Andrew Crump

The genuinely revelatory combined effect of the interviews, concert footage, and pure elation aside, there remains an undercurrent of bristling frustration bubbling beneath the film’s surface. 52 years? That’s how long “Summer of Soul” sat unseen, hidden from the public? If work this important can be squirreled away from view for this long, and if we let our imaginations run wild, then who knows how many other stories lie buried in anonymity, or where.

McQueen has made a textured, warm, breathtaking and heartbreaking portrait of Black experience, condensed economically into slightly over an hour of runtime. It’s exhilarating. It’s gorgeous. It’s moving. It’s also dangerous.

It speaks to Anderson’s skill as an architect of distended narratives that One Battle After Another’s parenting motif functions as a concrete pylon for action and political intrigue and rank human cruelty; it’s the beacon the film comes back to time and again.

It’s a journey jammed with pleasures we can all appreciate, and canopied by questions we all ask.

Scorsese’s gangster movies indulge the genre’s pleasures, of course, but in each of them—all seven of them—he’s looking for spirituality and for humanity. In The Irishman, he’s in self-reflection mode, glancing at his career-long search for God while pondering his own age.

Good as Marriage Story’s pieces are, they’re too finely curated: Baumbach rarely lets the film be as messy as it needs to be, hemming himself in with the threads of his limited perspective.

Shoplifters is held up by the strength of its ensemble and Kore-eda’s gifts as a storyteller, which gain with every movie he makes—even in the same year.

A hushed, unassuming, intimate movie to remind audiences of the power of cinema by interrogating the definition of cinema itself.

Saint Omer views Kabou’s crime and the story unfolding in its wake through the lenses of motherhood and daughterhood, arguing that neither can be disentwined from the other.

Before We Vanish is almost too much of a stretch for Kurosawa, veering from gory sci-fi horror to screwball comedy to marital drama to alien conspiracy potboiler without the necessary connective tissue to give his genre cocktail equilibrium.

Yes, This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection is constitutionally sad. It’s also angry, restrained, abandoned, exuberant when cracks open between its downward facing emotions, and, above all else, impeccably constructed.

[Anderson's] unobtrusive aesthetic, calibrated to highlight his actors and, of course, the fashion, belies its deceptive luxuriousness. This is a movie you’ll want to live in for the pure joy of reveling in Anderson’s effortless mastery.

At its best, The Perfection is an homage to 1970s horror movies and 1980s thrillers, a glorious, multi-hewed mind screw.

Pawlikowski leaves it to the viewer to determine for themselves the fate of his Cold War proxy parents, and to glean purpose from the film’s gaps in time, its reticence, and even its black-and-white palette. Married with the Academy ratio, the color scheme makes the film feel classic, but Pawlikowski’s desire to plumb his past makes it timeless.

As sobering as the film gets, it remains, as a work of art and expression of Victor’s thoughtful voice, a real joy.

Son of the White Mare must be seen to be believed, but mostly it just needs to be seen.

The places and things Kogonada includes in his frame are important for drawing us into Columbus’s world, but it’s Richardson who gives that world its shape, supplying her director’s clean, static compositions, captured in long shots, with aching humanity molded by doubt and disappointment.

Crime + Punishment isn’t without hope, but it anchors that hope to the unflattering realities of American policing.

It takes a deft hand and a rare talent to make tyranny and state sanctioned torture so funny.

Every shimmy, kick, spin, hook and sweep; every sideways glance and smirk, every stretched neck tendon, every warm smile; they’re all there for us to soak in. The combined effect is a cure-all for woe. “Hamilton” can’t solve the problems staring us down. That’s a ridiculous thing to expect. But it can give us a brief respite from those problems, and even provide a new framework with which to understand them.

Similar to how the characters are there to serve Anthony, Colman, Gatiss, Sewell and Poots are there to serve Hopkins. The stage belongs to him. What he does with it is something special, an unmissable performance from an actor with a filmography loaded with them.

Filho is self-reflective, not self-obsessed, and his clear-eyed stance is crucial to the anti-vanity he brings to his examination of his childhood home and youthful obsession.

Above all else, Birdman is tender, raucously funny and deeply tragic.

Every detail here, every flourish, has a purpose, whether splashes of red on flower petals, soft edges around dusk-lit trees, or three-panel split screen sequences that read like the pages of illuminated manuscripts brought to life.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl details the ways tradition is exploited and warped, and to whom’s favor, gently at times, and with a steely edge at others.

