who has raised his children with Ní Chrualaoí speaking Irish at home, read “Foster ,” in 2018, he said he knew he wanted to make it an Irish-language film. The book could “be an authentic Irish-language story,” he said. “We weren’t forcing the language into a scenario.”

At the time, he and Ní Chrualaoí were expecting their second child, and both felt drawn to Cáit’s aching loneliness, Bairéad said. In the film, the absence of Cáit’s world unfolds in slow, dreamy glimpses rather than via dialogue: a glove box filled with cigarettes, a child sitting alone in the bath. The pair were also aware, Bairéad said, of how rarely figures like Cáit were the protagonists in Irish stories.

“There’s been a tendency in our cinema to pander to something that’s expected of us,” Bairéad said. But a recent wave of Irish films feel “very sure of themselves in terms of their identity,” he added. “They’re coming from the inside out, rather than the outside in.”

These films include the fellow Oscar contender “The Banshees of Inisherin ,” in which Colm’s (Brendan Gleeson) ennui becomes a self-destructive determination to create a musical legacy. In the 2022 film “The Wonder,” the protagonist’s inability to speak about girlhood sexual abuse is transformed into a belief that God is speaking through her body.

In “The Quiet Girl,” we see Cáit grow from a lonely little girl to a more confident and open child. The film tackles the effect of societal traumas, O’Neill said, by addressing what goes “deeper than words,” and how comfort, sometimes, has to come from somewhere other than talking.

With words still scarce, Cáit finds comfort in the softness of Eibhlín’s touch, and her discovery — thanks to Seán — of the joy of movement. Although verbal expressions of emotion might continue to be culturally difficult for Cáit and for those around her, in the film’s powerful final moments, we see the child running, silently, toward love.

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The quiet girl, common sense media reviewers.

Beautiful Irish drama has language, death, smoking.

The Quiet Girl movie poster: A young girl in a yellow dress runs through some woods

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Love is powerful. Small gestures of kindness, empa

Cáit is quiet and neglected, interacting little wi

The film is set in Ireland with Irish dialogue use

Death of a child mentioned. Death of an adult and

Infrequent language includes "f---ing," "f--k," "b

Choc ice brand mentioned. Characters go to shops t

Characters drink alcohol but are not seen drunk. S

Positive Messages

Love is powerful. Small gestures of kindness, empathy, and compassion can have a big impact. Secrets sometimes harbor shame.

Positive Role Models

Cáit is quiet and neglected, interacting little with the chaos around her. This is until her environment changes and she is encouraged by those around her to feel safe in coming out of her shell, showing herself to be thoughtful and helpful toward others. Eibhlín is tender and patient, showing kindness, empathy, and compassion. Seán is gruff and distant when he first meets Cáit, but gradually shows great warmth and support toward her, while also standing up for her. They are both good neighbors to those around them, helping out in others' times of need. Cáit's mother is busy, overworked at home, and distant toward her daughter. She shows little care or attention to her. Neither does her father, who has an affair, and drinks and gambles away the family money.

Diverse Representations

The film is set in Ireland with Irish dialogue used for the majority of the film. The main character is a young girl, and is seen to be quiet and neglected, yet maintains an inner strength. Characters are majority White and adhere quite strongly to traditional male and female stereotypes, such as the women cooking, cleaning, and looking after children, and the men doing more manual labor or, less positively, having affairs, gambling, and drinking.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Death of a child mentioned. Death of an adult and a dead body shown in a coffin at a wake. Passing mention of intention to shoot a dog.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent language includes "f---ing," "f--k," "bastard," "ass," "idiot," "weirdo," and "dope."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Choc ice brand mentioned. Characters go to shops to buy clothes and there is an advert for stationery on the radio.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink alcohol but are not seen drunk. Some smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Quiet Girl is a captivating coming-of-age drama set in 1980s Ireland with occasional strong language and smoking. Adapted from a novella by Claire Keegan, the story focuses on a 9-year-old girl -- Cáit (Catherine Clinch) -- who's sent away from her family to live with distant relatives. Much of the dialogue is in Irish (with English subtitles for U.S. release), and the movie received an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature Film. Infrequent strong language includes "f--k" and "bastard." There's drinking and smoking, as well as references to gambling and characters seen betting on a card game. A child's death is mentioned, and an adult's dead body is shown in a coffin at a wake. The film has a slow, quiet pace that unfolds gradually, exploring the impact of empathy, compassion, and love. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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The Quiet Girl: A young girl sits in a kitchen

Community Reviews

Parents say (1)

Based on 1 parent review

A Gem from the Emerald Isle

What's the story.

In THE QUIET GIRL, Cáit (Catherine Clinch) is sent away from her dysfunctional family to live with distant relatives for the summer. Used to shrinking into the background, she comes out of her shell in the new environment. But in a place of unfamiliar love, she also discovers a painful secret.

Is It Any Good?

This impactful debut from writer-director Colm Bairéad quickly became the top-grossing Irish-language film of all time in its home country. The Quiet Girl is also the first Irish-language production to be nominated for an Oscar for Best International Film. The film is a slow, stealthy affair that is often as subdued as its heroine, giving a child's-eye-view of the world from a place of detached curiosity, the camera noticing every detail that captures Cáit's attention. Her coming of age is a gradual understanding and experience of being loved, cared for, and seen. There are subtle moments of tenderness expressed in the smallest of gestures that will have the biggest of impacts on even the coldest of hearts. The movie is beautifully produced, with dreamlike shots and a wistful score which, along with the phenomenal performances -- particularly from newcomer Clinch -- make this an emotional tour de force to be reckoned with.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the theme of love in The Quiet Girl. Why is it important to experience love and care from those around you? In what different ways do characters show their love in the film?

The film is in Irish. Can you think of any other movies you've seen in that language? What impact did it have to watch a movie in its native tongue? Did it change the experience?

Eibhlín and Seán show empathy and compassion toward Cáit. Why are these important character strengths ? What impact do you see them have on-screen?

Talk about the use of strong language in the movie. Did it seem necessary or excessive? What did it contribute to the movie?

How was smoking depicted in the film? Do you think attitudes to smoking have changed since when the movie was set? Why, or why why not?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 16, 2022
Cast : Carrie Crowley , Andrew Bennett , Catherine Clinch
Director : Colm Bairéad
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Super LTD
Genre : Drama
Topics : Book Characters
Character Strengths : Compassion , Empathy
Run time : 95 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : some strong language and smoking.
Last updated : June 22, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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'The Quiet Girl' Ending Explained: Cáit Finally Finds a Family

The Oscar-nominated film explores the question of what it takes to make a family.

The Big Picture

The Quiet Girl's ambiguous ending reveals a deep bond formed after confronting hidden traumas and neglected love.
The film subtly hints at abuse and neglect, culminating in a heartwarming connection between Cáit and Seán.
Cáit finds the father figure she deserves in Seán, healing both their past traumas and filling a void with love.

What does that beautiful, ambiguous ending of The Quiet Girl mean? This year, The Quiet Girl ( An Cailín Ciúin in Irish) received a much-deserved Oscar nomination for Best International Feature, and with it, Colm Bairéad’ s excellent feature debut i s sure to rack up a fair share of attention. It's also gone on to become the highest-grossing Irish language film of all time . The Quiet Girl is a wonderful film filled with quiet, beautiful moments, elevated by lush cinematography and succinct performances. Simply, it would make a neat little double feature with Charlotte Wells ’s magnificent Aftersun .

The story is simple: A shy and soft-spoken girl named Cáit ( Catherine Clinch ) is sent by her mother ( Kate Nic Chonaonaigh ) and father ( Michael Patric ) to live with, Seán ( Andrew Bennett ) and Eibhlín ( Carrie Crowley ), a pair of distant relatives. Out in the countryside, Cáit spends the summer with her relatives on an idyllic Irish farm, and along the way, she comes to terms with an unexpected reality. Through a simple, hushed narrative, The Quiet Girl accomplishes the impressive feat of changing its protagonist’s life in 90 short minutes . It ends with some ambiguity, but the ultimate meaning of its conclusion is spelled out throughout the movie.

The Quiet Girl

In rural Ireland, a quiet, neglected girl is sent away from her dysfunctional family to live with relatives for the summer where she blossoms and learns what it is to be loved.

What Happens at the End of ‘The Quiet Girl’?

Throughout the summer spent with Seán and Eibhlín, Cáit comes out of her shell, becoming more comfortable with herself and forming an intimate bond with her temporary guardians. Seán, while at first withdrawn and emotionally distant , soon treats Cáit like the daughter he never had. Near the end of the film, it’s revealed that Seán’s initial coldness towards Cáit is rooted in the trauma of losing his son , who drowned in the farm’s slurry pit. While spending time with Cáit, he learns to let his guard down and confront his grief in order to give Cáit the love and attention she needs.

Cáit is due home as the summer holidays have come to an end . But after falling into a well trying to fetch fresh water, Cáit catches a cold and is bedridden for a few days. Soon after, while still recovering, the Kinsellas bring her home, as her mother has given birth. There’s sadness all around, with neither Cáit nor her temporary guardians wanting their time together to end. Nonetheless, they return Cáit to her house, where she’s welcomed with general indifference by her parents and siblings .

Irish Cinema Is Having a Moment

Her father , on the other hand, notices the remnants of the cold and criticizes and berates her for sneezing and sniffles. Seán is visibly agitated by the subtle cruelty of Cáit’s father , and the couple cut their visit short. They depart, heartbroken to leave Cáit behind at a home where she’s, at best, outright neglected. After a moment’s hesitation, recognizing the suffocating reality of her home, she sprints after Seán and Eibhlín, catching them just as they’re opening the gate at the edge of the property. This recalls a pivotal moment earlier in the film where Seán challenges Cáit to sprint to the mailbox , which she does with blissful peace.

