The Room Next Door

• Director: Pedro Almodóvar
• Writers: Pedro Almodóvar 
• Starring: Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola, Juan Diego Botto

Grade: B

Pedro Almodóvar’s films have always explored the very essence of humanity, filtered through his specific, melodramatic lens. His latest film, The Room Next Door, offers more of his sensibilities, and his ruminations on death and companionship, but something gets lost in translation. Throughout his career, Almodóvar has worked almost exclusively in his native Spanish – with the exception of his two most recent short films – but The Room Next Door is his first feature film in English. While it’s borderline reductive to attribute the film’s flaws to the change in language, it’s undoubtedly a lingering question that hangs over the final product.

Nickel Boys

• Director: RaMell Ross
• Writers: RaMell Ross, Joslyn Barnes
• Starring: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs

Grade: A

For 111 years after it opened in 1900, Florida’s School for Boys, nicknamed the Nickel Academy, operated officially as a reform school for troubled youths, but harbored painful secrets rooted in racism and cruelty. RaMell Ross’s film Nickel Boys, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, tells just a fraction of the horrors that took place at the school in the Jim Crow era, but it’s also a film of staggering beauty. Through a risky creative choice, Ross has created one of the most empathetic films in recent memory, and one of the best of the year.

The Outrun

• Director: Nora Fingsheidt
• Writers: Nora Fingsheidt, Amy Liptrot
• Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Paapa Essiedou, Stephen Dillane, Saskia Reeves

Grade: B

The Outrun is a story of addiction – alcohol addiction, specifically – but it’s a film that looks at the almost mythological origins of addiction. Are we born an addict, or is it borne from circumstance? It’s fitting for a film set on the Scottish coast, where its main character, played with devastating humanity by Saoirse Ronan, is a biologist who often waxes poetic about humanity’s origins. Character studies about addicts, or even unlikeable protagonists, are nearly as old as film itself, and while writer-director Nora Fingsheidt’s film isn’t an entirely fresh entry, it feels like it comes from a place of genuine sincerity.