To the Erwins’ credit, they make an effort at taking their movie somewhere interesting and, at least for a Jesus-y football picture, new.

Del Toro weaves together his influences so finely, so delicately, that the product of his handiwork feels entirely new: We recognize the pieces, and we cannot mistake the author, but cast in the warm, beryl glow of Dan Laustsen’s gorgeous cinematography, we feel as if we’re seeing them afresh. That’s the magic of the movies, and, more importantly, the magic of del Toro.

As the crimes of the deportation haunts Bisbee and its inhabitants, so, too, are we haunted by them through the filter of Greene’s lens. But that experience, the experience of being haunted, proves vital. Maybe it’s necessary to let history haunt us. If we don’t, we’ll never be able to move beyond it.

The Red Turtle is poetry made cinema, an exquisite existential allegory that says everything without having to say anything at all.

We’re left with a prickly kind of harmony that blends mundanity with profundity. There’s no more perfect a note for a film as intelligent, compassionate, and complex as “My Happy Family” to end on than that.

It’s chaos, but it’s controlled chaos (even if only just), and in the chaos there’s absolute joy.

If nothing else, the impeccable craftsmanship is breathtaking, and if that’s not reason enough to seek out great cinema, nothing is.

The combined effect of Black Mother’s technique—Allah shot on both 16mm and HD—is dizzying to the point of overwhelming, but the discipline required to engage with it is rewarded by a singular moviegoing experience. As the mother births her baby, so does Allah birth new cinematic grammar.

With The Juniper Tree, [Keene] left behind an impeccable piece of cinema history as her legacy, waiting to be discovered by audiences denied the chance to experience it themselves.

The greatest miracle of Eighth Grade is its warmth. The film reflects arguably the worst stretch of growing up in America’s education system, but it’s rarely if ever ugly. Instead, it’s compassionate, radiating retroactive kindness for the children we all were to soothe the adults we are now.

Like life itself, Hale County This Morning, This Evening doesn’t lend itself to immediate comprehension. It’s to Ross’ credit that his work remains so thoroughly accessible and engrossing regardless.

The sensation of observing these details fold into one another and unfold as a narrative isn’t that far off from turning the pages of a novel, or even a newspaper; that’s the journalistic effect of Sorogoyen’s filmmaking.

Each of her previous movies captures human collapse in slow motion. You Were Never Really Here is a breakdown shot in hyperdrive, lean, economic, utterly ruthless and made with fiery craftsmanship. Let this be the language we use to characterize her reputation as one of the best filmmakers working today.

Lapid articulates Yoav’s increasingly fevered quest for the impossible through aesthetic fluidity: Whip pans and judicious use of saturated colors, couched foremost in the mustard-yellow, knee-length coat Emilie plucks from his wardrobe for Yoav at the beginning of the movie. It all reflects the movie’s rich and assertive style, a detached cool to hold the audience at the proper distance from Lapid’s narrative.

Maybe we know Hite only slightly better when The Disappearance of Shere Hite ends than when it starts, but because of Newnham’s rigor, we certainly understand her better.

For all of its cosmic implications, the film remains steadfast in its human devotions.

Saint Frances gets specific, stays lighthearted, but hits like a ton of emotional bricks.

As the argument expands, all of these men start to look less like icons and more like, well, men: Regular people with regular concerns and everyday flaws. They’re mortal and imperfect, and to witness their mortal imperfection is One Night in Miami’s greatest joy.

There’s texture here, unnerving ambience as proof of Glass’ budding talents. But less isn’t always more, and while Saint Maud doesn’t need much, it simply doesn’t have enough to make an impression lasting beyond one second of terror.

Using Barbakow’s direction and Andy Siara’s script as filters, Palm Springs presents viewers with a blend of soft science fiction, raucous punchlines, and human drama, the last of these encompassing self-loathing, grief, love and high anxiety.

Mitchell narrates in his rich baritone, taking his own audience back through the past, not only to appreciate the circumstances and struggle Black cinema has come from (and appreciate where it’s at in 2022), but to witness the incontrovertible proof of its appropriation by the movie industry through the decades.

Night of Kings aesthetic dissonance is discombobulating, but the discombobulation is surprisingly pleasing in its headiness, as Lacôte plays with naturalist filmmaking and spectacle right out of The Lord of the Rings, intertwining the two so much that they are, at the end, inseparable from one another.

