There have been a number of “lockdown movies” since the outbreak of Covid, and most of them have been unfortunate affairs. While it’s true that…
Will-o’-the-Wisp, João Pedro Rodrigues’s long-awaited follow-up feature to The Ornithologist, almost seems to take the form of a sketch. Running a slender 67 minutes and…
In hindsight, Paul Schrader’s career has been a repeated jettisoning and reappropriation of extraneous artiness, new off-kilter filmic shapes of inscrutable quality emerging at an…
Ashley McKenzie’s debut feature, Werewolf, already suggested a talent to watch in its refracted take on the addiction/relationship drama. While its dramatic sense felt stuck…
In his 2017 film Those Who Are Fine, Cyril Schäublin provided a quiet yet jaundiced view of his home nation of Switzerland. He depicted the…
In what can be construed both as commendation and criticism, Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. is assuredly a film of the times. Its contemporary grappling with hot-button…
Unfolded in twelve chapters and split into two parts, Trenque Lauquen includes across its 250-minute runtime a story of a missing woman possibly gone mad,…
Documentaries don’t get much more hybrid than Dry Ground Burning, the new film from Adirley Queirós and Joana Pimenta. It’s a film about a gang…
Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body) is a veritable encyclopedia of the human form, a visual compendium…
Walk Up is Hong Sang-soo’s trickiest film since The Day After (2017), and his most intricately structured effort since The Day He Arrives (2012). With…
A woman stands in the courtroom witness box, her face tensed, pained, and withdrawn, her hands clasping the railing before her, while the judge’s questions…
When Empress Elizabeth visits a mental asylum — the sort of place in 1878 where men are institutionalized for mental disorders and women for adultery…
The first thing you notice about Sarah Polley’s Women Talking is the color palette. It’s desaturated in the extreme — isolated shots even look almost…
One Fine Morning doesn’t stand out in Hansen-Løve’s filmography, but there’s enough here to suggest that it could resonate more fully in the long term. Stepping…
Return to Seoul is a film guided by its director’s steady hand, boasting a generous script and tethered to a fantastic lead performance. A hurried glance…
EO avoids the simplistic anthropomorphism that has plagued so many recent animal-centric films, and immerses viewers into something entirely more alien. Pitched as a remake of…
The Novelist’s Film feels more diaristic than anything Hong has made before and results in what’s arguably his most emotive and personal film. One of the…
The Eternal Daughter “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by…
Decision to Leave piles on the plot twists, but never loses its essential noir romance vibe. Tang Wei remains one of the great actresses of our…
Stars at Noon is the perfect externalization of a lovers-on-the-run experience, a fitting send-up to its source material. A gnarled, lightbulb-spotted, two-dimensional plastic facsimile of a…
Showing Up Despite the steady repetition of themes that define Kelly Reichardt’s filmography (alienation, class, gender, the American West), her output has remained surprisingly unpredictable…