Cáit and Seán lovingly embrace, whether it's bidding farewell or reuniting. Just up the way, Cáit’s father approaches steadily, angrily, in pursuit of his daughter. Cáit softly mutters “daddy,” as a sort of warning to Seán about her approaching father. A moment passes, she melts into Seán’s embrace, and repeats "daddy" much more fondly this time around as the film cuts to black.

‘The Quiet Girl’ Alludes to a History of Abuse

In order to properly and fully unpack the film’s restrained ending, it’s important to first look at a crucial plot point that is only alluded to, rather than outright stated. Apart from the unnatural discomfort that Cáit shows around her father , there are a few other signs that hint at the sinister truth that Cáit has been abused, perhaps even sexually, by her father. Repeated instances of bedwetting also hint at a hidden trauma . When Eibhlín asks Cáit to come with her to the well, the girl becomes sheepish. “Is it a secret? Am I not supposed to tell?” she asks timidly. Eibhlín understands what she’s saying, but she responds with remarkable calm, “there are no secrets in this house. If there are secrets in a house, there is shame in that house”.

The bedwetting and fear of late-night walks and the secrets they hold leave some ambiguity towards the abuse itself. What specifically happened at Cáit’s home is left unspoken, and it’s ultimately up to the viewer to decide what such a secret might hold at Cáit’s house. Even with such specificities undeclared, however, there’s an undeniable shame hidden, and all that is due to Cáit’s cruel and drunken father.

Seán Is the Father Cáit Never Had

Because of her father’s cruelty and abuse, Cáit has rejected him as a proper father figure. Through the abuse, as well as her mother’s general neglect, Cáit had become timid and reserved . She’d been cheated out of the unconditional love that a parent owes their child. Ironically, it’s only through Eibhlín and Seán (her mother's cousin and Eibhlín's husband) that she’s able to be treated rightfully as a daughter. They may not be her birth parents, but by all accounts, t hey’re the parents that Cáit deserves...and needs.

You can see it with the decadent little cookie (the Kimberley biscuit as it's known in Ireland) Seán discreetly passes her way one summer afternoon (it’s never just a cookie ), through the time spent sweeping the barn together and the moments of genuine kindness. So when she utters that second “daddy," it’s no longer directed at her father , it’s directed at Seán , who in a few short months showed her the kind of love she’d been missing all her life. With him, and with Eibhlín, she’s treated like their own beloved child , like somebody worth loving. And she loves them, too.

Cáit Helps the Kinsellas Confront Their Grief

With Seán accepting Cáit as a daughter figure, he also completes a crucial transformation. The emotional scars left by his son’s tragic death , while never able to vanish, are treated through Cáit’s presence. If his initial rejection of her came from a place of sensitivity, his push for her to buy her own clothes (rather than grotesquely wearing the dust-ridden outfits of his departed son) is an act of acceptance. Cáit isn’t a replacement for Seán’s son , and she could never be. She’s something different, someone who is equally worthy of love.

All this time, Seán had his guard up, protecting himself from further heartbreak. Through his bond with Cáit, he’s able to love again, recover, and move forward with his life. These two people, a newfound pair of father and daughter, discovered in each other a missing piece in their lives. In the warm embrace they share, if only then, each is safe from the dangers of the world.

The Quiet Girl is currently streaming on Hulu in the U.S.

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The Best Movies of 2023

This year seemed to mark the end of a film era. has another exploded out of the box already.

Is the franchise era over? In 2023, a slew of superhero movies earned hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office each and still reportedly failed to make back the money required to produce and market them. Not even Tom Cruise, 2022’s box office savior, could rescue a Mission: Impossible movie from the installment fatigue that has set in across multiplexes — a kind of invasive exhaustion that’s made even the most reliable (or put another way, formulaic) of animated features falter in theaters. All this uncertainty raises a natural question: If franchises are dead, what’s next?

As our critics thumbed through the many, many movie releases of 2023 to determine their favorites from the past year, that question loomed. Are there hints for what’s to come, post- Barbenheimer , in the kinds of films that broke through for them when a Paul Rudd–led Marvel title couldn’t? Greta Gerwig’s and Christopher Nolan’s historic releases perhaps provide some clues, though only one of them made our critics’ top-10 lists. In the end, after sifting through the tumult, Bilge Ebiri and Alison Willmore landed on 10 very different films each — not one movie choice made the other’s list. Still, there are similarities: Filmmakers with a penchant for autobiography made both records, movies that clock the existential confusion of being locked inside a career did too. And in a year when it feels safer than ever to say superhero movies are throttling toward their own demise, one of them ended up in our top 20. Perhaps the best answer to what comes next is, simply, more chaos.

Bilge Ebiri’s Top 10 Films

10. Anatomy of a Fall

Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or–winning courtroom drama, about a woman accused of killing her husband after he falls to his death in suspicious fashion, would be gripping enough as a procedural. But it gains transcendence as it begins to question the very nature of truth. Reality, we understand, is something different for each individual, an idea that has particular power in the world today. Anatomy of a Fall , however, isn’t necessarily a Grand Statement About Our Times; Triet and her co-writer and partner, Arthur Harari, have surely imagined this more as an exploration of domestic conflict than anything else. But their observational acuity, their fidelity to life as it’s lived — along with Sandra Huller’s entrancing lead performance — results in something that keeps exploding in the mind long after the credits have rolled.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Anatomy of a Fall .

9. Asteroid City

It should have been evident long ago that Wes Anderson’s brand of hyper-controlled whimsy was all an attempt to confront the unhinged madness of the world. And none of us should have been surprised that his work became even more peculiar and more precise as the world became more and more insane. Maybe that’s why Asteroid City feels like such a signature work. Anderson doubles down on his style (how is that even possible at this point?) and gives us a maze-like network of framing devices to tell a story about a group of teenage scientists and their traumatized parents confronting an alien life form in the 1950s. Or wait, is it actually a story about the Actors Studio and turn-of-the-century American theater’s attempt to wrestle with the intricacies of the human heart? Or maybe these are the same thing. Anderson uses all the technique at his disposal to create a beautiful diorama of a world he cannot understand. In the end, isn’t that what great art does?

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Asteroid City and Matt Zoller Seitz’s revealing tour of Wes Anderson’s office .

8. Passages

Ira Sachs is a master of the small, delicate gestures that wind up having seismic repercussions in our lives. In Passages , which might be his masterpiece, he fashions the most delectably ruinous of love triangles. A German filmmaker (Franz Rogowski) cheats on his husband (Ben Whishaw) with a woman (Adèle Exarchopoulos), falls in love with her, then begins to have second thoughts as the specter of commitment looms. Rogowski’s character is a total narcissist — a needy, callous, pathetic, selfish chaos agent — but go figure, he’s also quite irresistible. We’re drawn to this man despite the emotional devastation he wreaks, maybe because we sense something of ourselves in him. His destructive immaturity is captivating and relatable.

Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Passages .

7. Fallen Leaves

Many of the year’s best films capture the queasy uncertainty of living in this moment, but few do it with such oblique charm as Aki Kaurismaki in this understated romance following two lonely, mismatched souls who keep missing each other. Kaurismaki’s style — somehow both deadpan and tender — is timeless, and one could argue that his stories could be taking place at any moment in history. But look at the ways in which his characters constantly seem on the verge of being tossed aside by the post-human, industrial landscape of Helsinki, and listen to the way that the music on the radio has been replaced by news reports about the war in Ukraine. The world has no place for the individual. And yet here we still are, persisting and yearning and drinking and stewing and fumbling our way through.

Ava Duvernay has been so ever-present in the public eye that it’s wild to think this is her first feature film in five years, not to mention her first drama — the genre she truly excels at — in nearly a decade. She adapts Isabel Wilkerson’s monumental nonfiction study Caste as a cross between a historical mystery and a memoir, making the writer (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) her protagonist. Thus, we see the personal tragedies Wilkerson dealt with during her research, which adds an emotional urgency to her journey. But the film’s real power lies in Duvernay’s ability to jump across historical events, anecdotes, and images, forging connections that are at times revelatory and devastating, creating something that at times feels like both essay film and melodrama.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Origin .

5. About Dry Grasses

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films were never not ambitious, but they’ve become even more so over the years, all the while remaining confined to the rural Turkish small towns whose lives the director chronicles so well. His latest, clocking in at a mesmerizing 197 minutes, follows a middle school teacher (Deniz Celiloglu) whose attitude toward the people around him — be they students, fellow teachers, or ordinary citizens — is alternately patronizing, compassionate, and contemptuous. Not unlike with Passages , at times one wonders if this film could have been titled The Worst Person in the World , even as it’s clear that the filmmaker recognizes much of himself in the protagonist. Ceylan has never been a directly political filmmaker, but About Dry Grasses provides an astute analysis of the modern Turkish intellectual’s place in society, in all its infuriating complications, its social paralysis, and self-defeating self-absorption.

4. Perfect Days

Wim Wenders released two marvelous films this year (his 3-D documentary Anselm was another triumph, though it just missed my list) and I hope he makes at least a dozen more pictures before he’s through. But in some ways, Perfect Days represents a culmination of the director’s journey. Wenders’s restless, angst-ridden protagonists have always been searching for blissful oblivion. These weren’t ambitious characters but rather people looking for a center. All those road movies — where were they headed? Perfect Days provides a kind of answer. A quiet, middle-aged man lives in a modest Tokyo home, gets up every morning and goes about his day cleaning the city’s toilets. There are hints of a past heartbreak, but they’re nothing more than gentle nods to the fact that all of us come from somewhere. There’s no sense that this person needs to do more, no sense that his life is being wasted. If anything, he is more aware of how lucky he is to be here than any of us. Is this what happiness looks like?

Read Bilge Ebiri’s interview with Wim Wenders .

