By all accounts, Jane by Charlotte seems to be a therapeutic exercise, but for outside viewers, it’s a languidly paced and essentially shapeless film. Released…
The Outfit is a glossy but empty prestige crime drama that mistakes convolution for compelling plotting. Early in The Outfit, our central protagonist, a mild-mannered…
The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs is a multilayered, intersectional films that resonates far beyond its humble, unassuming narrative. In the annals of films about…
Dear Mr. Brody is powerful in spurts and conceived of in fascinating terms, but Maitland struggles to reconcile his disparate threads into a cohesive whole.…
Great Freedom is a tender celebration of unconventionality, in all its complex and varied incarnations. Paragraph 175 was a provision of the German Criminal Code…
Rock Bottom Riser is a work which regrettably shoehorns haptic political messaging into its otherwise incredible footage. Located somewhere in the Pacific Ocean — a…
Huda’s Salon uses genre trappings as a pretext to gesture at loose connections to reality rather than meaningfully developing anything. The crucial difference between…
Servants is a brutal, efficient affair, unconventional in its dramaturgy but landing with considerable force. Director Ivan Ostrochovský’s Servants begins with a cryptic, murky…
Friends and Strangers has plenty on its mind and is expertly crafted, but it fails to fully coalesce into a cogent whole. Friends and…
Ted K takes a potentially fascinating study and reduces it to a series of madman tropes and Wikipedia summarizing. The name Theodore Kaczynski has, for…
Strawberry Mansion is a vision still worth experiencing, even as its muddled with an ill-considered screenplay rife with tired twee tropes. In 2017, Kentucker Audley…
A Night of Knowing Nothing is a fascinating work of formal and intellectual hybridity. Beautifully dispatched through its entanglement of formal hybridity, Payal Kapadia’s A…
Playground is a penetrating, enveloping, and often brutal portrait of childhood. Playground, Laura Wandel’s first feature, is indeed set on an actual playground, but perhaps…
Compartment No. 6 is a gentle, moving romance that understands the benefit of languor rather than compression in establishing human connection. Single lodgings in a…
Rifkin’s Festival isn’t necessarily major Allen, but it’s a light romp that exists at a fascinating nexus of the director’s career-long pursuits and predilections. There’s…
There’s plenty of aesthetic polish to Futura, but it’s largely mitigated by the bland, reductive didacticism at its aging core. “How do you do,…
Brighton 4th is but the latest example of festival-facing cinema slipping into anonymity under the weight of overly familiarly elements and arcs. There’s a scene…
Sundown finds Franco up to his usual tricks, offering some appeal in his refusal of convention, but little more. Sort of the self-styled bad boy…