Honorable Mention: Leave it to Sean Baker to direct poverty porn. After the much-celebrated The Florida Project, a fantastical if somewhat aestheticised survey of…
#21. Hong Sang-soo’s films generally fall somewhere between melodrama and farce, but to classify them as such is to no doubt essentialize them as…
#5. Premiering in competition at 2020’s Berlinale and winner of its jury Teddy Award (for LGBT cinema), Tsai Ming-liang’s Days very much continues and deepens…
The Hand of God is a softer but no more subdued effort from Sorrentino, still rife with flourish but with a more personal core than…
More poodle than Wolf, Biancheri’s film is a frustratingly tame and conservative treatment of potentially fascinating material. Ten years ago, a film like Wolf would…
Neither didactic nor restrained, Ascension is a mesmerizing film that uncovers the face of a nation’s stoic realism. Civilization’s pursuit of unfettered growth has often clashed…
Bad Luck Banging borders on the didactic, but smartly allows its archetypes to conflate and contradict, turning its sketchbook designs into a platform for…
Clifford the Big Red Dog is vapid, conceptually nihilistic, and utterly soulless “entertainment.” When moviegoers go to the movies, they typically do so with certain…
Like so many pastiches before it, the thematically unfocused Dead & Beautiful succumbs to its own vacuous sheen. In the metropolitan center of Taipei, five…
The Deep House is a claustrophobic, otherworldly bit of throwback horror that welcomingly pivots away from modern, flattened genre sensibilities. Forget indie insufferability: it seems…
At the Ready engaged necessary discourse, but unfortunately leaves its most fertile sites for interrogation unexplored. In light of the surging unpopularity of its subject…
The Eyes of Tammy Faye indulges the very spectacle it supposedly interrogates, betraying its aims and offering only a flattened take on its titular subject.…
To make an effective political film, one frequently turns to documentary as the best medium for truth; it’s hard to deny in exemplars of…
“It’s your show I’m cancelling, not you,” remarks one character to another in The Accusation, encapsulating, intentionally or otherwise, the thorny politics at the…
Flag Day’s aesthetic cribbing and histrionic character result in a floundering film that feels too desperate by half. The realm of biography occupies an…
CODA’s personal storytelling and intelligent subversion of its middlebrow formulae make for a surprisingly affecting viewing experience. The title of Siân Heder’s sophomore feature…
Nine Days angles toward profundity, but is a largely maudlin, intellectually bankrupt genre-exercise of self-congratulation. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, prisoners sit facing a…
Kandisha doesn’t quite rise to the directors’ past heights, but remains both riveting and probing in its own right. With horror, thriller, and the…