Once upon a time, Michael Mann was the king of composed beauty — a director of impeccable frames, of telling postures, of ethereal moods. Over the years, especially as he began to experiment with digital video, his work became more frenetic, more abstract, more reflective of the cacophony of our many-screened visual culture. In Ferrari , a project he’s been trying to realize for several decades, he brings the different sides of his directorial persona together, creating a film that veers between classicism in its domestic scenes and rip-roaring kineticism in its racing scenes. It’s all held together beautifully by Adam Driver as the aging Enzo Ferrari and Penélope Cruz as his wife, Laura, grieving parents and feuding spouses locked in tight emotional combat.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Ferrari , interview with Michael Mann , and Rachel Handler’s report from the Venice Film Festival .

2. The Holdovers

Like a warm blanket made of asbestos, Alexander Payne’s comedy-drama about winter break at a boys’ boarding school has a cozy surface familiarity that’s slowly revealed to be toxic. Paul Giamatti — an actor who cannot be compared to any other actor in human history, in any medium — plays a history teacher living resolutely in the past. The stellar Da’Vine Joy Randolph is the grieving head cook who can neither move forward nor look back, and lightning-bolt newcomer Dominic Sessa is a troubled, unloved teen hurtling headlong into an uncertain future. Payne’s fondness for quiet, casual moments blends well with the film’s lo-fi aesthetic, which mimics the textures of a picture from the 1970s. This also means that formally, the movie is fixated on the past the way Giamatti’s character is. Even the nods to the Vietnam War throughout play like coy references to a controversial subject, as they would have been in 1970. Nevertheless, growth is possible. In Payne’s work, one individual’s foibles and failings can open another’s perception; his humans lead not by example, but through their flaws. This is one of the director’s greatest films.

Read Alison Willmore’s full review of The Holdovers and Matthew Jacobs’s interview with Da’Vine Joy Randolph .

1. Oppenheimer

So many biopics tried this year not to be biopics, to the point that the films’ publicists politely but firmly requested that we not call them biopics. Christopher Nolan didn’t seem to have any such worries. Oppenheimer is a proud biopic: a dense, big-swing condensation of a 600-page biography about one of the most important men of the 20th century and about (in the movie’s own words) “the most important fucking thing to ever happen in the history of the world.” But Oppenheimer is also the opposite of a standard-issue Great Man movie: The achievement here is monstrous, and the psychic dissolution of the main character before our very eyes is heartbreaking. Nolan wants to enter J. Robert Oppenheimer’s mind, to see the “hidden universe” that quantum physics opened up and thus convey the psychic prison in which the scientist found himself after ushering in the nuclear age. That the director turned this most devastating of stories into a riveting pop culture phenomenon without ceding one inch on its tragic dimensions is surely an achievement for the ages.

Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Oppenheimer and Bilge Ebiri’s explanation of the ending with Christopher Nolan.

Alison Willmore’s Top 10 Films

10. The Outwaters

All of horror’s liveliest developments bubbled up from the genre’s raw edges this year — and, more than anything, from the internet. A24’s hit Talk to Me was the product of two Australian YouTubers, while Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink was born out of creepy-pasta tropes and liminal spaces videos. But it’s another debut, Robbie Banfitch’s found-footage Mojave Desert freakout The Outwaters , that’s stubbornly stuck with me for months, and I only heard about it because of how much it polarized horror fans online. Made for a reported $15,000, and heavily improvised, The Outwaters sounds Blair Witch– like on paper, down to the camping trip its group of four friends is taking. But the actual experience of watching it is an astonishing array of dreamlike imagery as the trip goes from mundane to macabre. A stranger’s bloody limbs glimpsed by flashlight at night give way to sights that are even more disturbing in the harsh daylight, and Banfitch, who also stars in the film, appears at different times to be a victim of whatever’s happening and one of its perpetrators. He may not be working with much by way of resources, but what he accomplishes in this borderline experimental movie knocked my socks off — never more so than the moment when his protagonist somehow finds himself on the wing of a plane like the one he takes home at the start of the film, as though he’s always been caught in this nightmare and only now sees it.

9. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

James Gunn has headed off to the unenviable job of getting another superhero house in order at a corporation that’s willing to etherize even his own movie for tax purposes. But before he did, he demonstrated that he’s the best thing that ever happened to the MCU — not that I really needed the reminder as someone who’s always been hugely susceptible to his signature mix of the profane, the brutal, the sentimental, and the unexpectedly sublime. The decade’s most dominant genre has calcified into not just a formula but an ongoing advertisement for itself that viewers are expected to be grateful to pay for, and in the face of that, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 manages to be more than honest-to-god entertainment, one that has the liberated weirdness of material (like a stealth We3 adaptation) that was never expected to find a mass audiences. It even makes Chris Pratt likable as it brings Star-Lord full circle, from a kid who runs away from grief into the eternal arrested development of a space opera into an adult who finally goes home.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Siddhant Adlakha’s explanation of the ending .

8. Happer’s Comet

Most of the films that were shot during the pandemic retain some essence of the pandemic, whether it has anything to do with what’s onscreen or not. But this 62-minute feature, which is enveloping as the lush night in which it takes place, somehow doesn’t, despite being shot in 2020 after filmmaker Tyler Taormina moved back to his childhood home on Long Island. Happer’s Comet feels, instead, untethered from any particular moment, a dialogue-free tribute to the isolation of suburbia that manages to feel as luxurious as it does lonely. The film skips through space, capturing snapshots rather than trying to assemble anything resembling a story. An older woman takes a break from leafing through a flier to lay her head on her dining room table and smile; a mechanic staffing an auto-body shop with no company except the tinny sound of a radio drops down and starts doing push-ups; a dog sits in a living room watching an off-screen television. Taormina’s images are as undeniably beautiful as they are eerie — the streetlamps and taillights of a parked car glow with equal warmth on an quiet road — but it’s the solitude they exude that makes them so inviting, as though getting a peek into a million private moments. As characters strap on roller skates and go wheeling out into the dark streets, it feels unclear if what’s motivating them is a desire for company or a chance to revel in the indulgence of all those empty spaces.

7. A Thousand and One

A. V. Rockwell’s first film has the sweep of a novel and the fiercest of spirits, and it’s anchored by a remarkable performance by Teyana Taylor as the resolute Inez de la Paz. Fresh from Rikers in 1994, Inez promptly kidnaps her son, Terry, from a neglectful foster situation in Brooklyn and spirits him uptown to Harlem, where she grew up, and where she’ll eventually link up with an ex, Lucky (William Catlett), in a development that, like most of the ones in the film, doesn’t lead at all where you might expect. A Thousand and One is a gorgeous, moving work about people trying to carve out a family life for themselves with no models to pull from and in the face of a city that becomes increasingly hostile to their existence with every supposed improvement and who fuck up and hurt each other and keep going, because the only other option is to give up. Even while dealing in larger themes, Rockwell always lets her characters lead the way — they are never anything less than vividly alive as they make their way through a teeming metropolis it’s all too easy to disappear into.

Read Alison Willmore’s review of A Thousand and One .

There’s a formal rigor to playwright Tina Satter’s directorial debut that contrasts starkly with the panicky, pulse-fluttering experience of actually watching it. Satter took her dialogue verbatim from the transcripts of whistleblower Reality Winner’s interrogation by the FBI on June 3, 2017, the day of her arrest, redactions and all — when the film gets to a line that was blacked out, the actors glitch out and briefly vanish from the frame, as though their actual performances had been temporarily excised by the State. And yet there’s nothing removed about Sydney Sweeney’s performance as Reality, which unfolds in micro-expressions as her character tries to pretend — or will herself to believe — that what’s happening to her isn’t such a big deal. As men pour into Reality’s shitty Augusta, Georgia, rental house and start documenting the minutiae of her life, the camera closes in on Sweeney’s increasingly stricken face as though trying to peer into her character’s head. It’s a claustrophobic, masterful work that, in the space of 82 minutes, allows you to witness in intimate detail a young woman’s life getting imploded by the might of the State.

Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Reality .

5. The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s film portrays a key figure in the Holocaust not as the embodiment of virulent hatred but as a product of compartmentalization and ambition, which turns out to be even more disturbing. I’m not sure there is a viewing experience this year that is simultaneously as stunning and stifling as The Zone of Interest , which subjects you to the bourgeois aspirations and careerist angst of Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller), who’ve achieved their dream home right next to the death camp at Auschwitz, which Rudolf oversees. The austerity of Glazer’s approach is unforgiving, presenting the mundanity of the Höss’s concerns, from Hedwig’s pride in her garden to the transfer Rudolf is given that Hedwig refuses to accompany him during, against an always-present-but-never-peered-into backdrop of atrocity. The horror next door only occasionally manages to intrude into carefully partitioned-off consciousnesses of the family, as when a swimming trip with the children is cut short by an encounter with some of the gruesome by-products of the camp. But in a late scene that connects his film to Joshua Oppenheimer’s crucial documentary The Act of Killing , Glazer posits that sometimes the body can revolt against the brutal truths the mind tries to tamp down.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The Zone of Interest .

4. The Boy and the Heron

Leave it to Hayao Miyazaki to pack so much mourning, self-doubt, resentment, and hope into a movie about a secret kingdom filled with winsome, ravenous anthropomorphic birds. There’s more to The Boy and the Heron than that, of course, including a backdrop of World War II Japan, autobiographical resonances, a pregnant stepmother who’s also an aunt, a gray heron who’s also a grouchy man, and the dream logic of the ocean-dominated otherworld where souls rise up as adorable spirits to be born into our reality. But what’s so compelling about Miyazaki’s epic latest, which will hopefully also not be his last, is the way that the magical serves as an emotional allegory for what 12-year-old Mahito (Soma Santoki) is going through rather than something literal. Mahito’s wizardlike granduncle retreated from reality to create a beguiling but unsteady alternate universe that he needs someone “free of malice” to take over. The Boy and the Heron is about accepting loss but also accepting that you are part of the world, in all its brokenness and all its potential.

