Carson Lund

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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