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.