Clayton Dillard

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

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

Ikiru wows for its complicated interrogation (and innovation) of subjective, cinematic experiences of time and memory, but lulls in its commemoration of a wealthy, privileged man who finally decides to care after it’s absolutely confirmed he has no time left to live.

Tati biographer David Bellos called 1953’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday “Tati’s most perfect film,” and in many ways, it’s difficult to disagree with this sentiment in terms of tone and form.

If it ultimately can't reconcile all that's presented in its too-brief runtime, that's largely because its situation, much like the dissonance between those involved, is comprehensibly irresolvable.

Preston Sturges jammed volumes of sociological concerns into a 90-minute satire with Sullivan’s Travels, Hollywood’s greatest comedy.

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

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.

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.

Lukas Moodysson's film allows its trio of girls to express themselves through gender, certainly, but not undermine their desire to be heard as artists first.

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

Broomfield isn't so much dedicated to journalistic truth or social ethnography as he is displaying bodies and mindsets of individuals that complicate any sense of Manichean polemics, where good and evil must be reckoned with at a purely secular and corporeal level, particularly along the lines of class and gender.

Blood and trauma make an irresistible mix in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle.

Only Imamura could irreverently intertwine Catholicism, brutal murders, and pachinko to produce such devastating ends.

Jazz music is a state of mind in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 film ’Round Midnight.

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

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

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

The Other Side of Hope fulfills the vague sense of its aspirational title as a film limited in scope and led only by the guidance of its maker's skeptical positivity.

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.

Director Mike Nichols exploits rather than interrogates Ben’s anxieties, so that his ennui is reducible to his accomplishments, which keep getting repeated by the adults as badges of vicarious honor. Nichols also plays Ben’s socially awkward tics for laughs, whether Ben’s literally whimpering in Mrs. Robinson’s presence or in a cold sweat as he arranges what appears to be his first sexual encounter.

It evolves into an intimate reverie on family and aesthetics, while remaining sporadically attuned to the reflexive and ethical dimensions of ethnographic discovery.

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.

Director Brett Morgen distinguishes the biographical documentary by viewing himself as more of a curator than a film director.

A Room with a View is a masterful example of how to take well-regarded literary source material, render it in a manner that displays the visual markers of middlebrow sophistication, like ornamental costume design and fine-tuned “art direction,” as the Oscars like to call it, and intersperse it with surface-level controversies, like three heterosexual men chasing each other around a pond with their dicks out.

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

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.

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

Tsai Ming-liang's debut makes one yearn for an alternative reality where it, not Pulp Fiction, became the beacon of '90s independent filmmaking.

It's as if Carlos Saura were calling the bluff of spectacle-oriented narrative cinema that necessitates excusing its excesses with characters and plotting.

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.

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.

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

This is a work of art that's as much a cinematic probe, and a challenge to mythologizing past eras, as it is an ancestral history lesson.

A time-jumping narrative that’s rooted inside the linear temporal unfoldings of a pre-determined trial, Breaker Morant is like a conventional bloke in art—house clothing—but oh, what garb he has.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

It resembles a satirical treatise of self-reflection, functioning simultaneously as a summation of Bruno Dumont's thematic interests over the previous two decades and as a bonkers remake of Humanité.

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.

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

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

Charles Poekel displays an assured directorial hand and maintains a modest, appealing, even droll sensibility throughout.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Sid & Nancy, in its first half, offers an immersive plunge into the punk lifestyle, capturing with wit and verve its anti-authoritarian sneer and DIY ethos, before then slowly circling the drain during a dour second half given over to disillusion and dissolution.

It convincingly reconciles private passion with public desire by suggesting that, for women in particular, the 21st-century limelight is always on, no matter the setting or venue.

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.

Like Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, which creates a damning critique of media circuses that would allow a man to die if it means increasing readership, The Tarnished Angels understands the innate human desire to look at beauty or terror as the potentially catastrophic fuel of public interest.

It fuses documentary and dramatic sequences into a free-form narrative that exists somewhere between essay film, political manifesto, and exploitation.

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.

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

It's a film of such multitudinous interests and storytelling pursuits that its unfolding replicates the ecstasy of newfound romance.

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

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.

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

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

Even if the narrative threads aren’t as tightly focused on exploring a complex theme as one might hope, The Body Snatcher nevertheless manages to still send chills, and predominately through Wise’s fleet direction and Karloff’s unflinching embodiment of a real-world monster.

A ferocious plea for character salvation within a milieu where money and bodily affect are the raison d'être for human existence.

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

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

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

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

Mike Figgis’s anthem of aspiration and struggle leaves no doubt about Francis Ford Coppola’s beliefs.

In the end, Suburbia’s greatest strength lies in its assertion of youth as a political state of mind.

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

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

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.

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.

Over 40 years after its release, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song still retains its shock value, but even more so, it remains distinct as a work that cannot be squarely placed within a singular category.

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

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

Like Shohei Imamura, Argentinian writer-director Gaston Solnicki can be understood as a cinematic "entomologist."

What progressively mounts tension is the film's understanding of a boy's gradually realized homosexuality as being inextricable from the central metaphor of compromised vision.

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

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

Adept as both timely character study and epochal drama, Test wonderfully manages fully formed humanism without sentimentality.

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

Few genre films come as close to entering the abyss as Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, which effectively plays out as one elongated interrogation both of a single witness and the tortured psyche of Sergeant Johnson (Sean Connery).

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.

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

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

Death is a many-splendored thing in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which treats the possibility of an afterlife not with somber religious symbolism, but a keen sense that a human being’s mortal end must be understood for its corporeal difficulties.

The In-Laws never makes deeper, sustained sense of its premise and seems content to revel in the more basic pleasure of seeing Falk and Arkin interact with one another.

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

It falls into the trappings of middlebrow literary adaptation by finding only sporadic means to convincingly adjudicate the trauma and anguish of its transitory epoch.