BCP-520 action - Integrating the BlackBerry MVS Solution Updated: 2023

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The stock of BlackBerry Ltd (BB) has seen a -2.67% decrease in the past week, with a 4.30% gain in the past month, and a -21.04% decrease in the past quarter. The volatility ratio for the week is 4.29%, and the volatility levels for the past 30 days are at 4.49% for BB. The simple moving average for the past 20 days is 1.76% for BB’s stock, with a -19.15% simple moving average for the past 200 days.

compared to its average ratio and a 36-month beta value of 1.54. Analysts have mixed views on the stock, with 2 analysts rating it as a “buy,” 1 as “overweight,” 8 as “hold,” and 0 as “sell.”

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Blackberries - of which there are more than 2,000 varieties - can be gathered as soon as they ripen from red fruit into dark, plump berries and can be eaten fresh (they only keep for a short time) or preserved into excellent jelly or jam. Wild blackberries are as good as strawberries and raspberries, and sometimes superior in a good year. Their perfume is quite exotic for something that grows so abundantly. Cultivated blackberries are bigger and duller, but Strengthen when cooked.

In earlier years, it was considered unlucky to go brambling (the term used for picking blackberries) after Michaelmas, on September 29. In any case, blackberries are past their best after this time because of the cooler and wetter weather by month's end.

The tech world is buzzing, and it’s all about Artificial Intelligence (AI). This isn’t just tech talk. It’s about how our mobile games have become so smart and fun to play. Imagine playing a game that learns how you play and adapts to challenge you more. This clever technology isn’t just sticking to the gaming world. It’s sneaking into other places you might not expect. So, as we dive into the digital universe, we’ll uncover the spectacular ways AI is not only changing how we play but also how we are finding new, exciting ways to spend free time in our gaming worlds and beyond.

The Rise of Real-time AI Decision Making in Games

Games today are no longer just about flashy graphics or big explosions. It’s about making your jaw drop with surprises and new challenges around every corner. You know those moments in games when you think you’ve outsmarted the computer? With AI, the game is actually thinking, changing its tactics to keep you on your toes. Games like Clash Royale and Mobile Legends have AI that adapts, not just playing harder, but smarter, keeping players coming back for more.

These inventive games create an environment where each play feels fresh and distinctly yours. The adaptable AI ensures that you’re not simply revisiting the same scenarios but are constantly met with new, exciting in-game situations. Every session provides a different flavor, keeping the gameplay vibrant and more interesting than usual.

Personalized Gaming Experiences with AI

AI is not just about making games tricky. It’s about making them feel like they were made just for you. By watching how you play, these smart games change themselves to provide you more of what you like and less of what you don’t. This means that every time you play, you have your own adventure. But you might wonder, is the game spying on you? Game makers are super careful to make sure they respect our privacy while still making games that know just how to thrill us.

All this personalized fun isn’t staying in your living room. It’s zooming into the online world too, making things like live casino games even more exciting and tailored. It’s like having a pocket-sized world where every adventure, big or small, knows just how to make you smile and stay for one more round.

AI’s Influence in Larger Gaming Ecosystems

Even when you put down your mobile and explore other kinds of gaming, like on consoles or PCs, AI is there, making things exciting and fresh. Imagine playing a game on your PlayStation and then having your smart home adapt to make your gaming experience even more mind-blowing. Lights dim, your room cools down, all automatically to match the action on the screen. Even apps on your phone that aren’t games, like ones that help you shop or chat, are using AI to make things easier and more fun.

Nowadays, every online entertainment platform is looking at how AI is used in games, exploring ways they might use it to make your next virtual experience more exciting and lifelike.

NextEnergy Capital's approach to ESG integration won the solar specialist the 'Impact initiative of the year - Europe' award. Environmental Finance speaks to its head of ESG, Giulia Guidi

Environmental Finance: You closed your third institutional solar fund this year at $896 million. What's your investment approach?

Giulia Guidi: NextEnergy Capital was founded in 2007, and we focus exclusively on the solar sector. We are active in investment management, asset management and project development: investing across these three verticals provides significant synergies. We have invested around $3.3 billion across 350 solar investments.

We're a mission-driven organisation, leading the transition to clean energy. Environmental, social and governance (ESG) assessment and risk analysis form an integral part of our investment process.

EF: What does the integration of ESG mean in practice?

GG: Firstly, it means listening to the investment team, and working closely with them to understand their deals' structure and flow. Secondly, it means helping them adjust their processes to take into account additional ESG elements that might represent risk or opportunity. So, following the ESG due diligence process, that might involve preparing action plans and adding ESG clauses into the financial agreement or into the engineering, procurement and construction agreement. It also involves ensuring that ESG costs are allocated to the financial model – if you want to make things happen, you need to allocate capital.

