11. Helen Keller is one of those historical figures whose legacy has been so white-washed by history that it has become a kind of cornerstone,…
#12. Oft-explained as an homage to the mechanical body horror of David Cronenberg, Julia Ducournau’s surprise Palme d’Or winning follow-up to Raw is too often defined…
#13. “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” Emblazoned on trademark,…
#14. To talk about C.W. Winter and Anders Edström’s The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) is to talk about its…
#15. When the long-rumored director’s cut of Zack Snyder’s aborted 2017 feature Justice League emerged on HBO Max this March, it was, upon release, among…
#6. Visual rhymes preside over the three, tenuously interlinked sections of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, drawing parallels across earthbound stories that have the…
#7. Perhaps one of the greatest movie miracles Steven Spielberg has ever pulled off is in overcoming the Ansel of it all in his remake…
#8. Perhaps the most memed film of the year (give or take Annette), M. Night Shyamalan’s Old challenged and beguiled audiences in equal measure, becoming…
#9. Cristi Puiu’s fifth fiction feature, Malmkrog, represents a further entrenchment in the oeuvre of perhaps the Romanian New Wave’s most dedicated portrayer of claustrophobic…
#10. You could be forgiven for suspecting that a movie starring Nicolas Cage as a reclusive, world-renowned chef searching for his kidnaped, beloved truffle-hunting pig…
#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 its…
#4. Bruno Dumont’s France is “about” the contemporary media landscape in the way that Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is “about” the 15th-century judgments…
#3. Of all the innumerable gambits and devices that Ryūsuke Hamaguchi deploys in his immense Drive My Car, his particular use of language may be the…
#2. Memoria opens with a sound; booming, leaden, ominous, a sound that shakes you in your seat and fades as quickly as it came. Like…
#1. For something so ostensibly classical, it still feels like you’re smacking your head against a wall of varying superficial shorthand terms when trying to…
Misguided as female-driven blockbuster and unappealing as actioner, The 355 offers little to chew on. There is something rather refreshing in the fact that new action…
Although it doesn’t quite stick the landing, See For Me is still a precise, no-frills genre exercise that makes the most of its limited budget and…
The King’s Man is a tale of two films, neither of which belong in the other’s world. Every year, there’s at least one. In the odd…
Return to Hogwarts is the latest Harry Potter product to trade in empty nostalgia for sole the purpose of propping up the money-making franchise. As…
And with that, our Top Films of 2021 coverage comes to a close, with our five favorites talked up below. All films, even if we…