Happening is a film of intense linearity and physicality, but it leaves one wishing for a film that had perhaps widened its scope for more…
After Noé’s career peak with Climax, Lux Æterna represents a disappointing return to the director’s haphazard stylistic tics and overindulgent edgelord sensibilities. Like fellow provocateurs Lars von…
Saturday Fiction is a formally enterprising and experimental work that delivers as an exercise in digital esotericism. Set amidst the spy games of Allied and…
Vortex is as viscerally bracing as Noe’s previous efforts, but here also cut through with a new, impressive level of restraint. It’s become somewhat typical…
Petite Maman is both Sciamma’s most intimate and epic work, a gently profound fable about youth’s uneasy passage into adulthood. Celine Sciamma’s characters have always existed…
Despite its workaday subject matter, Cow is still recognizably an Andrea Arnold film, mostly for the better. Depending on your perspective — and depending on…
The Girl and the Spider is a bit of a symphony of sights and sounds that occasionally plays like too much of a recapitulation of The…
Squirrels to the Nuts may not rise to the level of salvaged masterpiece, but it breezily reasserts the legacy and artistry of Peter Bogdanovich. The rediscovery…
Nitram is the worst sort of armchair investigation — one that reopens wounds it doesn’t bother to heal. The True History of the Kelly Gang was…
Even by their standards, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Tori and Lokita is a relatively to-the-point affair. Set in an unnamed Belgian city, it follows a…
Ahed’s Knee is an expressionistic work of subjective ruptures and discontinuities that attempts to give complete satisfaction to human reason. If Nadav Lapid is a provocateur,…
There’s an appealing, lulling rhythm to Kogonada’s second feature, but few of its philosophical inquires are met with worthy responses. There is much to savor…
Fabian bears perhaps a thin thesis, but Graf remains a sly evangelist for and director of the dignity of disorder. Early on in Fabian: Going…
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…