Carson Lund

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.