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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 issue of racism sits nestled under both this sequence and the field of anthropology as a whole, giving Expedition Content a nakedly ontological dimension that interrogates how images are produced and who produces them.

Alison McAlpine's documentary lacks urgency beyond its persistent pondering of the sky's eternal mysteries.

Despite the film's bleak premise, writer-director Radu Jude finds dark humor within the certainty of death.

The pleasure of Denis Côté's film radiates not so much from its storytelling as it does from the meditative force of its formal construction. Read our review.

It adheres too rigidly to news-cycle replications of barbaric governmental acts, and without putting them into greater perspective.

The film is enlivened by an acute grasp of the impossibilities that abused Indonesian women face in a society predicated on their continued physical and emotional subjugation to men.

On the Seventh Day brings a certain levity to wrenching matters of daily survival by thoroughly humanizing its characters, thus preventing them from feeling as if they're being written as stand-ins for thematic ideas.

The film's screenplay is impressive for how crucial plot points emerge as backdrops to the explicit purpose of a scene.

Writer-director Attila Till is content to indulge a complication-free mix of bloodshed and pathos.

Agnès Varda and JR's film develops into something approaching a manifesto for the possibility of shared happiness.

The Future Perfect has the texture of a novella that keeps reworking the same idea in successively intricate ways.

Whereas the more grounded scenes of Death Note anchor a startlingly bloody fantasy of power run amok, the scenes that fixate on super powers and code-busting seldom manage to rise above the realm of serviceable YA fiction.

Bertrand Bonello constructs a clear-eyed sense of how technology keeps getting closer and closer to replacing human consciousness.

The film’s rhythmic editing contextualizes Ferguson’s streets for their relevance to a black populace’s want for stability and peace.

It too quickly opts out of its Scenes from a Marriage-like potential for what amounts to an augmented take on The Straight Story.

Bertrand Tavernier's exquisite documentary consistently avoids mere hagiography by looking to the films themselves.

Andrzej Wajda's film is a lean, unwavering look at the effects of artistic idealism in the face of fascist doctrine.

The film hovers between being a straight-up biopic of Zweig and a diagnosis of neoliberalism's recent ceding to neofascist policy and nationalistic fervor.

The choice of low-grade, handheld digital images further reduces the film to the clichés of revisionist literary filmmaking.

Mimosas confounds its surface narrative with intimations of more layered meanings to come through a jockeying of story threads.

Few documentarians give themselves to their work as literally as Joanna Arnow.

The primary pleasure of the film resides in its awareness of the impossibilities of unity, whether physical or cultural, within a rapidly transforming global milieu.

Canners plays a bit too infatuated with its subjects and for reasons not wholly clear by the film's end.

So Yong Kim's film ultimately manages a convincing articulation of friendship between women.

The film rolls political commentary into the template of a “lost highway” horror film by forgoing ironic distancing.

The film makes no concessions about its dissatisfaction with the whole rotten lot of so-called western democracy.

Mehrdad Oskouei avoids sentimentalizing the girls or tritely lamenting their stolen innocence.

The film’s nagging representational problem stems from its reductive sense of place and portraiture of emotional displacement, which gradually phases out the possibility of thornier revelations.

Sam Pollard's documentary teeters on reaching a higher plane of meaning simply through the efficiency of its information.

Writer-director Anna Muylaert writes themes into excellent, controlled first acts that turn capricious by the third.

Its strength lies in taking a thematic approach to Lumet's work, which prevents a chronological rattling off of one title after another.

The film is further confirmation of Mia Hansen-Løve’s delicately devastating ear and touch as a filmmaker.

Fire at Sea initiates a narrative that probes the fundamental gap between wanting to help and actually being able to do so.

Elite Zexer weaves an impressively terse narrative of distinctly motivated characters, but the film’s core remains somewhat shapeless due to the routine dramatization.

The Apostate finds humor in unusual images or situations, few resounding with lasting impact.

It insists that it's in moments of small talk, between life's larger events, that one finds vitality.

Tracy Droz Tragos's documentary examines its titular subject with a compassionate eye for regional detail.

It highlights how the ownership of art serves as a marker of capital for distinguishing one institution over another.

The doc finds pathos in an amiable, fluid construction that chronologically charts the career (and political) ambitions of TV producer Norman Lear.

The film stagnates by restricting camera mobility and focusing more on capturing dimensions of the performances in close-up.

The film presents Kitty Genovese's identity as an afterthought, turning her living days and nights into incidental details.

