Great Freedom is a tender celebration of unconventionality, in all its complex and varied incarnations. Paragraph 175 was a provision of the German Criminal Code enacted…
Lingui is a middlebrow arthouse trifle that offends in its simplicity and deference to narrative convenience. Lingui, The Sacred Bonds, the latest from Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh…
Black Medusa is cast with a certain austere beauty, but is an otherwise empty exercise in bland, utilitarian form. In a thankless role as one of…
There Will Be No More Night is an intelligent, nightmarish portrait of war as first-person shooter and interrogation of how we consume visual information in our…
Katz’s film is an understated, elliptical work that speaks volumes in its pointed quietude. Ana Katz’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet appears at first…
The latest entry into the “quarantine art” canon, Project Space 13 is just another empty film with nothing substantive to say about our present moment.…
The Trouble with Being Born is remarkable not just for its futurism and ambient atmosphere, but for the care with which its relationships — not all…
Thy Kingdom Come feels like what it is — deleted scenes from (and a misapprehension of) To the Wonder rather than a supplement to its beauty.…
Accidental Luxuriance is a poorly-paced, rancid mixture of conflicting aesthetic elements. Far more than its rather nonsensical title and unconventional mix of animation styles, the general…
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…
Endless Night is a film of well-meaning political engagement that succeeds only at conveying the intentionality of its aims. Endless Night falls into a recent spate…
Lucky Chan-sil is a delicate, deeply humanist film superbly anchored by Kang’s lead performance. “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in…
Fucking with Nobody is a radical, playful bit of meta-comedy that executes its risky conceit with aplomb. For her sophomore feature, Fucking with Nobody, Finnish director…
Azor is a fascinatingly oblique quasi-thriller that grows in unsettling power across its runtime. Andreas Fontana’s Azor is a fascinatingly oblique quasi-thriller, carefully organizing a deceptively…
Diaz’s signature long-takes here work more to push the material into territory of fatalism rather than substantive political observation. Lav Diaz knows violence. The director’s…
Yellow Cat is the kind of cribbing-as-mode film that illuminates nothing other than the kinds of movies its director likes. Godard once declared that all you…
Purple Sea is an arthouse trifle that merely effects the posture of serious cinema. In his 1975 book Notes on the Cinematographer, austere French director Robert…
Generations isn’t doing anything all that novel for static-shot documentary filmmaking, but as an exercise in how to watch cinema, it’s a plenty worthy effort. Stop me if…
The Cloud in Her Room is an one-note exercise in empty style that fails to marry its form and content. Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s The Cloud in…
All Hands on Deck dabble in tropes and archetypes, but still manages a vibrancy that keeps the film afloat. One of a number of Rohmer riffs…
If Krabi 2562 fails to convince by its end, its argument is at least worth engaging with. Following a short film collaboration for the 2018 Thai…