Carson Lund

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

Ethan Hawke's concentration on Seymour Bernstein isn't a betrayal of his own ego massaging, but rather an attempt to have a genuine soul-bearing conversation.

If not exactly an endearing experience on the whole, Irma la Douce is a fine example of Billy Wilder’s mid-career eccentricity and cosmopolitan curiosity.

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

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

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

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 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.

Even as it entertains increasingly far-fetched detours, the film's folkloric narrative offers an ideal vehicle for this pictorial play.

If it’s an ungainly variety, it doesn’t suggest directorial sloppiness, but the warmth of oral tradition as it dances around a cluster of themes (belonging, redemption, reconciliation) with the vigor of a yarn spun, porter in hand, alongside an open fire.

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

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

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, the distance from hope to despair is a short jump—a chasm crossed with the help of something so immediate as a television transmission.

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

Even 48 years after its release, and well into Dylan’s current phase of relative transparency, D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back retains something of a forbidden quality, a feeling that we shouldn’t be privy to the things it shows us.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 sticks firmly to a Kerouac-lite immersion into young love rather than a more provocative portrait of the hazards inherent to modern urban life.

The absence of anything traditionally "painterly" reflects an ambivalent attitude toward the kind of capitalistic pro-growth machinations on display in the film.

The film’s unifying theme is the egocentrism and inevitable violence of masculinity.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

What makes Alice in the Cities so noteworthy is the tender, lifelike rapport cultivated between Vogler and Rottländer.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It broods along as if it's expressing something monumentally important with each slow-as-molasses camera move.

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

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

Any masochistic joy that can be derived from watching the film owes to seeing it take its bullheaded conceit to its logical, artless extreme.

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.

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

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

Milestone’s direction is only sporadically inspired.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Woman of the Year certainly has its other auxiliary charms: beautifully textured lighting by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg; a luminous, if limited, performance by Fay Bainter as Tess’s motherly aunt; and some enchanting simulations of soft winter snowfall. But it’s hard not to feel berated, in a time that’s seeing the resurgence of a pernicious nationalism, by both the film’s anti-feminist slant and its insistent compulsion to put a box around Americanism.

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.

The narrative works through the many contradictions brewing inside its main character in the wake of his personal actualization without ever feeling like a dramatic checklist.

The mannered direction is at its most effective when it inspires an enhanced sensitivity to the import of every gesture, visual or verbal.

Fantastic Planet’s blend of straightforward, almost elementary storytelling (any missing context is filled in via a voiceover by Jean Valmont as the adult Terr) with heady themes and eroticized imagery marks the film as a relic of an era with much looser standards around the dichotomy of the children’s film and the adult drama.

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.

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

Flowers of Shanghai operates on the whole much like Yoshihiro’s music, filling your senses like a thick haze, holding you rapt without petitioning for your attention.

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.

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

The film isn't really fooling anyone into feeling doom-laden suspense (Paris, after all, is still standing), but the principal performers sell the momentousness of the drama.

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

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

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

There's literally no way to miss the memo that It's All So Quiet is about dealing with the encroachment of death, as it's there in every scene.

It showcases a genuine fascination with the mind/body split engendered by Skyping, online dating, and constant app usage through a plot that doesn't fuel itself on received wisdom.

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

Writer-director Louise Archambault's neatly affirmative denouement is at odds with the more uncertain reality occurring at the edges of the film's drama.

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

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

The film is yet another of Phillippe Garrel's densely anecdotal studies of romantic fidelity.

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 complicated psychological realities of army personnel require a tougher directorial treatment than the maudlin melodrama presented here.

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

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

For a life beyond mere DVD supplementary material, the film could use a dose of rigor to balance out its steady stream of congratulatory pit stops.

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

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

Its lack of dramatic specificity places it in a precarious middle ground between exacting character study and ethereal parable.

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

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

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

If nothing else, the film is a feat of formal conception and craftsmanship.

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

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.

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.