Carson Lund

Pacifiction uses its thin narrative elements as a pretense to explore the texture of uncertainty, suspicion, and inaction.

Dragnet Girl features an array of seemingly debased molls and violent loners who blow off steam with punching bags in between petty wrongdoings, but it never outright vilifies any of them.

A film that so clearly takes delight in the unfolding of a story and the unpacking of an enigmatic character is refreshing in an arthouse landscape where such narrative qualities are often relegated to secondary concerns.

The film’s collisions between the grave and the comic are crucial to its vision of a society cracking under the weight of its own inconsistencies.

Zürcher spins byzantine webs of audiovisual stimuli from an ultimately modest dramatic core, and not only is the larger narrative design unclear before it’s finally revealed, it’s easy to get stuck dwelling on the minutia along the way.

That Kind of Summer never quite resolves into any one stance on its subjects, an equanimity that’s to its credit.

It’s the hints of danger, employed like ghost notes in a shuffling rhythm, that lend the film its sneaky depth of feeling.

The film navigates a tricky space between pathos and absurdity and often turns on a dime from one to the other.

The film’s tonal and situational shapeshifting doesn’t go to the surrealist lengths of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but James Vaughan similarly indulges in burlesquing upper-middle-class complacency.

Rather than eliciting surprise and wonder, Roy Andersson channels his full stylistic arsenal in search of something far more delicate: a recognition of the sublime in the prosaic.

The film’s real subject is a young woman awakening to her oppression, rendered poignant in all its awkwardness by Noée Abita.

This intimate found-footage memoir is driven by a frantic internal monologue that will feel painfully familiar to many cinephiles in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The film’s reminder of the fragility of agrarian traditions in the face of a merciless profit motive is delivered with tact and subtlety.

Sean Durkin’s sweated-over filmmaking tediously lifts a familiar tale of domestic dysfunction to the level of myth.

It’s in certain characters’ trajectories that the Ross brothers locate the tragic soul of the bar.

Dan Sallitt recognizes that even the sturdiest of friendships are inevitably tested by time and the evolution of personal responsibility.

There’s a moving study within the film of a man in emotional paralysis learning to redirect his love from the past to the present, but it’s too often obscured by a muted revenge yarn that’s no less banal because it’s tastefully directed.

Thomas Heise’s documentary seeks to excavate real human thought and feeling beneath the haze of larger political structures.

The film is greater in its confrontational force than the sum of a dozen festival breakthroughs lauded for their fearlessness.

Only in focusing so thoroughly on the normal does Paul Harrill’s film stumble upon the paranormal.

What’s so fascinating about the world of On Cinema is the way each creative outgrowth expands and deepens the lore, and Mister America’s universe-specific innovations renders the film indispensable in context.

In My Room often exhibits an interest only in the accruing of incidents, giving it a this-happens-then-this-happens quality that defiantly eschews psychological shading.

In a future where the plagues of civilization have only evolved into new shapes and sizes, it asks, in a roundabout way, if there’s anything worthier of exploration than our own relationships.

Angela Schanalec’s film configures itself most potently in hindsight as a punch to the gut.

Though betraying the markings of its original form in its small revolving ensemble, single location, and frequent tableau staging, Liberté conjures a sustained ambiance and eroticism that’s unique to the language of cinema.

The film is a curiously anodyne affair that proposes the distinctly unenlightening idea that the medicine against despair is just a little R&R.

For all its emotional restraint, Rick Alverson’s film builds to a point of remarkable pathos.

The experience of watching Dominga Sotomayor’s film is not unlike entering a stranger’s dream without an anchor.

Its stylistic fluctuations are a sign of a filmmaker really wrestling with how she became the woman and artist she is today.

This is a rigorous film concerned with questions of cultural appropriation, learned behavior, and the very texture of life in our content-saturated present (a feeling not exclusive to urban centers), but one with the good humor and wisdom to disguise itself as something far more familiar.

In its balance of a wispy narrative and long, quiet episodes of textual close reading, the film feels incomplete in a productive way.

