Clayton Dillard

Samuel Van Grinsven’s Went Up the Hill is characterized by a starkly precise aesthetic and withholding approach to the ghost story.

The overriding suspense here is largely created by watching truth become negotiable, and through the small, plausible distortions of the truth that people come up with when survival instincts kick in.

Petty humiliations accumulate into a quietly blistering indictment of a culture that’s conditioned immigrants to hustle, wait endlessly, and smile through it all, as if their sanity weren’t constantly under strain.

The film adopts a diaristic, epistolary form that flattens its emotional topography.

The film’s microcosm of dysfunction is convincing for how it depicts an ongoing, even never-ending, struggle to define oneself.

Dogman seems outwardly enamored with cosmic possibilities of meaning, but Luc Besson’s script remains earthbound and unimaginative.

It’s Argento who consistently makes the most compelling and incisive on-screen presence throughout Simone Scafidi’s documentary.

How to Have Sex winds up delivering on the promise of its title, as this is a truly instructive film about sexual politics, though a remarkable one for largely leaving emotions unresolved and relationships feeling messy.

This 1970 psychological thriller was Paul Vecchiali’s self-conscious attempt during the waning years of the Nouvelle Vague to take the movement’s genre-defying sensibilities in a new direction.

With its determination to retrace the largely forgotten steps of a feminist trailblazer, The Disappearance of Shere Hite is an essential work of archival savvy, blending popular and academic conversations with ease and precision.

The film understands how atrocity is perpetuated, fanning a maddening sense of injustice.

That Feña suffers so that other trans people won’t have to may be edifying to some, but it also reduces Mutt to an Afterschool Special.

The cinematography looks striking enough throughout the various set pieces, but little happens in them to elevate Heart of Stone past its hackneyed foundation.

The film can never quite decide to what extent it wants to be either a light-hearted raunchy comedy or a darker comedic assessment of contemporary life.

Sarah Vos creates a nearly mockumentary effect that neither fully lampoons nor endorses contemporary standards for the art world’s political correctness but lands at a decidedly more ambivalent point.

Jamie Sisley’s film looks at its serious subject matter through a maudlin lens.

There’s an emptiness to Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh that no amount of striking cinematography, thematic suggestion, and allusions to Jean Painlevé can disguise.

The film unfolds at an excessive remove from its subject matter, and it becomes less an incisive thesis about the pope than an occasion for Gianfranco Rosi to flex his stylistic muscles.

The Origin of Evil recalls Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness for how its prolonged, soft-peddled skewering of the wealthy seems convinced of its Buñuelian irreverence.

Part of what makes The Worst Ones tick with a pace close to that of a thriller is its self-reflexive relationship to genre and knack for referentiality.

Nina Menkes’s documentary comes dangerously close to inhabiting its own title.

To say that the film grows tedious quickly would suggest that it wasn’t already trite from frame one.

Stock story beats of generational dispute run throughout Utama, existing mainly to show off the widescreen possibilities of the Scope frame.

Last Flight Home is an anguished therapy session disguised as a meditation on life and death.

The film relies on wide shots of distant mountains to stand in for a fruitful interrogation of what it means to occupy the open terrain of the U.S.

Sergei Loznitsa continues to mine the archives for what amount to living documents of a past that, as is all too clear, reverberate into the present with devastating force.

The film neglects to find a conceptual framework for its prolonged consideration of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s eventual revelation: “I have always loved you, but it’s much clearer to me now.”

The film drops any interest in the blurring of fact and fiction as it settles into a rote account of a contemporary oil rig catastrophe.