Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude, 2024). This sprawling, ambitious film from Romanian writer-director Rada Jude is built around Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a low-level employee of a video production house who criss-crosses Bucharest trying to enlist former employees of a big corporation to participate in a safety training video. She combats the tedium by recording Tiktok videos using a filter that makes her appear, unconvincingly, to be a bald, bearded, prodigiously eyebrowed bro who spouts misogynistic swill. Jude has a lot to say about the toxicity spreading across modern society like black paint dumped onto a white tile floor, and the film is no less scathing because its points are conveyed with a becalmed amusement. At the same time, the intellectual sprawl of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World sometimes proves a little unwieldy, and there are definitely stretches where Jude’s experimental ambition is more admirable than engaging. As clearly as I can see the artistry, I didn’t always feel it.

The Disappearance of Shere Hite (Nicole Newnham, 2023). It might seem like a small compliment, but it’s in fact significant: This documentary has a just-right balance of archival footage, contemporary talking-head interviews, and voiceover narration of the subject’s writing (read well by Dakota Johnson). Director Nicole Newnham uses all the fundamental tools of nonfiction filmmaking with determination to bring real insight to this consideration of Shere Hite, the sexologist who caused a sensation with her studies and bestselling books in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties. In particular, it was Hite’s bluntness about women’s sexuality that stirred up controversy, mostly, Newnham makes it clear, because the mere idea of women having a say in the bedroom was enough to prompt defensive hissy fits from fleet of monumentally insecure men. After seeming to be everywhere for a while, Hite basically vanished from the scene. Most of her later works were published only in Europe. It’s remarkable that Hite could go so completely from lightning-rod fixture who sold a heaping pile of books to someone who is barely remembered in the culture. Without stating it overtly, The Disappearance of Shere Hite makes it clear it was malicious erasure as much as retreat.

Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2025). I’ll defer to others on the complaints about the film’s reductive approach to trans representation and Mexican culture. I mainly found Emilia Pérez to be boring. Writer-director Jacques Audiard and his collaborators undoubtedly thought they were making a movie that was wild and daring, a fierce challenger to staid norms in multiple respects. Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) is a beleaguered attorney in Mexico City who is recruited by a local drug lord (Karla Sofía Gascón) to procure the medical assistance needed to gender transition and live as her true self, a process that will also necessitate starting over away from the underworld. Missing her children, she eventually works her way back into the home of her former wife (Selena Gomez) under the guise of being a totally different person. It only gets messier from there. The film is staged as a musical, albeit one where the songs indifferently murmured as often as they’re sung. It’s a big swing that rarely works. “El Alegato” and “El Mal” are the partial exceptions, and even those have a strange veneer of snideness to them, like Audiard is a kid who wants to be able to deny he really means it if some bullies stride up and start mocking him for the musical conceit.