Read Alison Willmore’s full review of The Boy and the Heron .

Lila Avilés’s dazzling family drama takes place over a single day, during which the relatives of a 7-year-old girl named Sol (Naíma Sentíes) gather at her grandfather’s house to throw a surprise birthday party for her father, Tona (Mateo García Elizondo). That Tona is likely to die soon from the cancer that’s reduced him to a husk is clear to everyone except Tótem ’s young protagonist, who struggles to understand why her dad doesn’t always want to see her (or anyone) and tries to make sense of the behavior of the grief-stricken grown-ups around her. Avilés’s film combines the avid curiosity of a child with the steady wisdom of an adult, and as it whirls through party prep and the bickering of family members — over a cake, over the bathroom, over Tona’s decision to forgo treatment, over a spiritualist brought in to cleanse the home — it approaches its large ensemble of characters with a tenderness that’s almost unbearable. Without ever verging on cloying, it’s a film about death that becomes a heartfelt celebration of life.

2. May December

Todd Haynes’s latest is a brilliant ode to female toxicity that begins at a place of camp and ends at one that’s closer to horror. The Mary Kay Letourneau–inspired Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) lisps and bakes and enforces her desired illusion of fairy-tale domesticity by way of a high-femme terrorism that involves weaponized tears and velvet barbs winged at her family members. As Elizabeth Berry, the actor set to play Gracie in an upcoming movie, Natalie Portman is all careful platitudes and hungry eyes, talking a big game about doing justice to the story of how a 36-year-old Gracie seduced the then-13 Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), who she later married, while barely concealing her ravenous glee at the ripeness of the material she’s harvesting. Haynes showcases these dueling characters and the outsize performances behind them with an appreciative wryness that’s deceptive (as Moore opens the fridge, the score lets loose with a dramatic twang before she observes “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs”). It’s Joe who emerges as the film’s wounded soul, played by an impressive Melton as a 30-something man frozen somewhere in adolescence by his experiences, blinking in disbelief at the life he’s found himself in as though just waking up to the reality of what happened to him. It’s a heartbreaking turn, and the way it’s deployed onscreen makes May December the year’s most complex and layered watch.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review on May December and Madeline Leung Coleman’s interview with Todd Haynes .

1. Showing Up

This year has given me a lot of “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born” feelings about the movies, between the contraction of the streaming model (which maybe never made sense to begin with in terms of profitability?), the floundering of Disney, the faltering of once-massive franchises, the triumphant labor movements, and the incursion of pop stars into the multiplexes. I’m hardly mourning the corporate structures that have dominated the last decade plus, but I have no idea what comes next. I just know that there’s been no better movie to encapsulate the year, and no better movie, period, than Kelly Reichardt’s matchless Showing Up , which is all about making art in a world that also requires you to make money. As Lizzy, a sculptor and admin assistant at a real arts college that (a little too fittingly) went under a few years ago for financial reasons, Michelle Williams has the perfectly pinched aura of a bluestocking dropped in sun-dappled present-day Portland. But her concerns — her ability to make her delicate clay sculptures of little ladies while also balancing a day job, the enviable self-interest of her frenemy-rival artist-landlord Jo (a delightful Hong Chau) — are palpable enough to feel like they could belong to Reichardt herself, the pressing intertwined with the petty in ways that are deeply relatable. Is it possible to support yourself and still have enough left over to do the work you love? Showing Up , which also features a turn from passion project flautist André Benjamin, doesn’t have an answer. What it does have is an inexpressibly lovely affirmation of the meaning of making art that you believe in, even if it only reaches a select but appreciative audience. Good job, girls.

Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Showing Up .

A Year of Movie Endings

This year saw several major superhero movies go bust (and as of this writing, we don’t know if Aquaman will be another one). It saw Disney deliver one bona fide animated flop ( Wish ) and another that exists in the liminal space between flop and hit ( Elemental ). We also saw Netflix starting to pull back on the mountains of money it throws toward film productions. Many of us have been anticipating (maybe even hoping for) the end of the franchise era. But now that it might be happening, what lies on the other side?

Read Bilge Ebiri and Alison Willmore’s full roundtable discussion about a year in movie endings — and all of 2023’s denouements offscreen, too .

Other Movie Highlights From This Year

Throughout 2023, our critics maintained “Best Movies of the Year (So Far)” lists. Some of those selections appear above in our Top 10 picks. Below are more of the films (but not all) that stood out to them this year.

Boudica, Queen of War

Low-budget action master Jessie V. Johnson directed this down-and-dirty period slaughterfest about a woman who becomes a powerful warrior after her husband, the leader of the Iceni, is killed by the Romans. As the title character, a legendary figure in ancient British history, the great Olga Kurylenko convincingly goes from meek, tender, and deferential to mad, snarling, and murderous. Don’t expect much historical analysis or period accuracy or emotional nuance; this one works on your lizard brain. It’s like a dimestore Braveheart : It might not have the sweep of those old-school period action films, but it’s still thrilling and passionate and filled with bloodcurdling, wall-to-wall violence. —B.E.

Four Daughters

Kaouther Ben Hania’s hybrid documentary has a remarkable conceit, telling the story of Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian mother, and her four daughters by restaging scenes from their eventful, terrifying lives. Two of the girls play themselves; the other two are played by actresses, because, as Olfa says, they “were devoured by the wolves.” What she actually means by that becomes clear over the course of the film (though Tunisians who remember this news item from recent history may know where the story goes), as we learn about Olfa’s marriage, the abuse in her family, and how her daughters gradually embraced a form of militant, fundamentalist Islam that tore their family apart. An actress is hired to play Olfa during the more difficult scenes, and we see dryly funny and slyly terrifying footage of the real Olfa coaching her double how to act. In telling the story of Olfa and her daughters, Ben Hania (whose 2019 film The Man Who Sold His Skin was nominated for an Oscar) is also telling the tumultuous story of Tunisia in the wake of the Arab Spring, a promising movement that began in that country before spreading to the rest of North Africa and the Middle East. —B.E.

Killers of the Flower Moon

It would be tempting to say that Killers of the Flower Moon is Martin Scorsese’s attempt at a western, and one could also see in it yet another gangster epic from a man who’s made his share of them. But in adapting David Grann’s acclaimed 2017 nonfiction history, about a yearslong conspiracy to murder members of the Osage nation in an effort to accrue their oil wealth, Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth have turned it into that simplest and slipperiest of things: the story of a marriage. The film is at its best when showing the growing relationship between Mollie Brown (Lily Gladstone), a member of a large and wealthy Osage family, and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI veteran who arrives in town to work for his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro), a local godfather type. The most uncomfortable aspect of Killers of the Flower Moon is not the spectacular criminality on display but rather how it’s treated by so many of the characters as no big deal. These are typically Scorsesean ideas: our offhand capacity for evil, the inherent violence of relationships, the strain of serving two masters. In so many ways, though, this is Lily Gladstone’s movie. She plays Mollie with a mix of standoffishness and exhausted hope. As the horrors mount around her, she navigates her queasy, gathering suspicions as well as her affection for her husband. When he tells Mollie he loves her, she believes him. And so do we. That is, in many ways, the great, cruel, unreconciled tragedy at the heart of this tale. —B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Killers of the Flower Moon and Alison Willmore’s profile of Lily Gladstone.

Delinquents

Argentine director Rodrigo Moreno’s film is being billed as a heist movie, which is not technically incorrect; it is, in fact, about a man who robs a bank and then coaxes a co-worker into an elaborate scheme to get away with it. But at heart, The Delinquents is about leaving an oppressive world behind and discovering the possibility of freedom in a new one. The thieves here are not looking to get rich. “Three and a half years in jail, or 25 at the bank?” is how Morán (Daniel Elias) puts it to his colleague Román (Esteban Bigliardi), explaining why he’s resorted to crime. The plan is quite simple: Morán will confess to the robbery and get three years in prison. Román will hide the money in the meantime. Afterward, the two men will have just enough to not have to work for a living. But is such a goal, such a world, even possible? Moreno’s film is really about the wait in between, about what happens as these two men bide their time. Clocking in at 183 minutes, this is a movie of detours both narrative and formal. But it’s never boring or tedious. The Delinquents works its magic on us the way that the promise of freedom works on its characters. It’s a vision of a life unlived — as impossible as it is intoxicating. —B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of The Delinquents.

When Evil Lurks

This brutal Argentine horror film takes place in a reality in which possessions are both known and spreadable, transforming the infected into malevolent, oozing masses of flesh that are referred to as “Rottens.” But what makes Demián Rugna’s film so effective is not the gore (which is appropriately gross!) or the idea of a demonic contagion — it’s the way that the weaknesses of human nature, on both a personal and a systemic level, make stopping the corruption almost impossible once it appears. When a Rotten turns up on land near the farm owned by brothers Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and Jaime (Demián Salomon), the local authorities pass the buck while insisting that everyone is overreacting. But Pedro, the closest thing the film has to a hero, is anything but. He ends up doing more damage in his flailing efforts to help and to save his children, a sequence that plays like a grim comedy of errors. Rugna was apparently inspired by health issues caused by pesticide in his native country, though the film’s combination of misinformation, denial, and institutional failures invariably brings to mind the early days of COVID. —A.W.

The Creator

The artificial-intelligence framing is just bait — the robots in this sci-fi epic don’t actually have much bearing on our current conversations about ChatGPT. They are, instead, multifaceted metaphors for all sorts of groups that get othered, and the focus of Gareth Edwards’s unexpectedly grown-up movie is less the AIs themselves than how they’re treated by the American forces that are battling to wipe them from existence. The Creator riffs on both Vietnam War movies and Blade Runner as it sends a never-better John David Washington into a war-torn Southeast Asia to look for the woman (Gemma Chan) he loved and betrayed, never seeming sure as to what he would say if he found her. Edwards, always good with visual effects, offers up stunning, lived-in landscapes in which brutalist metal towers coexist alongside paddy fields and villages. —A.W.