The third aspect is ensuring that the ESG team works closely with the portfolio managers and the asset managers. Once capital has been allocated and actions included in contracts, it's about making sure managers understand what they need to deliver over the lifetime of the asset.

EF: What sort of risks can that approach expose?

GG: To provide an example of a deal we were exploring in Chile: we found there was an indigenous community adjacent to the land occupied by the site. The IFC [International Finance Corporation] Performance Standards that we follow state that we need evidence that indigenous communities have given free, prior informed consent (FPIC).

We were told the FPIC had been obtained, but we were not given the evidence: the documentation setting out the process, how often communication occurred with local people, in what format what language was used and, most importantly, whether the community had been made aware of the potential impacts that could occur, during construction for example.

Eventually, after some back and forth, we found the evidence of FPIC being applied properly. We agreed to work alongside the previous owner with these communities and guarantee continuity of relationships and commitments. So it was a good outcome in the end. We now have a focal point contact in the community, providing them with a grievance mechanism, and making sure they can come to us through a local expert. As an international fund, when you're exposed to social and environmental risk, you always need to make sure you have local insight and local expertise.

EF: The fund is examining the potential for delivering positive biodiversity impact in Chile. How will that work?

GG: Biodiversity is one of the three pillars of our sustainability framework. We strongly believe that, if we manage our assets in a way that improves the natural environment, we increase their value.

Within this particular acquisition, we were required to undertake a biodiversity offset to account for the project's impact. However, we identified potential for net-positive impact, to go beyond what was required by regulation (no net loss). We have been working with our biodiversity partner and a local expert and we identified a nearby area that had similar characteristics, habitat structure, and species that was a perfect fit for the offset plan. By allocating capital and ensuring the asset manager had the capacity for implementing the biodiversity management plan, we hope to deliver the net-positive biodiversity impact.

EF: Your latest fund has been classified as EU SFDR Article 9. Was that an onerous process?

GG: Yes and no! It encouraged us to tidy up our paperwork. But it wasn't too onerous in that regard, particularly for NextPower III, because the ESG integration process was clear since the fund's inception. We had processes, procedures and policies in place, and the policy was already publicly available and signed by the Group's CEO. To have everything else written down as a document was useful to transfer that knowledge to other parts of the business.

Classification also requires you to be clear and transparent about how you contribute to one of the EU taxonomy's environmental objectives. Our business focus is to contribute to climate mitigation, and we have disclosed our carbon emissions avoided since 2019.

We also need to disclose, by June 2023, our Principal Adverse Impacts; that has been more painful because we spent time understanding what they mean for our business, whereby we do not invest in companies, but in assets. It requires disclosure of KPIs such as water or energy consumed, emissions across all three scopes, and also social KPIs such as job creation, diversity or working conditions. We're collecting these KPIs from our contractors and suppliers, including Scope 3 emissions, but, in many cases, these are small companies, with less than 50 people. It's important not to scare them! It's going to be a journey, and we have to be patient.

To summarise, we were prepared for the Article 9 process, but certain aspects are, without a doubt, onerous. Overall, however, it was a good thing to do.

For more information, see: nextenergycapital.com

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There’s been a lot of chatter this year about superhero fatigue. Are audiences tired of all the capes and wham-bam-punch stuff? Or, are critics just tired of writing about them? Despite some prominent flops, it’s looking like we’ll finish the year with three superhero flicks in the box-office top 10. That’s a lot of revenue for a failing genre. Possessing no special powers myself, I don’t know what the future holds. But I do know this: It’s certainly fun to think about superheroes being supplanted by—well, anything else!

Something else has been on my mind this past month, as I’ve noticed certain patterns and repetitions playing out on the big screen: It’s been a year of French courtroom dramas (of which there have been two very good ones), auteur-driven biopics (and in particular, ones that focus on icons’ wives); and soon, a year of hit men. Also, Sandra Hüller is amazing. It is the year of Sandra Hüller. Replace the whole MCU with Sandra Hüller. OK, thank you for your time. Enjoy the list now.

Therapy Dogs

The senior year experience chronicled by Ethan Eng in Therapy Dogs is far from extraordinary. Eng and his fellow small town Canadian teenagers are reckless, bored, awkward, and full of boundless energy. To entertain themselves, they attack lockers, hang from car roofs as they drift in parking lots, and climb up a tall water tower. But in the process, Eng subtly interrogates his cohort’s budding masculinity. The filmmaker paints a vivid, often exhilarating portrait of what it is to be young now—both how it’s unique to this moment and just like any other time.