It’s a simple film about complicated, often painful confirmations about the country we all call home, and about optimism for what that country can look like when people share it with each other; it’s about what happens when your worst nightmare come true; for Chun, it’s also about suffering a nightmare so dreadful that the foundational trauma of your youth seems preferable by comparison. But it’s especially about the way movies change the people who make them and the people who watch them. Bad Axe is a gift.

The Killing of Two Lovers is remarkable to behold, but all the technique in the world can’t distract from the holes littering the production beyond cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiminez’s lens.

Ghostlight is a comedy in a loose sense, a tragedy in another, and a redemption song in yet one more. More succinctly, it’s a Thompson film, meaning it gently, tenderly unpacks and embodies every single feeling its characters might have about their situation at hand.

Residue is about colonization, and through the creative choices he makes, Gerima suggests that colonization stories don’t actually have to be about the colonizers themselves. Instead, he maintains a personal touch over the picture and the narrative, about a homecoming that goes slowly awry over the course of a 90 minute duration.

As a showcase for its leads, it’s delightful. All it’s missing is a touch of honest-to-goodness gravity to keep the story anchored.

There’s no action here, no real revenge to take, but there’s a meaty, idiosyncratic, and especially moving story about finding peace in loss.

It’s an exquisitely challenging production, one that calls for repeat viewings over years, all the better to persuade the film to surrender its meaning.

Loach knows there are heavy restraints on art to affect meaningful change in the world. But he’s also aware of the kinship between art and activism: How art can educate people, and agitate them, and perhaps lead them to make more responsible choices in their personal lives.

The film is overwhelming, dizzying, not easily consumed on first viewing, but it’s also powerful, affecting and so stuffed with great work in front of and behind the camera that Lee’s outsized intentions wind up feeling like part of the experience.

The explosive fury of Bacurau’s slow-burn climax is a gratifying payoff to the film’s suspense, but without the deliberate measures taken to make the rest of the story count, it’d ring hollow.

With Revenge, Fargeat has waved a blistering middle finger at rape culture and rape culture’s enablers. Revenge isn’t hers alone. It’s womanhood’s, too.

Before there was such a thing as a “Fellini” movie, “Variety Lights” established what that would look like as he moved up the ladder in Italy’s movie industry, through humor and melancholy.

Riders of Justice ties together gun fights seamlessly with melancholy and masculinity, putting them on similar footing without one gobbling up the others. The effect is complimentary. Remove one theme and the others crumble. Jensen quietly, and nearly constantly, adjusts his filmmaking to suit varying tones, softening for moments where the subject is human suffering and then hardening around muscular elements

Gardner’s a timeless actress, and it’s through her that Pandora and the Flying Dutchman gains its own timelessness. She’s so cool and controlled that any time the film starts tipping over the edge from fantasy to absurdity, her mere presence grounds it.

It’s a gorgeous, shattering film. It’s an unapologetically real film about a number of very real subjects, plot-agnostic but driven by character, consequence and compassion.

Warren’s craftsmanship keeps the audience from swallowing a breath. He’s a merciless filmmaker, deeply considerate of his choices in staging and casting.

Summer of 1993 does what movies do so well (and yet so rarely do), which is to let viewers see the world through the eyes of another.

She Dies Tomorrow is both the perfect film for this moment and also the worst viewing choice possible considering the circumstances.

The result is a sharp, moving dissection of personal identity and self-agency.

It is intermittently a blast, particularly when Bale and Damon ham it up with each other, trading jabs and one-liners, and having childish slap fights in broad daylight as Miles’ saintly, patient wife Mollie (Caitriona Balfe) quietly observes. But when it isn’t a blast, Ford v Ferrari is politically muddled to the point of distraction.

Fundamentally, Banana Split isn’t about making unexpected friendships under antithetical circumstances, but about figuring out how to maintain them no matter what difficulties it encounters. It’s an honest film, and unabashedly fun, with a really kickass soundtrack as a bonus.

It’s a calculated and logical film about an altogether illogical subject.

For a movie about government incompetence married to government malfeasance, Costa Brava, Lebanon is surprisingly funny.

[Campbell] and Radwanski pair well. Together, they make Anne at 13,000 Ft. into a work that may leave the audience gasping for air.

In The Endless, Moorhead and Benson show how sustained paranoia and foreboding can keep an audience hooked as effectively as special effects.

The blend of artistry and genre is breezy and dense at the same time, a film worth enjoying for its surface charms and studied for its deeply personal reflections on intimacy. You may delight in its lively, buoyant filmmaking, but you’ll be awed by the breadth of its insight.

