Pleasure isn’t the first film to attack the intersection of capitalism, misogyny, and exploitation endemic to the porn industry, but it does so with style…
Memory is a pleasantly riveting watch even as it remains a one-trick pony that’s too reliant on shallow deep state caricature. “If I’m here, it’s…
Timelessness is a crucial thing of nature — where sediments erode and seas dry, nature par excellence remains unchanged, a totality to reckon with, yet…
There’s an appealing, lulling rhythm to Kogonada’s second feature, but few of its philosophical inquires are met with worthy responses. There is much to savor…
Ted K takes a potentially fascinating study and reduces it to a series of madman tropes and Wikipedia summarizing. The name Theodore Kaczynski has, for better…
Italian Studies is a banal, ponderous work that fails to land on any interesting or governing thesis. Dislocation and dissociation lie at the heart of…
Honorable Mention: Leave it to Sean Baker to direct poverty porn. After the much-celebrated The Florida Project, a fantastical if somewhat aestheticised survey of America’s…
#21. Hong Sang-soo’s films generally fall somewhere between melodrama and farce, but to classify them as such is to no doubt essentialize them as what…
#5. Premiering in competition at 2020’s Berlinale and winner of its jury Teddy Award (for LGBT cinema), Tsai Ming-liang’s Days very much continues and deepens its…
The Hand of God is a softer but no more subdued effort from Sorrentino, still rife with flourish but with a more personal core than ever…
More poodle than Wolf, Biancheri’s film is a frustratingly tame and conservative treatment of potentially fascinating material. Ten years ago, a film like Wolf would have…
Neither didactic nor restrained, Ascension is a mesmerizing film that uncovers the face of a nation’s stoic realism. Civilization’s pursuit of unfettered growth has often clashed with…
Bad Luck Banging borders on the didactic, but smartly allows its archetypes to conflate and contradict, turning its sketchbook designs into a platform for equal-opportunity…
Clifford the Big Red Dog is vapid, conceptually nihilistic, and utterly soulless “entertainment.” When moviegoers go to the movies, they typically do so with certain expectations:…
Like so many pastiches before it, the thematically unfocused Dead & Beautiful succumbs to its own vacuous sheen. In the metropolitan center of Taipei, five young…
The Deep House is a claustrophobic, otherworldly bit of throwback horror that welcomingly pivots away from modern, flattened genre sensibilities. Forget indie insufferability: it seems vogue…
At the Ready engaged necessary discourse, but unfortunately leaves its most fertile sites for interrogation unexplored. In light of the surging unpopularity of its subject matter,…
The Eyes of Tammy Faye indulges the very spectacle it supposedly interrogates, betraying its aims and offering only a flattened take on its titular subject. The…
After the resounding triumph of On Body and Soul, a film whose stoic tenderness and tactile intimacy proved an outlier among recent Golden Bear winners, Ildikó Enyedi returns…
To make an effective political film, one frequently turns to documentary as the best medium for truth; it’s hard to deny in exemplars of the…