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Waiting For the Light to Change

Lin Tranh’s debut feature—which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Slamdance—is set at a Michigan lake house. It’s winter, and a group of five 20-somethings—some of whom are old friends—are there for a weeklong vacation. It’s a quiet movie built on mini-dramas that feel big to the people involved. Tran, who is quite gifted at blocking, captures it all with poise and patience, finding beauty in all the fog.

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Hannah Ha Ha

Not much happens in Hannah Ha Ha, the microbudget debut from filmmakers Joshua Pikovsky and Jordan Tetewsky. Hannah (Hannah Lee Thompson), 25 and aimless, spends her summer days working on the family farm, biking around, and giving guitar lessons to children. When her ambitious brother (Roger Mancusi) comes to visit, he urges her to strive for more—and she’s left navigating what she wants with her life. But the film, shot through a hazy, impressionistic filter, is sensorially rich, evoking the smoky smell of evening bonfires, the sticky sweat induced by the thick New England air, and the bright chirp emanating from the green trees. It’s the sort of film that lingers after you’ve seen it, like a memory that could be your own.

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Huesera: The Bone Woman

There have been a lot of Rosemary’s Baby-inspired pregnancy thrillers in accurate years, some interrogating popular notions of motherhood and others flipping the script and putting the baby bump on a man. And of all these films, Huesera: The Bone Woman, the snap-cracking, bone-chilling debut from Mexican director Michelle Garza Cervera, may be the best. Garza Cervera captures the bodily horror and gendered double standards of pregnancy without veering overly didactic. Her tale is inspired by Mexican mythology, and it brims with evocative imagery, potent surreality, and edge-of-your-seat tension.

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Jethica

The bulk of the press around Pete Ohs’s Jethica revolves around the transparent accomplishment of the movie. Ohs has pioneered a filmmaking method in which he acts as his entire crew, allowing him to make aesthetically dynamic features for less money than most shorts. (The bill for Jethica was $10,000.) But as with Ohs’s previous film working in this style, 2021’s Youngstown, you don’t need to grade Jethica on a curve to enjoy it. The film is a stylish New Mexico-set comic noir about a woman who is haunted by the ghost of her stalker. Ohs brings to the film both the playful spirit of a home movie and the rigor and eye of an auteur. He collaborated on the story with his small cast, and they take the film in several surprising directions, with Will Madden (as Kevin) giving an especially standout performance.

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Magic Mike's Last Dance

Like Ocean’s 13, Magic Mike’s third and final chapter may not be the franchise’s best, but general tepid response to it probably has less to do with the movie itself than the incredibly high bar set by the first two installments. In Last Dance, Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) is retired from dancing and earning a living bartending at high-end parties–until he meets Maxandra (Salma Hayek Pinault). She's a rich dilettante who, after procuring Mike’s steamy services, hires him to come to London and put on an extravagant show at a historic theater. The film has its moments as a love story. But Last Dance is at its best as a movie about the artistic process and the complications that arise when making art relies on a wealthy, mercurial benefactor.

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Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part I

The first edition of the seventh Mission Impossible movie is not the franchise’s best. Like all of these movies, it is too long, treats Ethan Hunt’s love interests as comically interchangeable, and is often logically suspect. It also doesn’t quite achieve the enduring suspense of Rogue Nation or Fallout. But what it does do is send Tom Cruise motorcycling off a cliff to catch a moving train, which is among the thrilling action set pieces that make watching this MI a great way to spend a scorching summer afternoon.

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Mutt

Over the course of one sweltering summer day in New York City, Feña (Lío Mehiel), a young trans man, is taken on a meandering journey through the city and their pre-transition past as they’re visited by three different people with whom they have a complex history. It’s a more interesting emotional voyage than a geographical one, but director Vuk Lungulov-Klotz and cinematographer Matthew Pothier make Feña’s New York into a vibrant and lived-in supporting character nonetheless.

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Talk to Me

Danny and Michael Philippou–better known around the Internet as RackaRacka–have crafted the latest A24 horror sensation, with their viral spirit conjuring nightmare, Talk to Me. The film plays with a lot of familiar contemporary horror tropes–even nodding to Get Out–but also pulls deeply from the Philippou brothers’ personal fears, traumas, and Australian upbringing. It’s that specificity, coupled with its vicious, unrelenting energy, that won me over.