The Juniper Tree’s peculiar pedigree as an American indie fueled by European arthouse tropes and constructed with a flair for the avant-garde and the handmade marks it as a welcome rediscovery.

That the film adheres, upon close scrutiny, to the rough shape of a classical romantic tragedy—a seemingly intuitively understandable genre—only confirms the extreme degree to which Schanalec’s idiosyncratic manner of storytelling skirts and frustrates expectations.

The film finally ends up souring its perspective on responsibility with a hardened take on the limits of the American dream.

Ray & Liz generates pathos through its detailed attention to its characters' attempts to find permanence and meaning in a fundamentally unstable reality.

The film celebrates the unrecognized willpower and perseverance that undergirds low-wage service work in this country.

Joel Potrykus's droll world is defined by feats of man-child pettiness, by lazy guys who turn the banalities of daily life into meaningless trials of integrity.

It's true that the disorientation produced in the collision of Igorrr's frenetic style-mashing and Dumont's unadorned long-take aesthetic ensures that the film feels remarkably distinct from prior cinematic adaptations of Joan of Arc's life, but it's also hard not to wonder how this particular story might have played without the farfetched musical conceit grafted atop it.

In every scene, the film's cutting is dictated by the turbulent pace of the characters' inner lives.

In directly requesting the audience's trust, Travis Wilkerson initiates a not-particularly-inviting proposition for the viewer, and specifically the white American viewer.

Movement and progress are the organizing principles throughout Abbas Kiarostami's final, posthumously released film.

Its tension between ethnographic ensemble study and thesis-oriented docu-essay is irreconcilable.

The final optimism of the film's worldview lands with a conviction that's rare in contemporary Hollywood cinema—a resilience that's strong enough for Liam Neeson to ride out on.

Happy End reveals itself as something vacuous and cold, a bizarrely seductive pseudo-thriller lacking a thoroughly worked-out payoff.

For what it's worth, Jared Moshe seems genuinely interested in the role of unflagging decency in a sullied world.

It’s as exhilaratingly honest and unshackled a work as many have come to expect from this auteur of cringe comedy, one that foresees, absorbs, and responds to all possible bile that might be directed its way, knowing full well of the muck it dredges up.

It grapples with emotional enigma of infatuation, and the question of how such a mighty force can also be so fleeting.

Stephen Cone's Princess Cyd is distinguished by a dramatic complexity that would seem to run counter to its remarkably even-tempered tone.

While Ruben Östlund’s mastery of visually amplifying social unease is still very much intact, he’s partially undone here by his own thematic ambition, which, in scene after exquisitely staged scene, threatens to put too fine a point on otherwise thrillingly indeterminate situational comedy.

Shot in 4:3 with sliver-thin depth of field and a lush palette of swampy greens, Amman Abbasi's film is largely predicated on the idea of imparting a hyperreal sensuality to a region not often depicted on the big screen.

The whole affair suggests dramatic Tetris, and it leeches the artist and his process of any mystery.

Fiona Tan’s comprehensive project discriminates against no particular era or pedigree of imagery.

It may be Piñeiro’s most inspired and thrilling work to date, exhaustive in its means of keeping the viewer off balance and yet rich in its emotional implications.

It suffers by resembling arty, didactic bloat when it most begs for a more sophisticated dramatic touch.

This is a sports tale in which the character building has almost nothing to do with the sport.

A Quiet Passion's accomplishment is in fleshing out the stark context behind Emily Dickinson's ethereal words.

Catalan prankster Albert Serra's film ultimately emerges as a compact, improbably riveting viewing experience.

The film is about floating along on currents of uncertain desire and excitement, overthinking your own indulgence in these whims, and then sometime later on down the road, through no clear constellation of reasons, recognizing that a real human connection was squandered in the haze of all that self-exploration.

Its bid for social correctness does nothing to make the juvenile and numbing fixation on brutality any more palatable.

The film’s default state is an ambient inertia that gestures vaguely in multiple directions without concerning itself with the hard work of constructing an argument, a convincing milieu, or even a compelling mood.

