Anthony Kaufman

The film’s randomly generated structure manages to cohere enough to make the experiment mostly a success.

The fantastical elements soon fade away and the film becomes grounded in the tender realities of growing up, finding oneself and questions about love, sexuality, home, family, and the future.

All in all, Nine Days is a stellar feature debut, with strong filmmaking, from its assured compositions to its superb dimly lit frames, where shafts of outside light or wall lamps illuminate slivers of the sets. And Winston Duke, who appears in just about every scene in the film, offers a complex portrait of a wounded man.

Sure, the motorcycle wheelies are cool, but there’s nothing more intense than the raw emotion that comes from a mother trying to protect her child.

A compelling political campaign chronicle and an incisive allegory of American democracy, Boys State is also much more fun that you’d expect.

Minari is never downbeat, despite the challenges the characters face. Chung’s love for his characters—and the Arkansas farmland where he grew up—always shines through.

Proficiently directed by Sara Colangelo (The Kindergarten Teacher), well-acted by Keaton and co-star Amy Ryan as Feinberg’s deputy Camille Biros, and made with the respect and reverence that its subject deserves, Worth nevertheless remains a bit too stolid and too on-the-nose.

Promising Young Woman builds to a truly shocking climax that delivers Fennell’s themes with a dark and twisted sense of humour—and justice. It’s a clever and unexpected turn in a film full of surprises.

The Dissident holds few new revelations but presents its case with enough infuriating evidence and storytelling power to make it worthwhile.

The film is a unique, albeit rarefied example of hybrid cinema that reveals emotional truths through staged reality.

It’s ultimately unsatisfying—more style than substance.

Though it’s all a bit ridiculous—and Simien, in certain instances, acknowledges the humour in his horror—the film is anchored by Elle Lorraine’s breakout performance.

Estes handily pumps up the tension, and keeps the story moving along at a brisk pace. There may be nothing particularly memorable about the filmmaking on display, but Relive is focused mostly on its actors.

Both intimate and epic, American Factory offers a remarkably candid, fly-on-the-wall account ... It’s a deceptively lighthearted look at one of the most significant cultural and economic conflicts of our times.

I Am Mother mostly satisfies as another example of smart and slick indie sci-fi.

Feels like a Saturday Night Live skit that’s been stretched out over 90 minutes.

Little Monsters doesn’t exactly reanimate the popular subgenre in novel ways, but there’s enough humorous gags, suspenseful scares, fleshy gore, and quite surprisingly, a dash of heartfelt sentiment, to make for an amusing thrill-ride.

It’s intelligent and clever scripting, and except for a few moments where the dialogue is overly expository, as if Burns doesn’t trust his audience, The Report pulls back the curtain on America’s political machinations and one of its most appalling policy decisions and attempted cover-ups with startling clarity.

Thompson delivers a memorable performance as the abrasive “cold witch,” as someone describes her, perhaps even outdoing Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wars Prada as a delightfully wicked woman of power.

This ambitious debut features flashes of imaginative visuals, quirky dialogue, and well-meaning messages about gentrification and disenfranchisement.

The Farewell is so fixated on its principle problem that it doesn’t allow its story or its characters to veer from it, or find further complexities in it. There’s only so many scenes a story can take of family members trying to keep the truth from grandma before it become less compelling.

This meticulously conceived documentary is both a definitive account of the voyage as well as a creative, cinematic you-are-there unfolding of the events that transpired.

It’s ultimately a forgettable lark, amounting to little more than a spiteful attack on the vapidity of the commercial art-world. There’s nothing lampooned here that we haven’t already seen before, whether it be a pretentious art critic or avaricious art dealers.

Silva is a shrewd storyteller, uninterested in genre conventions or shock value; rather, he’s using that tension to tease out the anxieties of ordinary life and interactions.

For all its deft style and sympathetic characters, there’s still something missing in We,The Animals. In its efforts to evoke a young boy’s inner-world, it falls short of fully capturing his emotional reality. Jonah’s story should be heartbreaking, but when we see images of him flying over the forest, it’s just picturesque and lyrical.

Everyone loves a conspiracy—which is one of the reasons that A Gray State, a tantalising and fascinating real-life story, makes for compelling viewing. But it’s also supremely timely.

The Settlers is captivating viewing for the most part. But it’s also muddled in its combination of historical and contemporary storytelling.

A poetic, though admittedly esoteric piece of cinema.

Golden Exits is an idiosyncratic film about little moments of human pain and loneliness. There’s jealousy, sadness, unfulfilled loves and lives, all of it relayed in quiet conversations and glances, rather than big dramatic scenes.

The Polka King, and Jan’s plight, never quite reaches the level of palpable human drama of their previous effort. Black does his best to make Jan a vulnerable and sympathetic character, but neither the script nor the direction allows him to become fully dimensional.

The film’s second act is near spot-on comedy of discomfort.

Some issues, Trophy powerfully conveys, are bigger and broader than they initially appear.

Mudbound is full of strong performances, singular moments, and a heavy heart, but it’s an over-ambitious affair that struggles to find the right balance between its many characters.

Deutch, who appeared in Beautiful Creatures as well as Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some, delivers a sympathetic lead performance, carrying the film with equal doses of sweetness and grace, strength and vulnerability.

As a satire about L.A. living, the movie delivers its fair share of zingers. With a script that recalls Whit Stillman and TV sitcoms, Morgan’s crisp dialogue sometimes hits its target.

Though audiences may have heard this one before, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power preaches effectively to its choir, with a decade of fresh data and increasing cataclysms...to persuasively make its case.

It’s a classic underdog story, effective for its engaging chronicle of outsiders trying to change the system.

Agnus Dei’s filmmakers ultimately embrace the sin of over-simplification. And audiences, grabbing for their tissues, will likely forgive them of it.

Yoga Hosers is a movie that feels like it was more fun to make than to watch.

If the humor doesn’t always hit, the film’s darker conspiratorial turns never feel genuinely suspenseful, either. Even when Johnson ups the emotional and physical stakes for his character, the bogusness of the production interferes.

There is not an ounce of flourish to the filmmaking, but that’s always been the director’s aesthetic. His embellishments come in subtler forms, with witty dialogue and memorable characters—traits that Love and Friendship offers in abundance.

Goat is a potent reminder that even traditional gender roles can be rife with angst, anxiety and devastating social pressures.

Refreshingly, there is no clichéd love story or illicit thriller that emerges; Marston is pursuing ideas that are far more personal and philosophical, about the masquerade of identity and what it means to that identity when you make a significant change in your life.

Reichardt has crafted another deeply felt and beautifully ambiguous meditation on contemporary life in the far corners of the American heartland.

Lizzie is, at best, a powerful showcase for the two actors. At its worst, it’s a tiresome and unappealing exercise in the inevitability of a family’s mutually assured destruction.

Riley so wants to make strong criticisms about everything from racial stereotyping to corporate greed that he forgets the need for a real person to root for at the story’s core.

While Eighth Grade may look, on its surface, like a typical adolescent comedy, with its underdog protagonist pitted against popular girls and boy crushes, it is more a piquant series of vignettes that form a singular and focused portrait of youthful angst.

Deliberately off-putting, Hosking’s latest tests the audience’s patience with frustratingly unfunny scenarios and an array of nasty, angry characters doing unpleasant things.

Even those with only passing knowledge of Williams’ challenges—with drugs, alcohol, and self-esteem—aren’t likely to find any new revelations about the comic genius.

It’s a distinctive world that Decker and her team have created. Among this year’s coming-of-age films, it’s got to be one of the most original. But it’s also one of the more perplexing.