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Reality

In 2018, when it was reported that Reality Winner, a 26 year-old Air Force linguist and intelligence contractor, had been sentenced to five years and three months of prison time for leaking a classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election, her case was notable. Winner's sentence was the longest ever imposed in federal court for a leak of government information to the media. Aside from her remarkable name, though, Winner’s story didn’t seem obviously cinematic. But in adapting the transcript of Winner’s FBI interrogation, writer-director Tina Satter–who initially brought the story to the stage–has made a film that manages to be gripping and tense while also feeling mundane and true. In this condensed peek at Winner, you get a sense of her character, motivations, and how the FBI lulled her into confessing. Sydney Sweeney gives a fantastically subtle performance as Winner. Plus, Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis are equally good as a pair of disarmingly affable FBI agents.

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The Pigeon Tunnel

David Cornwell, better known as the late, great spy novelist John le Carré, was famous for extending his fictions beyond his books, and into press appearances. So, you’re never quite sure what’s true and what isn’t in Errol Morris’s new documentary, which finds Morris interviewing the author about his life and work over the course of four days in 2019. The film is built around the themes of deception, betrayal, and performance. Though some may watch it with an eye towards the chess match between interviewer and interviewee, Le Carré is such a captivating and convincing storyteller that I was content to lower my guard and listen. Here, at least, there’s satisfaction in being a dupe.

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Skinamarink

Part of the magic of Kyle Edward Ball’s feature debut is how it manages to feel both fresh and nostalgic. Another part: its slow pace and fuzzy white noise threatens to lure you to sleep, while its dimly glimmering nighttime perspective on a suburban home is the stuff of (millennial) childhood nightmares. Ball has a gift for framing, and is clearly fluent in translating analog horror to the digital age. No wonder his film has been such a viral sensation.

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Past Lives

With Past Lives, Celine Song articulates a familiar feeling—the yearning for an alternative life we might’ve lived—in a way that’s both smart and fresh. Weaved through the film is the Korean concept of “in-yun,” which suggests that fate ties people together through various lifetimes. The lives in question are those of Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Too), who get the first taste of a mutual crush as children—before Nora’s family moves from South Korea to Canada. The film drifts through twelve-year increments in Nora’s life elegantly and artfully, lingering in careful compositions and heightening the characters’ internal states with a detailed sound mix.

But as Nora and Hae Sung grow up and reconnect, Past Lives verges on being overly spare. The script doesn’t tell us much more about these characters than the plot absolutely demands, and as a result I wavered here and there in buying into the continued pull they feel towards each other. Ultimately, a resolution I love intellectually didn’t quite land the way it should’ve emotionally. But it came close!

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Close

Perhaps it’s because of his approach to collaboration that Lukas Dhont is able to so evocatively capture the amplified feelings of early adolescence. Dhont is a keen observer of the way children are socialized out of their early emotional abandon. When 13-year-old best friends Léo and Rémi enter a new year of school, their intimate bond is broken by the growing awareness of how their outward affection is perceived by their peers. Friction mounts, and without the words or self-awareness to address what they’re each feeling, their relationship meets tragic ends. The stomach-hollowing guilt that mingles with grief isn’t shocking; but rather, its power resides in the ways it feels achingly familiar.

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Our Father, The Devil

Ellie Foumbi’s feature debut, Our Father, the Devil, is a French-set drama about an African refugee’s encounter with a Catholic priest who she believes to be a warlord who slaughtered her family. Yeah, heavy stuff. But Foumbi pulls it off—on a miniscule budget, mind you—by leaning into the complexity with immense sensitivity, empathy, and passion.

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When You Finish Saving The World

Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut is, more or less, exactly what you’d hope for from the veteran actor: smart, wry, thoughtful, and personal. In adapting his own audiobook (based, to some extent, on his own romantic history), Eisenberg turns to Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard to play a high-minded social worker and her vapid teen musician son. Moore, in particular, gives a sterling performance—channeling a vein of lofty, humorless do-gooderism that can be off-putting as it is well-meaning.

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The Adults

When Michael Cera’s Eric returns to his very gray upstate New York hometown, his plan to limit his time with his two siblings is thwarted by his compulsion to be the best poker player around. As his stay lengthens, he’s forced to confront the strain in his relationship with his sister Rachel (an outstanding Hannah Gross) and the hurt his absence has caused his other sister, Maggie (Sophia Lillis, ditto). Writer-director Dustin Guy Deffa isn’t revolutionizing the sibling drama by any means, but his characters are so specific, funny, and sad, that you’ll want to ante up.

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Master Gardener

When planting seeds, knowing what they’ll become doesn’t spoil the wonder of seeing them actually grow into that thing. The same goes for the films of Paul Schrader. Master Gardener is the final installment of his “man in a room” trilogy, and it follows a similar playbook to the previous two, First Reformed and The Card Counter. In his new entry, a troubled, solitary man (in this case, a stoic Joel Edgerton) journals and broods, dedicating himself to a monastic craft, all the while seeming poised to erupt in violence. This formula is a successful one for Schrader, who’s of course returned to it many times throughout his robust career. Without giving too much away, there is a surprise in the way this particular edition unfolds. Though by no means cheery, Master Gardener blossoms into something relatively hopeful, open to the possibility of redemption and admiring of its beauty.

