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.

Its anodyne tastefulness effectively lumps it into a big vat of likeminded Sundance-or-SXSW-endorsed offerings.

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

When the appeal of the film's whimsy wears off, the fogginess of its historical perspectives comes to the fore.

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.

A phony collection of storytelling clichés held under the banner of archetype and lent a modicum of weight by the splendor of the landscape.

If the film is meant only as a pulpy genre exercise, Matt Shakman's competence in various modes actually works to strip it of any sense of coherent vision.

The film finds the actors' performance deficiencies functioning less as signs of authentic teenage behavior than as an incompetent carrier of plot.

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

This time around, in spotlighting Liam Neeson's fatigued charisma, Jaume Collet-Serra's formidable filmmaking chops have plateaued.

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.

For all the thematic emphasis the script ultimately places on the allegedly thick bonds among these men, it's surprising how often they communicate solely through exposition.

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

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

Adam Rifkin's documentary convincingly portrays the sense of community fostered by Giuseppe Andrews's crazed passion.

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.

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

Its greatest asset, and another trait it shares with Mann and Fincher's work, is a careful attention toward the particulars of its milieu in a way that doesn't call attention to those period touches.

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 cinematographic approach of the film suggests some unholy hybrid of the aesthetic and genre indulgences of Michael Bay and the hyper-literalist plot construction of Christopher Nolan.

Of greatest damage to the doc's coherence is its wholehearted belief that its subjects are offering firsthand reports worth hearing.

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.

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

From its first draw of blood onward, it bolts down a foreseeable slasher-movie trajectory, laying on thick the dramatic irony while constantly inventing new reasons to punish its characters for old iniquities.

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.

Never once does it project an intuitive understanding of how humans would behave or react in the midst of such a shattering misfortune.

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.

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

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.

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

Milestone’s direction is only sporadically inspired.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The film is a record of everyday spaces and the emotionally charged human dramas that pass through them.

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.

Navajo Joe plays more like a ’50s B western in its fluid pacing, compact narrative construction, and hokey emphasis on star power than it does the kinds of sprawling genre re-workings common to its era.