All Light, Everywhere is a Herculean effort meriting praise, but one in which the parts prove more impressive than the whole. If it hadn’t already…
Jia’s latest is a didactic, propogandist exercise, and something of a punctuating about-face from his best work. In a 2003 essay, Jia Zhangke — now…
Mainstream is a depthless, toothless attempt at satire that was out-of-touch at conception and arrives well past its expiration date. Social media, as captured in…
About Endlessness is a gentler than usual work from Roy Andersson, one that reflects humanity’s ability to create both great beauty and profound suffering. Those complaining…
The Human Voice is a recent high water mark for Almodóvar, a masterful exercise in depicting both interior and exterior surfaces. In the late 1920s, the…
The Father can veer into indulgence, but largely works as a nuanced, compassionate portrait of aging’s ravages. Like the captain of his soul, Anthony — played…
French Exit is an absolute disaster. The end. It takes truly talented people both in front of and behind the camera to make something as abysmal…
Red Post on Escher Street is a powerful, insurrectionary refutation of the larger culture’s nihilistic star-gazing and obliteration of art. Red Post on Escher Street, the…
True Mothers bears Kawase’s familiar textures and ambiance but is hampered by a few too many banal plot beats. Adapted from a 2015 bestseller by Mizuki…
Notturno is at times oddly diffuse, but the harrowing brutality it captures bears undeniable power. The echoes of war reverberate throughout Notturno, a film of unnerving…
The Salt of Tears is a pensive film that finds the aged director again reckoning with notions of parenthood, permanence, and familial legacy. Over the course…
Promising Young Woman does its best to reshape the rape-revenge narrative into a novel form, but it ultimately fails to muster much ambiguity or thorniness. Heavy…
One Night in Miami finds power in its discourse and suggests King’s legitimate directorial chops in moments, but it fails to fully translate its stage origins…
Minari sets up opportunities for deep engagement, but it mostly forgoes those in favor a flattened series of simplistic, bittersweet vignettes as narrative. Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping…
To the Ends of the Earth is a masterwork of adventurous, boundary-less filmmaking. Kiyoshi Kurosawa has been here before. Not to Uzbekistan, where his newest film…
Much like its main character, Another Round is a film firmly situated somewhere between thrill and disappointment. The 19th-century French poet, Charles Baudelaire once wrote, “You…
Nomadland’s delicate attention to storytelling tradition unfortunately gives way to conventionality in the film’s back half, displacing its early promise. Having just taken the top…
Woody Allen’s long-delayed latest isn’t among the director’s most psychologically incisive works, but its minor-key efforts reflect a curious transposition of the director’s old-fashioned absorptions…
Ammonite struggles to summon the visceral potency or emotional depth needed to tell its story. Three years on from Francis Lee’s terrific gay drama, God’s Own…
Fatman remains a bleak bit of dark holiday fun even as it fails to seize on its more potent genre possibilities. Somebody deserves proper credit…