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The League

Sam Pollard’s look back at baseball’s Negro leagues is informative, wide-ranging, and often quite moving. With rich period footage and spirited oral accounts, Pollard transports you back to the days before integration–which, the film reminds you, wasn’t all that long ago. Pollard explains what–and who–kept baseball segregated for so long. But rather than simply viewing the Negro leagues in relation to the MLB, Pollard depicts what made the Negro leagues special in their own right, too–from the kinetic style of play to the vital communality it fostered.

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Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

I’ll admit being less enamored by the new Spider-Verse film than many critics. Clever as its meta jokes about superhero fatigue may have been, they didn’t quite ease my genuine superhero fatigue, and I never truly locked into this story and its emotional stakes. But it’s hard to deny the feat of what the second Spider-Verse’s extensive team of creators pulled off. The film had three writers, three directors, and an entire multiverse worth of certified in each department. Plus, the animation is dazzling, the villain (voiced by Jason Schwartzman) a walking work of art; the whole thing bursts with ideas and style.

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M3GAN

Forget identifying buses or street signs. Your response to M3GAN could function as its own CAPTCHA: if you didn’t have fun, you’re probably a robot. Blumhouse marketed M3GAN as a horror movie, and yes, there are jump scares and bursts of violence to back that up. But there’s something so uncanny, and consistently hilarious, about the way this luxury AI doll—who’s played physically by Amie Donald—moves. Whether M3GAN was prancing through the woods like a demon or dancing in a hallway, she had my theater keeling over in a good sort of pain.

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Sanctuary

Of all the single-location movies the pandemic has wrought—and there have been a lot—Sanctuary may be the best. The movie is set in a magnificent hotel suite that plays home to Hal (Christopher Abbott), a submissive and ill-equipped heir to a hotel empire. But the wallpaper and carpeting aren’t what make the movie great, ornate and visually dynamic as they are. Sanctuary, which was written by Micah Bloomberg and directed by Zachary Wigon, gets its juice from the topsy-turvy power dance between Hal and his dominatrix, Rebecca (an electric Margaret Qualley). Smart, surprising, and wonderfully kinky, it’s about as fun as a modern romcom gets.

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Rotting in the Sun

In this verite-style dark comedy, an abundantly depressed Sebastian Silva (director of Tyrel and Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus) encounters the influencer Jordan Firstman at a nude gay beach resort. Having just watched Crystal Fairy, the sunnier Firstman thinks it’s fate—the universe telling them to collaborate on a project he’s been developing. The movie, though, has something else in mind, taking a wild and unexpected turn that transforms the film and lets other actors shine.

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R.M.N.

Romanian auteur Cristian Mungiu’s latest drama can be an unbearably frustrating watch. I mean that as a compliment. The film is frustrating for how methodically and realistically it hits a potent nerve. When a bakery in an insular, economically struggling Transylvanian village hires a few Sri Lankan workers, the villagers take their long-boiling frustrations–and prejudices–out on the men and the bakery. Mungiu expertly shows how global socioeconomic forces and rhetoric find ugly root locally, culminating in an impressively staged and acted 17-minute town hall scene and a very surprising conclusion.

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Alcarràs

Carla Simón’s sophomore feature is a portrait of a peach-harvesting family in present-day Catalonia that faces the end of an era: their orchard is about to be destroyed to make way for the construction of solar panels. It’s the sort of conflict that’s usually framed in stark good-versus-evil terms in movies. But what’s so refreshing about Alcarras is that Simón doesn’t judge so much as observe, humanizing—but not lionizing—the people caught in the current of progress.

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Sick of Myself

Is attention-getting an art or a disease? In Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli’s utterly absurd, dryly hilarious debut feature, it’s a little bit of both. When her artist boyfriend gains a dash of notoriety for his stolen furniture sculptures, Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) takes an alarming dose of a dangerous Russian drug—in a deliberate attempt to attract sympathy–causing her face to break out in lesions. Borgli, whose short films hit a similar caustic tone and clinical aesthetic, is a master of threading the line between body humor and body horror, between grotesquery and beauty, a cringe and a cackle.

