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.