Read Alison Wilmore’s full review of The Creator .

Documentarian Claire Simon explains what she’s setting out to do at the start of the astonishing Our Body — to explore the “mostly female world” of the women’s health ward of a Parisian hospital, “treating the gynecological pathologies that weigh down on our lives, on our loves, on our hopes, on our desires.” Over the course of her almost three-hour film, she turns her camera to moments of vulnerability, sorrow, and joy as a woman records the voice of her crying newborn after giving birth alone, as a trans teenager learns he’ll have to wait until he’s 18 to go ahead with medical procedures his father refuses to consent to, and as a young woman weeps while talking about the pain she’s started experiencing during sex with her new husband. There’s an expansive generosity to the film, and to the willingness of its subjects to allow these moments to be documented, that’s met with the same openness from Simon when a diagnosis means that she’s no longer just the director but a patient herself. —A.W.

The Origin of Evil

Sebastien Marnier’s slow-boiling thriller weaves such a mood of sinister duplicity that you might want to take a shower afterward. It follows Stephane (Laure Calamy), a cannery worker with a girlfriend in prison, who reconnects with Serge (Jacques Weber), the wealthy businessman she claims is her father. Serge’s family is immediately suspicious, but it’s clear they’ve got their own designs on the man’s wealth. Everybody in this movie seems to be lying through their teeth. In less sure hands, this could have resulted in annoyance. But Marnier and his terrific cast know just how much to reveal and when. They keep us delightfully unmoored. —B.E.

A Haunting in Venice

Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot mysteries haven’t exactly set the film world on fire, so the fact that the director-star continues to make them clearly speaks to his love for these stories and this character. In the latest, A Haunting in Venice , he forsakes the swooping cameras and epic vistas and frantic pacing of the previous films for something stranger, more insular, and maybe even more refined. He takes Agatha Christie’s little-discussed 1969 novel, Hallowe’en Party, and turns it into a moody, staccato thriller about the unknown. He also takes quite a few liberties with the original along the way, transporting the story to Venice in 1947 and bringing in a supernatural undercurrent. This allows for some jump-scares, but it also makes Poirot more intriguing: His refusal to believe in matters of the spirit isn’t just due to his devotion to science and reason — it’s also a measure of his brokenness. —B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of A Haunting in Venice .

Pablo Larraín’s latest film presents General Augusto Pinochet, the brutal, U.S.-backed military dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990 and died in 2006, still with the blood of thousands on his hands, as a literal vampire. So, what is it? Horror? Satire? Allegory? Political thriller? Family drama? It’s got all these elements in it, but it’s also very much its own thing — an elegantly shot film whose competing tones create something delirious and new. But beneath all the genre theatrics, what comes through most vividly in El Conde are Larraín’s sadness and rage at what happened to his country. —B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of El Conde.

If anything, Emma Seligman’s follow-up to Shiva Baby could be even more anarchic, but as is, it’s a blissfully silly, unabashedly violent, and often daring time. Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri are a comedy duo for the ages as PJ and Josie, lesbian outcasts who found a women’s self-defense class/fight club at their high school and accidentally create a space for feminist solidarity, though the two of them are just trying to get laid. Both are very funny, and the cast features other standouts too — like Marshawn Lynch as the club’s soon-to-be-divorced adviser and Kaia Gerber as the school’s second-most-popular cheerleader. —A.W.

Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Bottoms.

In Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s absorbing, suspenseful drama, a French couple attempt to start an organic farm and rehabilitate a desolate stretch of property in a rural Spanish village. But the locals, who are trying to sell their land off for development by a wind-energy company, see the couple as stuck-up foreigners trying to prevent them from making money and leaving this place. Sorogoyen might give lip service to the economic realities underlying the land dispute, but he’s also not afraid to take sides and to entertain. As the growing hostility between the man and woman and their neighbors eventually reaches Straw Dogs– esque proportions, it becomes clear the director wants to make us feel his protagonists’ growing helplessness and the gnawing tension of living right next door to people who might genuinely want to kill you. — B.E.

Directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, Barbie has become a Rorschach-inkblot purity test about feminism, womanhood, and the state of the industry itself. Is Barbie feminist or is it merely a marker of capitalism’s cunning, taking the emblems but not of the soul of the feminist movement? Is it just a slick toy commercial or is it actually reckoning with the cultural weight of Barbie with wit? I think the truth is rather complex, making Barbie operate as a woman’s picture, a feminist argument, and film defined by its delirious interest in the pleasure principle. No matter where you’ve drawn your lines on this cultural battlefield, it’s hard to deny that Barbie is fun as hell. Led by star-producer Margot Robbie, Barbie is a pink funhouse brimming with glittering dance numbers, heartfelt monologues, and a genuine curiosity about not just womanhood but humanity itself. Everyone in the cast brings their A-game. Ryan Gosling undoubtedly has the boldest performance as the yearning himbo Ken, whose entire existence is in service of basking in Barbie’s warm gaze. Issa Rae and Hari Nef are equal delights for some deranged line readings alone. America Ferrera is the stealth MVP for her juicy monologue that extols the constrictions on women. Robbie cements her position as a true new star in Hollywood’s firmament by helping craft a film that has a capacious curiosity and joyful aesthetics that speak toward the wild, yearning nature of being alive. — A.J.B.

Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Barbie and Allison P. Davis’ essay about Greta Gerwig’s films .

They Cloned Tyrone

Juel Taylor’s genre-bending directorial debut is a vibrant, snappy melding of sci-fi concepts, social commentary, and blaxploitation homage with John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, and Teyonah Parris starring as broadly drawn types — a drug dealer, a pimp, and a sex worker — who discover that the seemingly inescapable patterns of their lives in a neighborhood called the Glen aren’t accidental and are actually the result of a government conspiracy. With so many Netflix original movies these days feeling like algorithmic filler, They Cloned Tyrone is the rare offering that doesn’t just feel like it’s made by a person but by someone with an eye for visual, a distinctive voice, and a sharp sense of humor. — A.W.

Forest fires rage in the distance in Christian Petzold’s entrancing film, which doesn’t stop its characters — novelist Leon (Thomas Schubert), photographer Felix (Langston Uibel), seasonal worker Nadja (Paula Beer), and rescue swimmer Devid (Enno Trebs) — from flirting and fighting over shared meals outside the beach house that’s Afire ’s primary setting. Throughout the film, it’s Leon’s tetchiness over the failings of his second manuscript that threaten to derail the seaside idyll, but the potential for more serious danger always lurks in the background. The wonder of Petzold’s work is that it revels in the unblemished youthfulness of its characters while allowing that, in order to make great art, it helps to have endured some pain. — A.W.

Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Afire .

The Deepest Breath

Free-diving — trying to reach record depths by simply holding your breath and diving as far as you can — is one of the deadliest sports on the face of the Earth, and Laura McGann’s documentary has quite a challenge: How to tell its story without feeling like it’s exploiting a potential tragedy. The film opens with champion Italian diver Alessia Zecchini blacking out at the end of one of her dives, then flashes back across the years to show her love for the sport and her rise to the top, all the while interweaving the story of Stephen Keenan, an Irish free diver who eventually became an expert safety diver and coach. Those familiar with the story will know where it’s all headed. Others — that would be most viewers, probably — will wonder how these two lives will ultimately intersect. Documentary purists who balk at movies hiding real-life tragedies from their viewers until the end will probably break out in hives. But McGann doesn’t really hide the nature of her story. It’s clear pretty early on that we’re watching something harrowing. This is, ultimately, an elegant and deeply moving picture. — B.E.

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One

The latest Mission: Impossible movie, as suggested by that ominous “part one,” seems to care a bit more about its plot than previous entries, and it’s not hard to see why. This time, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt isn’t fighting nihilistic terrorists or vaporous international-espionage networks but an all-powerful artificial intelligence known as “the Entity,” a variation on the man-versus-machine theme that Cruise pursued in last year’s Top Gun: Maverick . It’s also a rather compelling metaphor for the actor’s well-publicized dedication to old-school action filmmaking and real-life stunt work. But if Dead Reckoning spends a bit too much time slowly (and repeatedly) spelling out what the Entity is and what it can do and why that’s capital- B Bad, it can be forgiven, because all that exposition serves as a kind of spiritual justification for the bravado on display. And the film is filled with amazing action set pieces, including the star’s much-publicized death-defying motorcycle-parachute jump over — or rather into — an immense Norwegian canyon as well as the most hair-raising train derailment ever put to film. Whenever it gets down to the business of making Tom Cruise run and jump and drive and fly in and out of things, Dead Reckoning manages to astonish. — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One and Jason Bailey’s ranking of the best action sequences in the entire M:I franchise .

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Despite the spectacle of an effectively de-aged Harrison Ford walloping Nazis atop a train during World War II in its opening scenes, James Mangold’s film isn’t about the young Indiana Jones but about the aging and rather pathetic Dr. Henry Jones, now on the verge of retirement from teaching archaeology to sleepy Hunter College students, drinking himself silly in a grubby New York apartment. Into his life enters his goddaughter, Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), the adventurous offspring of an old colleague, to drag him along on a chase for a contraption that can predict fissures in the very fabric of time, thereby allowing travel into the past. Not unlike The Force Awakens did with the original Star Wars , Dial of Destiny feels at times like a remix, offering variations on elements from earlier Indiana Jones movies. Mangold may not have the young Steven Spielberg’s musical flair for extravagant action choreography (who does?), but he is a tougher, leaner director, using a tighter frame and keeping his camera close. That may shortchange the escapist atmosphere and evocative exotica of the material, but it does bring a ground-level immediacy to the action. Plus all the vehicular mayhem probably suits this older, slower version of Indy, who fights less but often finds himself in the middle of any number of “wouldn’t it be cool if” chases: motorcycles and tuk-tuks and trains and Jaguars and horses and planes in all manner of arrangements and rearrangements as well as one delirious final sequence that had me giggling with delight. No, it’s not Raiders of the Lost Ark ; no movie is. But it’s too entertaining to dismiss. — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny .

