Carson Lund

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.