Blink Twice (Zoë Kravitz, 2024). In her film in the role. Zoë Kravitz shows promise as a director. She’s inventive in the framing of images and navigates some especially tricky narrative switchbacks with reasonable skill. She also falls prey to the common first-timer temptation of going overboard with visual stylization and frenetic editing. Blink Twice centers on Frida (Naomi Ackie) an aspiring nail artist who makes ends meet as a cocktail waitress at posh catered events. At one of those swanky affairs, she catches the eye of Slater King (Channing Tatum), a wealthy tech bro slowly polishing up a reputation tarnished by scandal. He invites Frida and her coworker Jess (Alia Shawkat) to his private island for a getaway vacation with a batch of his fellow privileged pals. If things seem a little off, there’s plenty of booze, drugs, and raucous debauchery to distract from any misgivings, at least for a while. Blink Twice plays like Get Out with patriarchal predation of women swapped in for institutionalized racism, especially in its melding of satire and horror. The balance is off, though, and the thesis doesn’t quite come together, making the film feel intellectually unwieldy. Among the cast, Adria Arjona stands out in a supporting role. Combined with her terrific work in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, Arjona has asserted herself as an up-and-comer to watch.

Strange Darling (JT Mollner, 2024). This dark thriller is impressively, effectively twisty. The structural conceit of Strange Darling, presenting the seven chapters of the story in jumbled order, can veer perilously close to self-indulgence, but it works more often than it doesn’t. Mainly, it allows writer-director JT Mollner to cunningly hold back some of the reveals in his script about, in its simplest description to avoid spoiling anything, a date between strangers that goes bad. Kyle Gallner is solid as the male half of that coupling, but the film’s real MVP is Willa Fitzgerald, who is thrillingly raw, charismatic, and inventive as a character billed simply as “The Lady.” In addition to the effectiveness of its performances and plot particulars, the film simply looks amazing. It’s Giovanni Ribisi’s first feature as a cinematographer after spending his time around acting gigs learning the craft for the past decade or more. It’s no vanity credit; he has a real talent for the job.

The Wild Robot (Chris Sanders, 2024). Based on Peter Brown’s book of the same name, The Wild Robot follows a technologically advance personal assistant robot who goes by Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o). The robot is jarred into operation after a cargo ship accident leaves it stranded on a remote island devoid of humans. Instead, Roz uses AI technology to communicate with the animals there and eventually takes on a motherly role with a young goose she names Brightbill (voiced mostly by Kit Connor). Under the direction of Chris Sanders, the film is charming, lovely, and rendered elegantly. The early passages that acknowledge the brutality of nature are terrific and presumably made a little easier to take for sensitive young viewers by the sharp comic voice-work of Pedro Pascal and Catherine O’Hara, as a huckster fox with a heart of gold and a weary mama opossum, respectively. As the film goes on, it grows more conventional and less engaging, in part because the later lessons about community building stand awkwardly against the earlier acknowledgments of the food chain.