Pietro Marcello’s previous feature, 2020’s brilliant Martin Eden , was an ambitious adaptation that attempted to graft a Jack London novel onto the entire history of the 20th century. With Scarlet , he works in a gentler register, though the ambition is still there. In its opening scenes, a gruff, quiet man, Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry), returns from World War I to discover that his wife is dead and that he has a young daughter. He and the girl live with a group of women who are outcasts from the community, and he soon becomes an outcast as well. This rough man’s daughter (played as a young woman by Juliette Jouan) turns out to be the most delicate of creatures, a romantic young woman with a connection to the divine. This beguiling film has the cadences of a fairy tale — prophetic visions, magical coincidences, behavior echoed across the years — but Marcello, who came up through the documentary world, expertly blends the immediate and the airy. —B.E.

Georgia Oakley’s feature debut is an anguished look at life in the closet set in Northeast England in 1988 — the year the Thatcher administration introduced a set of laws banning the “promotion of homosexuality” in the name of protecting children. Jean, played by a terrific Rosy McEwen in her first leading role, has painstakingly compartmentalized her existence. At night, she hangs out at a lesbian bar with her girlfriend, Viv (Kerrie Hayes), a part of herself she keeps secret from her co-workers and students at the school where she works as a gym teacher in the day. Blue Jean is a moody, delicately wrought film about how Jean, damaged from past experiences and her own internalized homophobia, is unable to feel like she belongs in either of the worlds she created for herself. The justification for the impending legislation in the background of the film may sound all too familiar, but Blue Jean ’s real power comes from its examination of the human costs of living in fear. — A.W.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Not to be corny, but I teared up a few times during the opening scenes of this sequel to 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse just from how good it all looked. Somehow, the animation is even more impressive and imaginative, as the film gives us new universes done in soft watercolors and futuristic detail while also returning us to the embrace of the vibrant, comic-book-art–inspired Brooklyn that its teenage hero, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), inhabits. Across the Spider-Verse ends on a to-be-continued, but it’s hard to complain about that when it’s so rich with detail and so beautifully crafted — a riff on multiverse storytelling that also becomes a heartfelt exploration of parenting and accepting that growing up means that your child is going to encounter pain you can’t shelter them from. — A.W.

Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Richard Newby’s explanation of the cliff-hanger ending .

Night of the 12th

Based on a real-life case, Dominik Moll’s thriller follows the lengthy investigation into the grisly burning death of a young woman in a small town near Grenoble. An opening title informs us that this was but one of many unsolved murders in France, a disquieting bit of information with which to kick off a mystery, telling us there won’t be a final solution to the case. This subtly draws our attention to other aspects of the story: to the interactions among the cops investigating the case, to the humdrum bureaucracy of police work, and to a general feeling of haunted desolation in this provincial area nestled next to the French Alps. The film won six awards at this year’s César Awards, including Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay, but there seems to be very little buzz around its U.S. release. Even so, it feels major, with an unsettling mood that recalls such previous policier masterpieces as David Fincher’s Zodiac and Bong Joon Ho’s Memories of Murder . Its real-world mysteries eventually become existential ones, but the movie never stops sending chills up your spine. —B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Night of the 12th .

As the ultracorporate “shark” Jim Balsillie, Glenn Howerton is a near-comical vision of drive and animalistic ambition, and his character turns out to be just who the clumsy, introverted nerds who founded Research in Motion (RIM), the tiny company that would transform the cell-phone industry, need to make their harebrained schemes reality. Directed by Matt Johnson, BlackBerry basically presents the rise of the smartphone as a sitcom pitch: What happens when two affable, not-ready-for-prime-time dorks from Waterloo, Canada — brilliant engineer Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and his can-do cheerleader pal Doug Fregin (Johnson) — are joined by a crisply suited, Harvard-educated, phone-smashing apex predator. One of the great pleasures of BlackBerry is watching Balsillie’s befuddled, running disgust at Lazaridis and Fregin’s hapless ways, at the chaotic ineptitude of their finances, their utter lack of business sense, and their go-along-to-get-along management style. I would happily watch several seasons of these three going at it. — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of BlackBerry .

This is a largely wordless World War II thriller about a grizzled, haunted loner who strikes a massive vein of gold in the remote reaches of Lapland, only to find himself tormented by a platoon of retreating Nazis. The year is 1944, and the war is basically lost for the Germans, who are laying waste to everything in their path. As the Nazis chase him, our hero picks them off, sometimes individually and sometimes en masse. What keeps it from being repetitive and predictable is director Jalmari Helander’s increasingly creative ideas about how his hero should go about wasting the Nazis in his path, as the film graduates from humble head stabbings and limb snappings to more ambitious and explosive mayhem. So much so that it all starts to border on a philosophical treatise about survival and perseverance. Some will say Sisu recalls Mad Max: Fury Road or Inglourious Basterds , but I kept imagining it as what might have happened had Sergio Leone been alive to direct Crank: High Voltage . — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Sisu .

The Eight Mountains

Like the characters in Brokeback Mountain , the men in this drama from Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch bond during an Edenic summer in the wilderness, and while their relationship is platonic, the film is no less a love story. Pietro (Luca Marinelli) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) are childhood friends who reunite as adults to build a cabin up in the mountains where Bruno grew up and Pietro’s family used to spend the summers — a breathtaking location that becomes a place the two return to as the years pass. The Eight Mountains offers all sorts of ecstatically beautiful footage of the Italian Alps, but it also spins out a delicate, rueful story about trying to find a balance between nature and work, as its two characters take divergent routes in their search for a meaningful life. — A.W.

The comedy troupe Broken Lizard met at Colgate back in 1989 and never spiritually left college. Thank God for that. Their work still feels like a group of amiable stoners from across the hall came up with a bunch of dumb, funny ideas to put into a movie and then filmed it all the following morning. A riff on The Hunchback of Notre Dame , Quasi may be their first period piece, but it’s basically the same vibes-based silliness. Steve Lemme plays Quasimodo, a torture-chamber employee who gets caught in a petty but murderous tiff between the pope and the king. One can easily imagine a version of this movie where the plot is handled with urgency, authenticity, and suspense, but then what would you be left with? The Broken Lizard guys understand that their brand of handmade, good-natured humor doesn’t really work with tighter storytelling or sharper acting, and they’ve honed their approach well over the years. They’re always winking at us because they know theirs is a fundamentally participatory style of comedy; the process is part of the joke. They keep making cult movies so that when you watch them, you feel as if you were there when they made them. Broken Lizard is all of us. — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Quasi and a transcript of Vulture Festival’s Broken Lizard panel .

Makoto Shinkai’s latest is another of the openhearted romantic fantasies he’s so good at , a road-trip adventure about an orphaned teenage girl who helps save Japan from a mythical worm whose intrusions into our world cause massive earthquakes. But despite featuring both a mysterious love interest and a talking cat, Suzume is a more pensive affair than it first appears, one that reflects what it means to come of age when the future feels so uncertain. Suzume (Nanoka Hara) and her companion, Souta (Hokuto Matsumura) — a dreamboat who, hilariously, spends most of his time magically transformed into a three-legged chair — cross the country trying to close up portals that open in areas that have been abandoned because of disasters or the shrinking population, as though patching up the tears in a social fabric that’s wearing thin all over. It’s a swoony, gorgeously animated movie that earns its sadness as well as its ecstatic bursts of hope. — A.W.

Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Suzume and Rafael Motamayor’s interview with Makoto Shinkai .

Sick of Myself

It’s possible that no scene this year will be more entertaining than the one in which Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp), a Norwegian woman with a pathological need to be the center of attention, lies to the chef at a fancy dinner about having severe nut allergies, then forgets she said that and eats something with nuts while the whole table looks on in horrified expectation. But then, all of this Kristoffer Borgli movie is like that — a bitterly funny black comedy about narcissism and the paths people attempt to take to fame. When Signe’s boyfriend, Thomas (Eirik Sæther), rises thanks to a dubious artistic career involving stolen furniture, Signe retaliates by taking a recalled Russian drug whose side effects include a horrifying skin condition. The perfectly paired sociopaths ricochet through Oslo as though each is involved in their own elaborate stunt that never actually ends. — A.W.

Air, Ben Affleck’s enormously entertaining corporate drama about Nike’s efforts to sign Michael Jordan, might seem at first like a ridiculous idea for a movie, but it is in fact an ingenious one. The creation of the Air Jordan sneaker changed pop culture forever, and Jordan’s unprecedented profit-sharing deal with Nike would give athletes equity in the products they were being used to sell. The film situates the Air Jordan as a product of the runaway consumerism of the 1980s, but it also hints at a boundless, complex new world coming into view. In what will surely go down in history as one of the great sports-movie speeches, Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), the executive in charge of the shoe company’s basketball outreach, makes the point to Michael himself that the player practically exists outside of space and time. “Everyone at this table will be forgotten,” he says, noting all the executives gathered around them. “Except for you.” — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s review of Air , Chris Lee’s behind-the-scenes story about screenwriter Alex Convery , and Derek Lawrence’s interview with actor Chris Messina .

