Erudite and playful and moving, The Worst Person in the World is brimming with ideas and feeling, and executed with the touch of a master storyteller. First…
Introduction bears a fitting title, as it feels like something distinctly new within Hong’s self-reflexive oeuvre. It’s somewhat reductive to observe that Hong Sang-soo, so…
Belle as a leaden mess of abject sentimentality and perfunctory technological tedium. If there’s anything to be gleaned from Belle, it’s this: Mamoru Hosoda has…
Memoria is another masterwork from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a slow unfurling of personal and nationals pasts that challenges and entrances in equal measure. Frequent In Review Online…
The moving Parallel Mothers puts on full display Almodovar’s facility with wrangling the controlled chaos of narrative into a coherent whole. If Pedro Almodóvar’s pandemic short…
Licorice Pizza continues Anderson’s interest in how personal histories are assimilated into myth, and largely does so compellingly, but ultimately still feels more lopsided than the…
Dumont’s recent shift into outright absurdity and his exuberant mistrust of form is most thrillingly realized in France, and particularly in Seydoux’s remarkable performance. Bruno…
Red Rocket is an intentionally bad vibes experience, and while the film’s messaging is resolutely simplistic, it’s all kept afloat by Simon Rex’s year’s-best performance. It’s…
Benedetta is as bawdy as any Verhoeven on paper, but the director’s uncharacteristically meek directorial approach renders the film far tamer than it should be.…
Drive My Car is the latest proof that Ryusuke Hamaguchi is thinking much bigger than most of his contemporaries. Ryusuke Hamaguchi has fast become one of…
C’mon C’mon is a distinctly inauthentic, contrived viewing experience more likely to have viewers chanting “go away, go away.” Next only to dead wives, doomed love…
The Power of the Dog gains considerable power in its back half, but Campion ultimately leaves too much simply twist in the wind. The narrative of…
Bad Luck Banging borders on the didactic, but smartly allows its archetypes to conflate and contradict, turning its sketchbook designs into a platform for equal-opportunity…
Zeros and Ones’ study of violence and digitality is the latest proof that Ferrara thrives in the spaces between knuckleheaded obviousness and total abstraction. A…
What Do We See, in its rejection of atomized systems of characterization and narrative, offers a kinder, more free-spirited form of cinema. Alexandre Koberidz’s first…
There’s very little to distinguish Belfast as a work of art, a film that uses its dramatic and formal elements only in service of feel-good platitudes.…
Larrain is given massive assists courtesy of Stewart and Spencer’s A/V artists, but everyone is let down time and again by the film’s wildly unsubtle script. With…
The Souvenir: Part II plays out largely as protracted epilogue, a fumbling, detached work that negates the first film’s powerful ending. Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 1778 painting…
Obayashi’s final film is an apporpriately madcap, delirious submersion into the very heart of cinema, and is an articulation of its power in a despairing…
The French Dispatch is the latest Wes Anderson film to be utterly encumbered by the director’s propeller-beanie twee and flattened storytelling chops. For better or for…