Vox Lux, the second film from actor-turned-director Brady Corbet (after 2016’s The Childhood of a Leader), scans as a fruitless and embittered attack on…
Julia Murat’s Pendular is film filled with impressive compositions: it opens with its central couple — credited as He (Rodrigo Bolzan) and She (Raquel Karro)…
The year’s second major film addressing the particular evil of church-sanctioned gay conversion therapy, Boy Erased (based on a memoir of the same name)…
Director Antonio Mendez-Esparza’s Life and Nothing More is a minimalist portrait of mother-and-son strife, but that emotional center is contextualized by a larger exploration…
As perhaps the most narratively straightforward Hong Sang-soo film to date, albeit one still prone to a certain structural mischievousness, Woman on the Beach modulates its conceptual restraint…
Perhaps the most surprising thing about First Man, director Damien Chazelle’s latest, is how little the director tries to narratively subvert the limited trappings…
Based on a pair of memoirs, authored by father and son David and Nic Sheff — which detail the latter’s meth addiction and general…
Vacillating between brutality, mysticism, and comedy, Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch offers a cinematic approximation of a traditional African fairy tale; it tells the…
Minding the Gap begins by opaquely tracing the lives of three skateboarding high schoolers — including the film’s director, Bing Liu — in their…
Jeon Go-woon’s debut feature Microhabitat offers a conceptually ambitious and thematically rich premise: a young woman named Miso (Esom) — who leads a simple,…
In Xavier Legrand’s Custody, viewers may get the sense that instead of the domestic drama this has been billed as, what they’re in fact watching is something much…
In transmuting the true-life story of rodeo star Brady Jandreau into the sort-of-fictionalized The Rider, director Chloé Zhao uses low-key character and narrative detail…
Above all else, Andrew Haigh has proven himself a deeply empathic artist; whether tackling 21st century queer identity (Looking, Weekend) or the devolution of a decades-long…
Scott Cooper is not a subtle filmmaker. Further proof of this comes in the first five minutes of his Hostiles, when two young children…
Downsizing represents a departure from a filmography built on incisive character studies and black comedy; Alexander Payne imbues his latest with a broader tonal…
Guillermo del Toro abandons his recent efforts at delivering alt-blockbusters and curating photography for interior design catalogs with The Shape of Water. A mute-mermaid…
Tackling the trickiest of transpositions, that of adapting a dialogue-driven one-act play to the big screen, Benedict Andrews’s Una takes on David Harrower’s Blackbird—and it…
As a documentary film student newly arrived in America, director Nanfu Wang’s probing I Am Another You begins as she meets a charismatic, intentionally homeless…