Nomad is a passionate and heartfelt work, but Herzog’s foregrounded presence sometimes distracts from film’s more mystical ambitions. In January 1989, the legendary British adventurer, writer,…
Iannucci’s latest isn’t quite a natural fit for the director, but he still mostly succeeds by injecting his trademark levity into the spirited core of…
Almereyda’s Experimenter-style mode is not as organic of a fit for the often compelling but ultimately overburdened Tesla. Having risen to renewed prominence on the indie…
Hirokazu Kore-eda feels distinctly uninterested in his own material here, a sentiment sure to be echoed by audiences. Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda has consistently shown an affinity…
The director’s latest work is built on quiet moments of spiritual and professional reflection, a Fellini-esque inward gaze at the artist and his art. Originally…
Liberté is gorgeous and confounding, a Brechtian presentation of passion, tedium and perversion. Albert Serra’s Liberté continues the director’s penchant for placing human rot, literal and metaphorical,…
Kelly Reichardt’s latest treads familiar thematic territory, but her minimalist leanings here lend toward something altogether more expansive. First Cow is a film of beginnings…
Bacurau’s initial promise of a raucous genre celebration ultimately devolves into a shallow approximation of those pleasures. There’s an undeniable sensuousness to the surfaces of Bacurau:…
The Wild Goose Lake is a thrilling neon noir and incisive commentary on the degradation that comes with rapid economic boon. There’s a particularly pleasing synesthetic…
The Whistlers makes the most of its basic parts, tying some nifty knots and glossing up proceedings, but it fails to offer anything memorable. Corneliu Porumboiu’s The…
Vitalina Varela is a profound humanistic effort, conceptually bold and featuring compositions of affecting beauty. Winner of last year’s Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival,…
Young Ahmed is an misguided effort in the Dardennes’ usually rock solid filmography. Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne have created a corpus of films strong enough to…
Beanpole is a rending vision of aftermath, conjuring moments of real beauty from misery. War films have been with us as long as film has been…
The Traitor operates as both biopic and mob flick, reveling in the murky complexity of its central figure. A biopic of Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta (played…
Bonello’s attempt to meld cultural commentary with a historical consideration of colonialist sins is lost amid a commitment to tension-building. Voodoo, as represented in Zombi Child,…
From its title alone, Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life concerns itself with subjects that cinema often struggles to depict: the twin blossomings of consciousness and conscience. In…
The instantly ravishing Portrait of a Lady on Fire is Céline Sciamma’s grandest film to date, even if its story feels somewhat familiar. Winner of the Queer Palm…
Having recently explored heroin-heavy, vagabond living in Heaven Knows What (2014) and a bank robber’s desperation in Good Time (2017), directors Benny and Josh Safdie glimpse a different class of…
Agnès Varda’s documentaries have often incorporated her immediate periphery – friends (Jane B. by Agnès V.), family (Uncle Yanco), neighbors (Diary of a Pregnant Woman, Daguerreotypes),…
Noah Baumbach doesn’t like risk. Even when his films are impressive — and they often are — their formal parameters remain fairly limited. His collaborations…