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…
After Asako I & II, Hamaguchi’s latest can’t help but feel like something of a step backward into less aesthetically daring filmmaking. “Once Again”, the third…
Bergman Island is an intentionally ephemeral, frictionless bit of meta-fiction, conceptually justifiable but all the more frustrating for it. Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island is, quite literally,…
Titane admirably reconciles opposites and piles on texture and sensation, but ultimately reveals itself far too content to trade only in cliché. What is the role…
Wife of a Spy can be too reserved in stretches, but is ultimately fully invigorated by its monumental conclusion. Though over three decades into his…
The Card Counter takes a similar shape to many of Schrader’s Lonely Man films, but this latest can’t quite overcome the template and thrive on…
Isabella is another bold effort from Piñeiro, and a indication of the direction his particular art is headed. Isabella, the latest feature from Argentine writer-director…
Flag Day’s aesthetic cribbing and histrionic character result in a floundering film that feels too desperate by half. The realm of biography occupies an uneasy…
CODA’s personal storytelling and intelligent subversion of its middlebrow formulae make for a surprisingly affecting viewing experience. The title of Siân Heder’s sophomore feature is…