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Infinity Pool

You have to admire Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgaard for their transparent willingness to go there. In Brandon Cronenberg’s third feature, what happens during a vacation at a luxury resort quickly makes the drama at a White Lotus hotel feel tame. There’s enough graphic—and hallucinatory—sex, drugs, and violence that the film just skirted an NC-17 rating. Exiting the theater, my own brain felt as though it had been chemically altered. After the come down, though, the ideas Cronenberg raises about identity, self-destruction, and tourism stuck with me—though, admittedly, perhaps less so than the wonderful absurdity of Mia Goth sitting on the hood of a moving car, taunting Skarsgaard’s James, and throwing fried chicken at him.

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Passages

Paris is unbelievably alluring in Ira Sachs’s latest. Love triangles are not. But as blatantly narcissistic and frustratingly erratic as Franz Rogowski’s Tomas is as the focal point of this movie’s, you kind of get it. Tomas is a force, fearless in fashion, bold on the dance floor, and quick to act. He’s the type of character who probably reminds you of someone, but feels singular nonetheless.

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Beau Is Afraid

Ari Aster’s latest is an early front-runner for most polarizing movie of the year. You’ll either get down with Aster’s sense of humor and submit to this absurd, punishing epic of mommy issues and paralyzing anxiety, or you’ll be alienated and put off by it. I erred more in the former camp—admiring the film’s abundance of detail, Aster’s visual imagination, and, yes, all the puerile humor. Aster’s use of a certain Mariah Carey track alone pays off the three-hour runtime.

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Cash Cow

Years from now, if movie theaters put together pandemic-themed programs, Cash Cow should be the centerpiece. Matt Barats’s one-man, no-budget docu-essay-comedy is far and away the best film I’ve seen in which COVID looms large in the background. Here’s the story: Just before the world shut down, Barats, a standout comedian in Brooklyn’s alt scene, was on the verge of a breakthrough. He’d just starred in a Domino’s Pizza commercial, and was going to receive a big pay day once it aired. The lockdown, though, threw everything into flux, and the commercial idled. As Barats waited for his cash cow, he drove around the country, camping, subsisting on soggy pineapple, and learning about Mormons. The film he made is packed with lots of laughs, beautiful fall foliage, and several perfect unexpected twists and turns.

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Earth Mama

Savannah Leaf’s feature debut isn’t a heart-wrenching character study so much as it is a heart-prodding one–its drama and horror mostly unfolding in a slow, glum haze. Leaf’s subject is Gia (Tia Nomore), a young Black mother of two in the Bay who is constantly swimming against the current of the system, her responsibilities, and her past and present mistakes. As she recovers from drug addiction, her two children are stuck in foster care and she struggles to prove that she is equipped to take care of them again. Meanwhile, she’s pregnant with a third child and struggles against doing what she thinks she should: provide it up for adoption. The film occasionally veers into the surreal, but even when it does, it feels all too real.

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Tori and Lokita

It’s hard to flat-out love a movie as bleak and tragic as the Dardenne brothers’ latest, but it’s even harder not to be deeply affected by it. Tori and Lokita follows a pair of African migrant children trying to survive and stick together, in modern Belgium. It's about how they are failed by bureaucracy, taken advantage of by the underworld, and ignored by everyone else (implicating viewers, including all those who will skip this film because of its heaviness). The 11 year-old Tori and 17-year-old Lokita are forced to operate well beyond their years. In playing them, Pablo Schils (Tori) and Joely Mbundu (Lokita) achieve the same feat. Their performances are subtle and convincing, touching and gripping; crucially, they imbue these characters with the vivid humanity society denies them.

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Blackberry

For as long as I can remember, we’ve been inundated with stories of guys inventing things in garages that will “change the world.” The beginning of Matt Johnson’s Blackberry resembles one of those stories, albeit with a quirkier tone and more jagged texture. A group of nerds, led by Mike Lazaridis (a pitch-perfect Jay Baruchel) and his bombastic best friend Doug (Johnson), has created a device–a phone… that does computing!–that the world isn’t ready for. They’re not taken seriously, until a raging, recently fired businessman named Jim Balsillie (a movie-stealing Glenn Howerton) comes on board. He bluffs, he yells, he whips the ragtag group into shape, and pretty soon their device catches fire. (Remember?)

It changes the world, yes. But what’s so beautiful about Johnson’s film–in addition to all the dynamic performances and moments of hilarity–is that in spending the final act on the company’s fall, the director shows how ephemeral these sorts of products are. Blackberry isn’t a film that valorizes business, nor is it one that sinks its teeth all that deep. Instead, it’s a movie that knocks wild ambition down a peg. No matter how big these men’s invention gets, they always seem quite small, destined to be munched up by bigger world-changers.