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

In attempting to turn the classic fantasy role-playing game into a franchise picture, directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein somehow manage to play to the base while acknowledging the inherent ridiculousness and impenetrability of the concept. Their film is filled with medieval derring-do, unpronounceable fantasyspeak, and what I can only assume is a cornucopia of nerdtastic Easter eggs. But it’s also hilarious, with a game cast led by Chris Pine, a leading man who has turned making fun of his own leading manness into an art form. The film’s set pieces are built around comedy, with bits of (cleverly choreographed and directed) action to add some urgency, not the other way around. And the humor actually helps to up the suspense. Honor Among Thieve s is the work of filmmakers who understand that the best way to take stuff like this seriously is not to take it seriously at all, and to have fun with it. — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s review of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves .

John Wick: Chapter 4

John Wick: Chapter 4 is blissfully entertaining, full of pratfalls and acting turns that make audiences swell with oohs, aahs, and yelps. It’s far more narratively focused than its previous sequels, while still managing to globe-trot a behemoth cast à la Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 . Here, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) seeks to finally buy his freedom by dueling the Marquis (Bill Skarsgård). I have some reservations about the narrative choices, but the cinematic violence of Chapter 4 brought me the joy and erotic rush that has long powered the series. It synthesizes the zaniness of Looney Tunes and gags of Buster Keaton with martial-arts master classes that call back to the career of Jackie Chan and learn from more recent films like 2017’s South Korean action flick The Villainess . It’s a history lesson on what the body can do onscreen — its limits and its wonders. — A.J.B.

Read Angelica Jade Bastién’s review of John Wick: Chapter 4 , Chris Lee’s interview with filmmaker Chad Stahelski , and Bilge Ebiri’s analysis of the movie’s ending .

The Lost King

This is the lightly fictionalized (and amazing) story of amateur historian Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins), who in 2012 helped lead an archaeological expedition that dug up a nondescript Leicester car park and unearthed the remains of the notorious King Richard III. The bulk of the film tells of how Philippa came to be fascinated by the disgraced medieval monarch and fought not just to find his grave but also to counter the prevailing villainous narrative about him, which may well have been the work of Tudor propagandists. There’s an interesting tension in the film, between the exaltation of royal power on the one hand — a spiritual belief in the magic of lineage, itself dating back to arcane notions of divine right — and, on the other, the ennobling of common individuals, of ordinary people like Philippa as they butt heads with city councils and university administrators and academic mossbacks. The very act of reclaiming Richard’s legacy from his now-gone Tudor rivals puts the lie to the very idea of royalty, of bloodlines, and the eternal question of who gets to have power over whom. — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s review of The Lost King .

Tori and Lokita

The latest from award-winning, veteran Belgian realists Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne follows two African migrants in Belgium: 17-year-old Lokita (Joely Mbundu) and her 11-year-old “brother,” Tori (Pablo Schils). They’re not actually siblings. They’re not even from the same country. But they’ve formed an almost mystically strong bond ever since they met during their crossing to Europe and have now become inseparable. For all the sensitivity and sobriety of their work, what has made the Dardennes such effective filmmakers has been the subtle way they insert genre elements into their dramas. Each movie could be thought of as a thriller — often involving characters racing against the clock, entering places they mustn’t, or crossing people they shouldn’t. This one is no different: Tori and Lokita work for pennies at an Italian restaurant, singing songs for the customers, then dealing drugs all over the city for the joint’s owner so they can make money to send to Lokita’s family back home and to the smugglers that brought them here. These two kids are surrounded by cruelty, indifference, and suspicion, but their relationship also allows us to feel some hope. It also means that the film becomes ulcer-inducingly unbearable once things truly start to spin out of control. — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s review of Tori and Lokita .

This cleverly constructed comedy from Hong Sang-soo takes place entirely in a small Seoul apartment building that provides not just the setting for the movie, but its structure. Byung-soo (Hae-hyo Kwon) is an acclaimed filmmaker paying a visit to the building’s owner, an old friend named Ms. Kim (Lee Hye-young) who soon realizes he has ulterior motives. But what follows are sly episodes that take Byung-soo to each level of the building in what can be seen as glimpses of his future romantic and professional disappointments, or as forward-looking fantasies about his life as he gradually loses the status that’s key to his identity. — A.W.

Read Alison Willmore’s review of Walk Up .

The romantic comedy isn’t dead, it’s strolling around South London in the company of Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah), a pair of charming 20-somethings who end up spending the day together after a less than auspicious meet cute in the bathroom of an art gallery. Both are getting over breakups, and the joy of Raine Allen-Miller’s movie comes from the dawning realization in each, over teasing banter and some mini-adventures along the way, that they might finally be ready to open their hearts again. — A.W.

Read Alison Willmore’s review of Rye Lane .

Stonewalling

Ji Huang and Ryûji Otsuka’s bleakly funny film has you aching for its 20-year-old protagonist Lynn (Honggui Yao) as much as you also feel exasperated with her naïveté. Lynn, who’s studying to be a flight attendant, seems forever a passenger in her own life, but when she finds out she’s pregnant by her self-involved boyfriend, she opts to keep the baby in a scheme to help her mother, one of the few firm decisions we see her make. In Stonewalling ’s vision of a contemporary China accelerating toward dystopia, this shifts Lynn from being commodified for her beauty to being commodified for the fetus she’s carrying, navigating an increasingly absurd fertility industry that suggests her future prospects are bleak. — A.W.

Congrats to Michael B. Jordan for turning a creaky boxing franchise into something deliciously close to shonen anime . — A.W.

Read Alison Willmore’s review of Creed III .

Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre

Guy Ritchie movies should theoretically be romps, but an overbearing fussiness threatens to kneecap many of them at every turn. Here then is something genuinely charming and light-footed: An espionage comedy-thriller in which a British superspy (Jason Statham) with a fondness for the finer things in life puts together a team to infiltrate the world of a playboy billionaire arms dealer (Hugh Grant), who just happens to be obsessed with the work of an action-movie star (Josh Hartnett), who in turn also gets roped into the elaborate scheme. With plenty of action set pieces — shootouts, car chases, and acrobatic beatdowns — you could imagine this as a dry run for a James Bond film, but the humorous banter and the cast (with especially charming turns from Hartnett and Grant) place it firmly in the realm of comedy. Everybody in Operation Fortune — yes, even Guy Ritchie — seems to be having fun. Sometimes, that’s all you need. — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s review of Operation Fortune .

Cocaine Bear

Cocaine Bear is, above all else, a title and a concept, and the movie clearly understands this. Elizabeth Banks’s action-comedy-thriller is loosely based on a 1985 incident when an American black bear ingested a massive amount of cocaine and was found dead soon thereafter. The film concocts a fanciful story — a series of stories, really — out of what might happen if an enormous bear went on a savage, indestructible, coke-fueled rampage through the Georgia woods. It’s part Spielbergian kids’ adventure, part slasher flick, with an ambling, gory insouciance that might have been more off-putting in a movie not called Cocaine Bear . — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s review of Cocaine Bear , Chris Lee’s interview with director Elizabeth Banks , and Derek Lawrence’s interview with star Keri Russell .

Colin West’s gentle sci-fi comedy-drama plays like Interstellar remade by Wes Anderson. Jim Gaffigan gives a warm, charming performance as the host of a children’s science show who loses his job and decides to build a rocket from the remains of one that has crashed in his backyard. Meanwhile, his rebellious teenage daughter begins falling for the new kid at school, who just happens to be the troubled son of the hard-ass, go-getter astronaut who replaced our hero at his job (also played by Gaffigan, now with a sinister mustache). But as the characters’ realities begin to fray, we start to sense that there’s more to this story than what we’re seeing. It’s a moving film about time, ambition, aging, wormholes, and the all-consuming power of love. And the film’s quaint, handmade qualities help make the tears it remorselessly jerks out of you feel like honest ones. — B.E.

Knock at the Cabin

Four strangers (led by a wonderful Dave Bautista ) emerge from the woods and present a family — a young girl and her two fathers (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge) — with an impossible choice: They must willingly sacrifice one member in order to avert the apocalypse. The film smoothly moves from the textures of one type of thriller to another, even as the mood remains eerily consistent. A Frankenstein opening soon gives way to a home-invasion picture, then a village-cult horror movie, and finally a disaster flick. Knock at the Cabin is based on Paul Tremblay’s 2018 novel, The Cabin at the End of the World , and the script follows the book pretty closely for the first two-thirds. Both are works of the apocalyptic imagination, but Tremblay’s tale is more insular, working the ambiguity of the situation to explore the characters’ faith and emotional perseverance. Shyamalan, however, understands that there is usually little ambiguity around such horrors in cinema; in 2023, when someone in a movie says the planet is ending, it usually is. Instead, he returns to one of the animating ideas of his early work: a profound grief at the state of the world. The result is the most exhilarating and wounding film the director has made in many, many years. — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s review of Knock at the Cabin .

One Fine Morning

Mia Hansen-Løve makes pictures that amble along with the rhythms of the everyday, about characters who never quite know what to do with themselves when they experience brief moments of happiness. She borrows odds and ends from her own life (and the lives of those around her), and reconfigures them into stories that carry the unnerving echoes of truth. In One Fine Morning , Léa Seydoux plays a widowed single mother whose philosopher father (Pascal Greggory) has been struggling with dementia. While mulling what to do with his rapidly deteriorating condition, Sandra reconnects with an old, married friend (Melvil Poupaud) and begins a heated affair. Suddenly, she finds herself deeply in need of this man’s affections — cherishing her moments with him while trying to hold off the irreparable sadness that seems to surround her. This could have easily become a torrid, tear-jerking melodrama, but Hansen-Løve’s matter-of-fact approach to performance and incident allow the emotions to emerge organically from the unfussy drama onscreen. She reminds us that beauty is often found in the mundane cadences of ordinary life. — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s review of One Fine Morning .

Plane. — B.E.

Read Bilge Ebiri’s review of Plane .

