Divine Love is a frustrating, contemptuous affair that ultimately builds little depth into its religio-dystopic premise. Gabriel Mascaro’s Divine Love comes at a timely moment for…
Jungleland is a deeply familiar film that injects little energy or originality into its template narrative. Max Winkler’s Jungleland follows bare-knuckle boxer Lion (Jack O’Connell) and…
Proxima is a markedly incurious film, happy to diminish all complexity of its female protagonist. Alice Winocour’s Proxima is a film constructed around a single premise:…
Fire Will Come retains a kind of documentary-based fascination even as it becomes clear capturing the titular blaze was the only real objective here. Oliver Laxe‘s…
Shithouse marks a promising debut from writer-director Cooper Raiff, effectively capturing the awkwardness and insecurity of the collegiate experience. One’s reaction to the coming-of-age dramedy…
The Wolf of Snow Hollow is yet further, winning proof of Jim Cummings’ singular artistic voice. Much like his debut feature, 2018’s Thunder Road, director-writer-actor Jim…
Swanberg’s latest represents a savvy and mature return to his early-career mode of filmmaking. Fifteen years after his first feature, Joe Swanberg is back where…
Modern-day Cuba, as documented in Hubert Sauper’s latest foray into political ethnography, is a third-world island marked distinctly by the stamp of first-world capitalism. Co-existing…
Centigrade doesn’t do much as a character-driven chamber piece, but it’s served well by an attention to detail and the ability to build genuine tension. In…
Spree represents a futuristic cinema, engaging both new media modes and psychologies of the digital age in a vision both appealing and deeply frightening. Spree is…
Words on Bathroom Walls is emotionally manipulative and easy to mock but has moments that are genuinely affecting. Broadly speaking, film has not exactly been kind…
It’s a bad sign that the only person attempting anything in The Tax Collector is also delivering a racist caricature as performance. David Ayer isn’t…
Ciro Guerra opts for transcription over translation, and in doing so, loses the allegorical power of Coetzee’s novel. Ciro Guerra’s Waiting for the Barbarians is…
Yes, God, Yes doesn’t say anything new about oppressive evangelical traditions but is elevated thanks to Dyer’s wonderful comic performance. Yes, God, Yes will be particularly…
She Dies Tomorrow is a fever-dreamy reflection of modern existential anxieties. Rodney Ascher’s 2015 documentary The Nightmare follows multiple subjects that have experienced bouts of sleep paralysis,…
The Ross Brothers’ latest is a uniquely heady, tonally dexterous work that operates at the intersection of documentary and fiction. An official selection of this…
Lewis Klahr’s latest example of collage cinema is his most explicitly political, and perhaps creative, yet. Over several decades of consistent output, collage artist Lewis…
Like numerous other films from Mainland China this year, Derek Tsang’s Better Days has traveled a troubled path from production to the screen: It was…
I Was at Home, But… is an admirable but obnoxious examination of the nature of artifice. At right around the halfway mark of writer-director Angela Schanelec’s latest…
Weathering with You is a heartwarming and delicately animated escapist fantasy finds hope in hardscrabble realities. Makoto Shinkai has already proved himself an idiosyncratic anime filmmaker…