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You Hurt My Feelings

The inherent problem with giving feedback—especially to loved ones—is that everyone wants to be told they’re special and no one wants to be lied to. Often, of course, the two things are mutually exclusive, creating a tricky situation—one with the potential for both good drama and hearty laughs. Nicole Holofcener’s latest film achieves both. The film comes at the question of how honest we should be about others’ work from many angles. But the central conflict occurs when Beth (Julia Louis Dreyfus) overhears her husband Don (Tobias Menzies) tell a friend that he doesn’t like her debut novel. Light yet vulnerable, You Hurt My Feelings might be my favorite movie Holofcener has made. (I swear I’m not saying that to be nice!)

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The Civil Dead

With The Civil Dead, Clay Tatum and Whitmer Thomas have made one of my favorite comedies in… *thinks*... a long time! The film, written by the pair and directed by Tatum, finds Thomas playing a ghost only Tatum’s character can see. But this ain’t your average haunting. Rather than explore trauma or evoke fear, this is a ghost story about friendship–and how being a friend can sometimes get a little annoying. If those sound like small stakes, well, maybe they are. But the key to a good buddy movie is a good hang, and The Civil Dead delivers that and then some. Enormously funny and wonderfully idiosyncratic, it’s a very promising debut.

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A Thousand and One

It’s abundantly evident from watching A Thousand and One that A.V. Rockwell, who directed the film, grew up in New York—and has both genuine love and deserved derision for her hometown. Rockwell’s feature debut follows Inez (a revelatory Teyana Taylor) from the mid-'90s, when she gets out of Rikers, to the present. As she tries to rebuild her life in Harlem, with a son she smuggled out of state custody, the threat of being discovered and the pressure of providing for him large. Rockwell’s character study highlights the ways people define a place, and how a place rubs off on people. A Thousand and One is clear-eyed about the toll of gentrification without being overly sentimental for a more vibrant, but still imperfect past incarnation of the city. In totality, the movie finds great beauty and pathos in a nuanced, unexpected, and drawn-out sort of tragedy.

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Priscilla

If Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis didn’t impress upon you the disturbing age gap between Elvis and his eventual wife, Priscilla Presley, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla surely will. When the pair met, Elvis was 24 and Priscilla was 14—and Coppola’s film makes blatantly visible the stark contrast of those two numbers. Cailee Spaeny looks like a child, while Jacob Elordi is an imposing and powerful man. Over its 113-minute runtime, the film makes you sit in the discomfort of the discrepancy—not just of age, but of power—without ever losing sight of Priscilla as a person. The initial excitement of an impossible teenage fantasy coming true is palpable, as is the ultimately mundane and objectifying reality.

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Barbie

The idea to make a Barbie movie did not come from Greta Gerwig, but the miracle of Gerwig’s Barbie is that it feels like it did—that Gerwig wanted to use this doll to tell this story rather than having been asked (by Mattel and Margot Robbie) to write a story for this doll. That’s mostly because of the creative exuberance infused into the film’s bright pink, highly musical fabric. But it’s also because Barbie–with her plasticity and evolving symbolism–is perfectly cast in this surreal, doll’s-eye romp about the impossible double standards inherent to life as a woman in a capitalist patriarchy. Besides being passionate in its satire, Barbie is one of the funniest studio comedies of the past few years, highlighted by Ken’s patriarchal awakening and Barbie’s run-in with Mattel executives. It might rank even higher on this list if not for one shameless element: all the naked product placement for a certain car company.

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Godland

I’m worried that if you haven’t seen Godland—and chances are, you haven’t—because almost anything I mention about the film will make you less likely to want to see it. It’s starless, set in the late 19th century, and takes a nuanced look at colonialism, religion, and mortality. See what I mean? But please, don’t be deterred. Hlynur Pálmason’s third feature is much less forbidding than the Icelandic elements he captures so breathtakingly in his third feature. This story of a young Danish priest’s harrowing journey to a remote region of Iceland is stunningly photographed, occasionally quite funny, and ultimately one of the few movies that actually warrants adjectives like “sublime” and “epic.” Herzog fans rejoice.

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Anatomy of a Fall

Little is certain in Justine Triet’s Palm d’Or-winning courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Fall. Least of all how the death at the center of the movie occurred. Instead, the film makes the case that truth is inherently blurry; that it looks different depending on your vantage; that a marriage, in particular, is full of contradictions and messy complexities. These aren’t radical ideas, but Triet—with the help of an outstanding cast, led by Sandra Hüller—presents them so compellingly and, well, honestly, that that doesn’t much matter.

