Andrew Crump

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.

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.

Arizona bathes its absurdist satire in the bleakest humor and takes a sober glance at the consequences of America’s worst modern economic calamity.

Tramps is a minor effort loaded with small pleasures, but tallied together, those small pleasures add up to one great movie.

Their Finest is a joy to watch, if not for Scherfig’s direction than for Arterton’s leading performance, a mixture of affronted gumption, feminine stoicism and vulnerability that adds up to towering portraiture.

Guided by Fabietto, the movie takes its time. It watches. It breathes. It captures life with a clarity even Sorrentino’s best efforts haven’t quite—which makes it his best effort to date.

The power of Fouéré’s performance echoes across the film to its gruesome, tragic ending – further supporting evidence of the past’s grip strength on people of any generation.

Chronicles of a Wandering Saint is wry with a side of quirk, unblinking in facing its subject matter head-on while refusing to pull punches; it isn’t without mercy, either.

Most of all, the chance to spend 90 or so minutes in Fonda’s orbit offers a welcome reminder of what cancellation actually means. For her, and for F.T.A., it means silence. Bravo to the folks responsible for putting the film under a spotlight at a moment where a lesson in genuine cancellation is so desperately needed.

This Is Congo has a point to prove and a righteous fury with which to prove it. But it’s focused and precise, which makes the sheer breadth of context required to understand it much easier to digest.

Labaki’s filmmaking suggests uncertainty at best and lack of confidence at worst. She layers on the suffering too thick.

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.

There’s something to be said about humbly funded productions that achieve high aesthetic standards despite a relative lack of dough: When I Consume You packs an emotional wallop and looks stunning while spending peanuts compared to the average studio horror product.

A sobering, beautiful movie that’ll haunt you for weeks after watching it.

Undoubtedly, filmmakers like O’Connor wish to honor their subjects instead of idly speculating. Emily performs that complicated maneuver with casual ease, proving that for the right kind of movies, actors make the best kind of directors.

It’s well-intended, it’s heartfelt and in its small-scale fashion it’s surprisingly ambitious, but it’s also content to cheat its own premise and withhold its genre pleasures, which effectively undermines Barbara’s journey.

We all look for magic in the world around us, and when we do the world routinely lets us down. Movies like this remind us that there’s magic, and life, in art—and perhaps especially in animation.

Simó “gets” Buñuel’s drives, and his animation lends the story a layer of romanticism while emphasizing that talent isn’t a hall pass. Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles treats genius as a knottier idea. Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan is a masterpiece, sure, but “masterpiece” takes on layers of new meaning once we see how the sausage is made.

Though A Couple is [Wiseman's] first narrative feature in 20 years, the narrative structure documents history by fashioning Sophia’s diaries and letters as a performance.

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.

Beast plays with enough restraint to sustain our doubts for most of its duration, its gentle and often lovely filmmaking lulling us toward false certainties about its underlying inhumanity.