Andrew Crump

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Square’s contrast between categories of morality is peak Östlund. There’s no clearly defined gauge for goodness or badness here, just a palette of gray ethical relativism to offset the film’s superior construction.

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.

A story about drug addiction, corrupt authorities, and environmental collapse sounds grim on paper and plays grim on screen, but Unicorn Wars is more than “grim.” It’s deranged.

Burns conjures horror so vivid and tactile that at any time it feels like it might leap off of the screen and into our own imaginations or, worse, our own lives.

What makes the movie such a welcome surprise is Bonello’s creativity: Digging back nearly 60 years to trace an arc of trauma inherited through French colonialism takes as much chutzpah as imagination, the latter seen here mostly in the form of atmospheric horror homage.

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.

Kramer’s filmmaking is vibrant, vital, easy to swallow while retaining astounding verbal density; you may wish for subtitles and a notepad to follow along with the near-constant back-and-forth between her characters. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

[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.

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.

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.

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 discussion of what the film isn’t is a discussion worth having, just not at the expense of what the film is: Delicious, sensual, made with sterling craft and an unassumingly sharp edge.

Asako I & II is an easygoing movie, at least if the film’s exterior is taken at its words. Under the hood, it’s roiling.

Sisu communicates the basics without glossing over the record, and best of all without taking up time better spent liquifying bad guys.

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

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 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.

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

Rich filmmaking, from assured camerawork to tactile set decoration, is the film’s basis. But richer exploration of theme and spiritual belief is its design. Things Heard & Seen isn’t elevated. It’s just mature, wonderfully made, and, whether dead or alive, human.

Life for today’s young’uns is frankly terrifying, even if they aren’t literally living inside a horror film, with overarching threats to their future dotted by day-to-day micro-threats. In its unassuming way as real-world fantasy, Weston Razooli’s Riddle of Fire is sensitive to these plights, and casually rejects didactic allegory about them.

Hara marries biography to observational and slapstick humor, plus a healthy dose of supernatural rumblings, and in so doing produces something altogether fascinating and endlessly entertaining.

1922 is a ghastly slow burner, not the kind where nothing happens until the last ten minutes, but rather the kind that layers minor incident upon minor incident until they tally up to something major.