Here, merriment and melancholy go hand in hand, partners in life’s dance just as a stiff drink is an accompaniment to life’s pleasures. The combination proves as intoxicating as the fancy-pants cocktails the boys whip up together—if not more so.

Think better of art’s power, Ree’s filmmaking tells us, but especially think better of each other, too.

The film looks heavenly, often bathed in light, as if Qu wants nothing more than to assuage these women of their suffering by suggesting paradise. But the brightness is just a veneer. Beneath the surface, “Angels Wear White” is as bleak as they come.

The sensation of the film, on the other hand, is suspicion, the relentless and sickening notion that nobody can be trusted. Whether the thrumming electronic soundtrack or Rodríguez’s photography, composed to the point of feeling suffocating, Chile ’76 drives that anxiety like a knife in the heart.

What is a fishing community if restrictions deny their catch? The world continues to change no matter what anyone does. Camilleri understands that dilemma and puts it on film with humble clarity.

Normally, ego married with naivety is a bummer. In “birth/rebirth,” it’s gut-chilling.

Love, Antosha lays Yelchin’s immense spirit bare, but the film remains wanting for depth. Make no mistake: This is the definitive Encyclopedia of Anton Yelchin, a tome to chronicle the best of him. But there’s so much about him to learn, and so much breezed over to fit into a 90-minute running time, that Price’s study feels somewhat diffuse.

Comedy is a welcome release for the genuine harms couched in Gibberitia’s philistine precepts. Authoritarians are self-important, humorless fools. We should make fun of them and laugh at them. Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia encourages viewers to join in the mockery, but not at the expense of its central motif, because ripping on autocrats alone isn’t enough.

What Imbert has done here, some years down the line, may solidify The Summit of the Gods, a work of fiction, as one of the greatest Everest films ever made. If nothing else it’s the Everest film that respects the mountain best.

Saloum is tense and, when it kicks into high gear, scary as hell.

Twomey gives The Breadwinner ballast, binding it to the real-world history that serves as its basis, and elevates it to realms of imagination at the same time. It’s a collision of truth and fantasy.

It’s a rapturous, gorgeous movie about the sad joy of living, the product of a filmmaker who has spent his life wrestling with the human desire to shed banality and elude our mortality, but for all its intellectual ambitions and philosophical gravity, Endless Poetry never reads as stuffy or self-serious.

If the film is tender, it’s merciless at the same time.

At its grimmest the film hits peaks of nerve-shredding dread. But more than being just frightening, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is confidently weird and deeply sad.

The strength of ensemble’s performances can’t be overstated, especially that of Woodard and Hodge—she one of the greatest actors of her generation, he on the path to becoming one of the greats of his own.

The film has an identity problem. It’s uncertain what it wants to be. This is too damn bad because its first mode, a parody of male self-obsession, is perfectly satisfying; the comedy makes us shift in our seats, but the shifting is pleasurable, complemented by well-timed gags and a mesmerizingly selfish performance from its leading man, Yannis Drakopoulos.

What Maitland does do to separate his film from other docs that rely on that structure is weave dramatization into documentation, breathing life into the woeful stories and dashed dreams of men, women and children mailing their pleas for relief to Michael Brody Jr. at the edge of desperation.

A movie like this shouldn’t be so ambivalent, much less so harsh on the eye.

What Pollard pulls from his subjects is ease of storytelling; even at an hour and forty minutes, the film keeps a lively pace, and for all of the work’s academic value, it’s endlessly, almost effortlessly engaging.

It’s less a story and more a fragile white male provocation, and it’s repulsive.

Some documentaries would be better off as written journalism. Silver Dollar Road complements Presser’s work with Peck’s erudition and humane touch.

[Green's] new film The Royal Hotel could be summed up as Smile More: The Movie, which grounds a clash between two globe-separated cultures in old-time misogynist tropes that know no geographic borders. Like The Assistant, the movie revolves around women in the presence of atmospheric male domination. Gendered maltreatment is in the very air they breathe.

This movie is a painful, beautiful and especially true gem.

The film’s lived-in craftsmanship provides structure in an unstable world. Collins’ superb performance gives it soul.

This is neither a pleasant movie nor a pleasing movie, but it is made with high aesthetic value to offset its unrelenting pitilessness: It’s fastidiously constructed, as one should expect from a director of Kent’s talent, and ferociously acted by her leading trio of Aisling Franciosi, Baykali Ganambarr and Sam Claflin.