The final note of optimism is consistent with the documentary's overall tone and interest in perseverance.

The film's Cuban specificity comes to seem like an opportunistic locale for reenacting a decidedly art-cinematic legacy.

Given its nearly episodic structure, formal choices, and similar thematic inquiries, Sworn Virgin suggests an unofficial remake of Vivre Sa Vie.

The documentary lingers on silences and reveals its subjects only through moments of quotidian behavior.

The documentary is an attempt to capture something of Akerman's infectious spirit and thirst for worldly experience, as both an artist and a human being.

The film mostly functions as a tour of familiar horror tropes for much of its running time.

The film's larger purpose, be it about the ardor of handmade crafts or artist Tom Sachs's artistic ambitions, never emerges with any consistent focus.

Asghar Farhadi's 2006 film interrogates the tensions between tactility and vision in complex ways.

It neither glorifies nor castigates pot usage, letting consumers speak for themselves without the intrusion of an omnipresent voice.

Its vantage point too loosely assembles an argument by focusing, almost obsessively, on reassembling a tangible timeline of events.

The film finally seems conspicuously at odds with itself, neither funny nor impassioned enough to pass as an accomplished vision of transnational welfare.

By refusing to finitely define Natalia, or reduce her life to a series of biographical details, Akerman elides eulogizing of any sort, dignifying Natalia without personifying her as an idea made flesh.

According to the film, individual misdeeds aren't the final enemy, but the byproduct of an unregulated regime.

By negating more conventional, facts-first priorities, Mor Loushy creates an alternative historiography that's more meant to be felt than learned.

The film is unwaveringly attentive to problematizing the dividing line between predator and prey.

With the invocation of national allegiance as an inherent contradiction, the documentary blooms its larger, allegorical inklings.

The film unfolds as a kind, politically soft offering of what lies beneath both Sembène's films and the man himself.

The film is a compelling addition to Sebastián Silva's cinema of compassionate comeuppance.

Laurie Anderson condenses contemporary, human experience to the point where exterior and interior are made indistinguishable from one another.

It displays a staggering propensity for examining its unauthorized scenario without succumbing to either too insular or too general a set of assertions.

It forays into satirical terrain in order to elide actual dealings with the problems at hand, so that each piece feels alternatively frivolous and weighty.

North Korean culture is lensed in part through a South Korean perspective, with the final chapter asking: “Is reunification possible?”

It uses convention to its advantage through an intriguing play with casting choices and bizarrely effective allusions to film history.

Character relations are hinted at and even primed for confrontation, but without payoff or meaningful conclusion.

It revives hope for a pop-art cinema that's capable of treating characters like actual human beings rather than pawns on a chess board.

Bobcat Goldthwait's hand too nervously tempers Crimmins's outré tactics as kooky showmanship bred from unimaginable trauma.

The poetic pretenses are compounded by a sledgehammer insistence on elusive and irreducible moments as inherently beautiful.

Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville reinforce the very circumstances they outwardly condemn.

Like technological innovation itself, the film seems overwhelmed by the reach of all its techo-cultural parts.

Charles Stone III's film ultimately succeeds as a convincing social plea, but fails as compelling cinema.

Stations of the Cross acknowledges that putting theoretical behaviors and mindsets into practice can have unwieldy consequences if context and intent are wholly ignored.

Even Les Blank's most conventional work remains an elusive vision, punctuated by cultural insights that elude many filmmakers for their entire careers.

Its wholly complex and provocative social pleas slip too frequently into the seedy realm of journalistic exploitation.

It lacks a formal rigor to match its thematic heft, preferring a digestible naturalism that serves its plot points in plain, uncomplicated sight.

Michael Winterbottom's film is a mess of tones, but not of ideas, which could well sum up the director's prodigious but uneven oeuvre.

Sophie Barthes neglects to thoroughly conceive of Emma's plight, instead making only sporadic gestures to it.

If the documentary isn't quite dynamic in its revelations, it's considerably more so in its challengingly essayistic presentation.

The film at first plays like a refresher and throwback to Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, before revealing itself to be less minimal than minor.

This adaptation is to concerned with narrative fidelity and formal objectivity to pierce the veil of power dynamics that largely comprises the film's concerns.

Lafleur denies Nicole the angsty treatments given similar characters in films like The Graduate and Frances Ha by refusing to saturate the film with an undergirding sense of charm, where the issues being faced are merely points of spasmodic uncertainty that will erode over time.

The ghostliness of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna derives from an identity crisis, where digitization threatens to eradicate the gallery space.