Alex Saveliev

A modern-day Apocalypse Now, a visual and aural trip that’s as abstract and surreal as it is stark and realistic, Sirat urges us to embrace each other, as the world swells and throbs around us.

Featuring fascinating archival footage, timeless music, and a plethora of compelling subjects, Viva Verdi may have a rather narrow target audience. But boy, will it please them.

The stark contrast between the way-too-confident-for-his-age Jake and the introverted, insecure Ben underscores how identity at that age calcifies in opposition: one boy armoring himself with swagger, the other shrinking under its weight.

You’ll never look at life—through a camera lens, that is—the same way again.

Dispenses with all the flourishes and focuses purely on the story and the characters, the gentle humor and the heartrending moments. It all leads up to a wonderful final scene, a knockout punch that cements MacLachlan as one of cinema’s indie greats.

Woo and Benson don’t underestimate their young audience’s intelligence, subtly layering in complexity, which comes off as a mini-miracle.

Nuremberg is a competently made, overlong, corny, entertaining, poignant epic made by the filmmaker responsible for writing classics like Zodiac and duds like Independence Day: Resurgence — a jumble of the man’s best and worst tendencies. Scattershot? Yes. Way too long? Sure. Predictable? Yes. Cheesy? Yes. Did I secretly kinda love it? No comment, your honor.

Boasting impressive production values — especially given its budget limitations — it harks back to a more innocent era: a cozy, stylish, and mildly thrilling feature from a promising filmmaker.

It’s Plemons, who’s always stellar, that proves to be the real revelation.

Audiences have grown so accustomed to nonstop thrills that the film does feel like a relic of sorts; they don’t make ’em like this anymore.

The personal and the political intertwine, until lines blur and dissipate. Anderson punches your gut while warming your heart, and he leaves enough room for you to draw your own conclusions. What remains inarguable is that One Battle After Another represents the pinnacle of the man’s astounding career.

Kudos to Max for conjuring genuinely unsettling, Boschian images with a limited budget.

Those seeking visceral thrills may be somewhat underwhelmed by Descendent, but the filmmaker firmly establishes himself as a descendant of the Benson/Moorhead cinematic lineage.

Stripped away off all privileges, a shell of a human remains, a carcass, and that glimmer of hope that keeps one going is the driving nucleus of the lyrical and timely To a Land Unknown.

A mostly-smooth, sometimes-uneasy blend of pitch-black drama and absurdist comedy, Sunlight may follow the age-old “road-trip movie” structure, but it fully commits to an offbeat, non-sequitur style/logic that will either compel or repel audiences.

The film effortlessly examines hefty themes like freedom, toxic masculinity, privilege, familial bonds (and the need to escape them).

An indictment of a regime but also a look at the strength that perseveres despite the most dire circumstances, this film, and its lead star, deserve all the upcoming love at the award circuit… if there’s any justice left in Hollywood, that is.

Basir doesn’t shy away from glaring into the gaping maw of despair. But he skillfully counterbalances it with an energy that propels the film forward; how refreshing: this filmmaker has something to say.

The film amounts to a truthful portrait of family supporting each other in a time of crisis and a painfully real depiction of the hell that was the pandemic.

The entirety of Give Me Pity! is more of an artistic treatise, a museum piece, a series of single-woman monologues, than a coherent, you know, film, and that’s clearly the intention. One can do a lot worse than take a look inside Kramer’s head, and this one makes her other explorations of humanity, Please Baby Please and Ladyworld, seem positively conventional. Quite the feat.

Here’s something you haven’t seen before, masquerading as something you have 1,000 times. It may be a one-trick pony, but it’s well worth the ride when the pony is this unhinged.

It would be blasphemous to produce another “Neeson-as-old-but-badass-motherfuck*r flick” after this one.

The laughs in Anora come in so fast and frequently that they almost eclipse the underlying tension; things are constantly on the edge of exploding, amusement on the verge of anxiety.

Sirocco’s world resembles a phantasmagoric dream by Antoni Gaudí.

The filmmaker, doing a lot with an extremely limited cast and location, has a concrete vision and sticks with it, and whether you get it or not is up to you. A character in the film, when confronted, states: “Big question. Too long to answer.” That pretty much summarizes this cinematic endeavor.

There’s nothing spectacular about any of this, but it’s heartfelt and well done.

As effortless as Clooney and Pitt’s screen charisma is, one can’t help but wish for a more polished scenario to complement it.

For a low-budget, contained flick, Day’s film does a remarkable job of keeping audiences riveted with a minimum of pyrotechnics. It doesn’t aspire to greatness, knowing perfectly well what it is: a lean, mean, bloody little machine with a few subliminal – and not-so-subliminal – messages thrown in. Dive right into this tub.