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Saint Omer

There is so much happening beneath the surface in Saint Omer, documentarian Alice Diop’s narrative debut. In depicting the trial of Laurence Coly, a woman charged with killing her 15-month-old daughter, as seen through the eyes of Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist and literary scholar, Diop constructs a meta-narrative about true crime spectatorship, cultural dislocation, myth, and motherhood. Where the French justice system tries to explain—and ultimately condemn—Coly for her actions, Diop works in the mode of observation. She’d rather raise interesting questions than seek simple answers. Leaning on long, expertly composed takes, she emphasizes the richness and inscrutability of human faces. Maybe we can’t ever truly understand each other, but there are ways to try.

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Oppenheimer

Like the man himself, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour-long J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic has a lot on its mind. Among other things, Nolan is interested in Oppenheimer’s contradictions, genius, inscrutability, and rationalizations–how the romance of a momentous achievement can blind ostensibly well-meaning people to their inevitable disastrous consequences. It’s a testament, then, to the potency of Nolan’s filmmaking–as well as Ludwig Goransson’s pulse-quickening score and Cillian Murphy’s magnetic performance–that Oppenheimer feels propulsive throughout. As a bonus, it will be hard for any movie this year to top the spectacle of the Trinity Test.

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Fremont

British Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalalia’s Fremont moves slowly through carefully composed black and white frames. The film follows Donya (a wonderful Anaita Wali Zada), a 20-something refugee and former translator for the American military, as she tries to get by in Northern California. She works in a small fortune cookie-making factory, sees a quirky psychiatrist to help with her insomnia, and withstands the harsh judgment of her fellow refugee neighbors. As quiet and contemplative as the movie is, though, it is equally funny and warm, full of terrific characters and absurd situations.

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The Holdovers

To those who watch movies from the '70s and say, “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” I provide you Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. It's a character-driven dramatic comedy that not only captures the period’s filmic sound and texture—it even employs a vintage rating card. But Payne’s latest isn’t mere pastiche, and it is hardly sentimental. The film follows a group of boys at a prestigious New England boarding school who have the distinct displeasure of spending winter break on campus with everyone’s least favorite teacher, Mr. Hunham (Paul Giamatti, at his best). Or, that’s the film’s setup anyway. But David Hemingson’s superb script takes a number of sharp turns that allow it to shed layers and continuously move, satisfyingly hitting notes both high and low. Miraculously, Dominic Sessa (as a student named Angus Tully) and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (as the school cook, Mary Lamb) match Giamatti every step of the way.

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How to Blow Up a Pipeline

If How to Blow Up a Pipeline was a pure popcorn thriller, it would still be one hell of a time at the movies. But Daniel Goldhaber’s follow-up to his 2018 camgirl horror flick, Cam, harnesses its edge-of-your-seat adrenaline for admirably audacious ends: To urge viewers to rethink what modern eco-activism should look like. Without becoming didactic about its politics, the film creates a context in which attacking oil infrastructure is a heroic act. It’s a subversive piece of pop entertainment, one that riffs on cinematic classics while having an eye to the future. It’s probably the film most likely to make you say “Hell yeah!” upon exiting the theater.

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Showing Up

Sometimes a great piece of art smacks you in the face, other times its effect creeps up on you. Kelly Reichardt’s films tend to work in the latter mode, and Showing Up—one of her best—is no exception. The film follows Lizzy (Michelle Williams), a dour sculptor who works at a small Portland arts college, in the leadup to a new exhibition. Showing Up captures the realities of a working-class art-making process—the distractions, frustrations, and sporadic victories—better than any movie I can recall. Williams and Hong Chau (who plays her landlord and a fellow artist) are both better here than in their respective Oscar-nominated turns from last year. A pleasurable as the bulk of the movie is, the quietly transcendent ending is what moved me from a place of simmering enjoyment to full-boiled enthrallment.

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Asteroid City

Asteroid City finds Wes Anderson at the height of his powers, juggling a constellation of stars, dual sides of postwar America, and several layers of fiction. Yes, the director somehow pulls it all off with his usual visual flair and wit, but also with a genuine sense of lostness and wonder. Miraculously, it's both disaffected and deeply affecting. I’ve watched it twice now, and it was on the second viewing that my modest appreciation for it turned to full-on adoration. Which is to say: If Asteroid City didn’t quite hit home emotionally on the first viewing, provide it another shot.

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Killers of the Flower Moon

Martin Scorsese’s 27th feature film has much in common with his work that preceded it: Killers of the Flower Moon is a big rise-and-fall American crime story, full of violence and betrayal, all told from the perspective of the bad guys. But this particular variation comes with the highest level of difficulty. In part, that’s because of who the victims are, and also in part it’s because of the specifics of the story (an outstandingly dim protagonist and a marriage that doesn’t always make sense). That Scorsese pulls it off isn’t necessarily surprising—this is one of the living greats after all—but that he does so with such humor, awareness, feeling, and grace is truly special.

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