Alice Diop’s stunner of a film tucks a whole fraught universe into a courtroom drama. Kayije Kagame plays Rama, an author and professor who attends the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a woman who’s been accused of killing her own baby. Rama intends to make Laurence the subject of her next book, but instead, to her fascination and sporadic horror, sees herself in the admitted murderer, especially in their shared experiences as Senegalese immigrants and receptacles of immense parental expectations. — A.W.

Return to Seoul

With his film Return to Seoul , writer-director Davy Chou grounds his story in Park Ji-min’s features and expressions. Her debut performance is so piercing it makes the entire film move like a breathing poem. Park plays Frédérique “Freddie” Benoît, a 25-year-old Korean woman adopted by a white French couple, who has returned to her ancestral home. When she visits an adoption center to find out more about her parents and realizes the organization must formally send requests to her birth mother and father, Freddie tries to remain impenetrable. But cracks in her charismatic façade become undeniable when she travels to meet her father and the family that could have been hers. There are no grand speeches, no sudden or dramatic upheavals, no twinkling score to mawkishly pull at your heartstrings. Return to Seoul carries itself with a gentle forcefulness. Where do Freddie’s wounds begin? Where does the pain of her torn identity end? It is in the grooves of Park’s beauty, the clarity of her emotion, that we come to understand Freddie’s life as a fable written upon sand. — A.J.B.

Read Angelica Jade Bastién’s review of Return to Seoul .

The Quiet Girl

It may not have won the Oscar, but Colm Bairéad’s 1980s drama about a neglected 9-year-old is a delicate marvel. Filmed entirely in Irish — a first for a Best International Film nominee — The Quiet Girl stars newcomer Catherine Clinch as the vulnerable Cáit, who’s sent away for the summer to live on a farm with distant cousin Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) and her husband Seán (Andrew Bennett). The couple lost their own child years ago, and the film’s subdued pleasures come from the way the visit makes all three of these wounded people open up, with Cáit, pushed to the margins in her crowded home, blossoming under the attention and care she’s been craving all her life. — A.W.

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The Quiet Girl movie review & film summary (2023)
"The Quiet Girl," adapted for the screen and directed by Colm Bairéad, maintains this point of view admirably, for the most part, keeping the frame of reference narrowed to the world as seen through the girl's eyes.Bairéad has made some alterations to the source material, opening up the story a wee bit, with a prologue of sorts—her life at home, her bed-wetting, her tendency to wander away ...
'The Quiet Girl' review: This tender Irish drama speaks volumes
This tender Irish drama proves the quietest films can have the most to say. Catherine Clinch plays Cáit in The Quiet Girl. The late film critic Roger Ebert once wrote, "What moves me emotionally ...
'The Quiet Girl' Review: Welcome Home
For a beat, "The Quiet Girl" sounds an uneasy note. It won't be the last time this luminous Irish drama — directed by Colm Bairead and based on Claire Keegan's short story "Foster ...
The Quiet Girl
Movie Info. Rural Ireland. 1981. Nine-year-old Cait is sent away from her overcrowded, dysfunctional family to live with foster parents for the summer. Quietly struggling at school and at home ...
The Quiet Girl review
There's a lovely scene in which the "quiet girl" of the title, 10-year-old Cáit (played by newcomer Catherine Clinch), is reading Heidi before bedtime, and this movie, for all its darkness ...
'The Quiet Girl' Is One of the Most Heartbreaking Movies in Ages
February 24, 2023. Catherine Clinch in 'The Quiet Girl.'. Super. The girl is named Cáit. She's 12 years old, doesn't like attention, stays hidden and silent when she can. Living in the rural ...
The Quiet Girl
Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 17, 2023. Tina Kakadelis Beyond the Cinerama Dome. For as gentle and earnest as The Quiet Girl is, the film is full of rage. An angry plea to give a damn ...
'The Quiet Girl' Review: A Moving Tale of a Lonely Irish Childhood
Camera: Kate McCullough. Editor: John Murphy. Music: Stephen Rennicks. With: Catherine Clinch, Carrie Crowley, Andrew Bennett, Michael Patric, Kate Nic Chonaonaigh. (Irish, English dialogue) Colm ...
'The Quiet Girl': Irish Oscar nominee is eloquent in its silence
March 7, 2023 at 12:45 p.m. EST. Catherine Clinch in "The Quiet Girl." (Neon) 3 min. ( 4 stars) In a world of noise — and noisy, overstuffed movies, nowhere better epitomized than in this ...
The Quiet Girl review
The quiet girl is Cáit (the remarkable Catherine Clinch), one of an ever-expanding brood of neglected kids on an impoverished smallholding in early-80s rural Ireland. With her mother expecting ...
The Quiet Girl Review: Poignant, Impactful Oscar-Nominated Drama Is A
The Quiet Girl is far from a showy drama, which could give the impression it is slight and unmemorable. The opposite is true, and in fact, its strength lies in its unfussy approach to telling Cait's story. Like its protagonist, The Quiet Girl is quiet, sensitive, and not to be underestimated in the Oscars race.
The Quiet Girl (2022)
The Quiet Girl: Directed by Colm Bairéad. With Carrie Crowley, Andrew Bennett, Catherine Clinch, Michael Patric. In rural Ireland, a quiet, neglected girl is sent away from her dysfunctional family to live with relatives for the summer where she blossoms and learns what it is to be loved.
Review: Irish Oscar nominee 'The Quiet Girl' speaks clearly
Set in 1981 rural Ireland, "The Quiet Girl" — a clever tweak to the title of John Ford's Ireland-set "The Quiet Man" — comes from Claire Keegan's short story "Foster," and it preserves much of the rhythm and concision of a good short story. A willowy and taciturn 9-year-old, Cait (Catherine Clinch, a newcomer of staggering ...
'The Quiet Girl,' an Oscar Contender, Explores Irish Loneliness
The first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Oscar, directed by Colm Bairéad, tells a gentle story of cultural reticence. In "The Quiet Girl," Catherine Clinch plays Cáit, who is ...
'The Quiet Girl' Review: Irish Oscar Submission
The Quiet Girl is an unassuming drama — hushed, intimate and melancholy — skirting the edges of sentimentality at times but invariably pulling back before it becomes a sugary cliché. That ...
The Quiet Girl Movie Review
The Quiet Girl is also the first Irish-language production to be nominated for an Oscar for Best International Film. The film is a slow, stealthy affair that is often as subdued as its heroine, giving a child's-eye-view of the world from a place of detached curiosity, the camera noticing every detail that captures Cáit's attention.
Review: 'The Quiet Girl' is a masterpiece
It makes the viewer not quite at home, which is exactly how the title character, Cáit, feels for much of the movie. Catherine Clinch plays a young girl in rural Ireland in the early 1980s in "The Quiet Girl.". The second thing was to film it entirely from Cáit's perspective, so that the movie always follows her.
Review: Ireland's 'The Quiet Girl' speaks quiet volumes
The rare Irish-language film released in the U.S., 'The Quiet Girl,' based on Claire Keegan's 'Foster,' tells a poignant story about a neglected girl sent to live with distant relatives for a summer
'The Quiet Girl' Review: Ireland's Oscar Nominee Is a ...
This is one of the most authentic, naturalistic, and beautiful Irish films ever made. Cáit arrives at Eibhlin ( Carrie Crowley) and Seán ( Andrew Bennett) Kinsella's house, oblivious to the ...
'The Quiet Girl' Ending Explained: Cáit Finally Finds a Family
The Quiet Girl is a wonderful film filled with quiet, beautiful moments, elevated by lush cinematography and succinct performances. Simply, it would make a neat little double feature with ...
'The Quiet Girl' Hulu Movie Review: Stream It Or Skip It?
The Quiet Girl ( now on Hulu) was the first-ever Irish film nominated for the Best International Feature Film Oscar; it and another truly exceptional film, Jerzy Skolimowski's donkey parable EO ...
The Quiet Girl
The Quiet Girl (Irish: An Cailín Ciúin [ənˠ ˈkalʲiːnʲ cuːnʲ]) is a 2022 Irish coming-of-age drama film written and directed by Colm Bairéad, in his feature film debut. Based on the 2010 short story "Foster" by Claire Keegan, it stars Catherine Clinch, Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett.. Set in 1981, the film follows a withdrawn nine-year-old girl raised by neglectful parents among ...
'The Quiet Girl' Movie Review
'The Quiet Girl' sketches lightly all the elements of Irishness that in a different movie would be layered on thickly, or overemphasized at another element's expense.
The Best Movies of 2023: The Year in Film
4. Perfect Days. Wim Wenders released two marvelous films this year (his 3-D documentary Anselm was another triumph, though it just missed my list) and I hope he makes at least a dozen more ...
'Quiet on Set' bombshells about Nickelodeon: Pedophiles, sexism, more
00:00. 00:55. Investigation Discovery's Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV drops a number of disconcerting bombs about the workplace culture at Nickelodeon during the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s ...
'Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV': 6 key takeaways from the
'Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,' the ID documentary series premiering Sunday, delves into Dan Schneider's hit Nickelodeon shows and the abuse former employees say happened.
Road House Movie Review: Laughs, Brawls & Florida Fun!
The Verdict: Road House (2024) - A Knockout (With a Side of Laughs) Look, this movie isn't trying to win Oscars. It's here to entertain you with a healthy dose of action, humor, and Florida weirdness. And entertain it does. If you're looking for a film with a plot tighter than a boa constrictor's grip, this might not be it.
Quiet on Set Doc Directors on Dan Schneider, Drake Bell and More Episodes
Bell, the star of Drake & Josh and The Amanda Show, names himself as the John Doe victim in Brian Peck's sexual assault case in the third episode of Quiet on Set, which aired on Tuesday. The ...

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‘The Quiet Girl’ Review: A Heartfelt, Beautifully Homespun Tale of a Lonely Irish Childhood

Jessica Kiang

Reviewed in Berlin Film Festival (Generations), Feb. 22, 2022. Running time: 94 MIN. (Original title: "An Cailín Ciúin")

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