Most gratifying throughout A Cure for Wellness is the moment-to-moment anticipation of where Gore Verbinski will put his camera next.

Tim Sutton's film often surprises on the micro level, but its broader execution gives reason for pause.

Cohen here is ever the model of grace and dignity around his peers, if not exactly entirely at peace with himself.

The film undermines the unity of its characterizations, redirecting into garish phantasmagoria.

Even more diverse than the film's historical material is its eccentric mash-up of styles and approaches.

Portrait of a Garden‘s distance from its human subjects forestalls the film’s momentum and strips it of a heart.

The film is like a landlocked Bergman chamber drama divested of any ambivalence regarding human relationships.

The insistence of Green’s gaze throughout the film encourages us to look beyond the mechanisms of speech and behavior at the more uncanny movements of the conscience.

It's a shame that the José Luis Guerín film's verbal qualities far outpace its formal attributes.

Hamaguchi arranges most sequences around a handful of static, roomy medium shots that subtly suggest emotional dynamics through camera and actor positioning.

The documentary is just more of what we've come to expect from director Richard Linklater's expanded fanverse.

James Schamus's screenplay is rich with culturally specific details that deepen these forking moral predicaments.

The film, whose disparate narrative threads unsurprisingly never connect, drowns in weirdness for its own sake.

As clarified potently by the film, most of life is spent distracting oneself from matters of the closest personal significance.

It's too texturally exacting in its recreation of a transitory moment in U.S. history to register as a failure.

What makes the film churn so forcefully for so long is Jaume Collet-Serra's visual acrobatics.

Walter Salles reinforces the impression of Jia's own art as emerging fluidly from the vagaries of his own life and socioeconomic position.

Roberto Minervini's documentary is as quintessentially American a text as one could hope for in today's divided union.

The film is an unambiguous endorsement of violent revolt as the only effective response to such inhuman savagery.

Richard Linklater's film luxuriates in a world that's the platonic ideal of youthful indulgence.

A flaccidly directed film that basks for two hours in a carefully art-designed simulation of the past.

Michael Showalter is content to trade They Came Together's mischievous genre deconstructionism for cheap-shot indie quirk.

It has the uncanny quality of an out-of-body experience, not a torn-from-the-heart confessional.

The film adheres to the dictionary definition of a classical genre without ever attempting to subvert it.

What comes through clearly by the end of the film is the act of one artist's eccentric generosity breathing new awareness into the life of another.

One wonders how receptive young audiences should be to a film that puts its storytelling secondary to its message-making.

As in Nathan Silver's previous work, what could have been a rote retread of Pasolini's Teorema blossoms into a study of factional identity and power dynamics.

A buoyant tribute, even if the pedigree of the project implies something more paradigm-shifting.

In the simultaneously heady and lyrical The Creation of Meaning, we're obviously implicated in that comment, as the film views the meaning-making process as something malleable and dependent on perspective.

Out 1 is largely a film of conversation, as its prolonged rehearsal vignettes regularly give way to even lengthier scenes of verbal self-analysis.

It offers a CliffsNotes encapsulation of Edgar Allen Poe's most enduring works for viewers unacquainted with them.

Its utter indulgence in esoterica paradoxically leaves it most vulnerable to the beating heart of this great artist of self-therapy.

Ramin Bahrani's talent for orchestrating sequences of tightly wound tension is in full bloom here, as is his complementary knack for quieter grace notes.

Fatih Akin falls back on convenience and contrivance to streamline the thornier specificities of his grand-scale narrative.

This is exactly the kind of movie at which David Wain took aim with his sublime rom-com parody They Came Together.

Familiar as its art/life paralleling may be, it's all fueled by a filmmaker with an intimate relationship to his subject matter.

Its expositional crutch proves most inadequate when the team ascends the final pitch to the top after years of preparation in no more than a minute of screen time.

A consummate sampler platter of the bounty of state-of-the-art animation currently available as alternatives established major-studio house styles.