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.

The film comes to feel like a parody of a possession flick rather than a straightforward replication of the genre’s tropes.

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.

The film settles much too comfortably into the well-trodden footsteps of other works.

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.

The film seems to think that the mere recognition of Gabriel as a narcissist sufficiently complicates the character's sense of entitlement.

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.

As two-handers go, the film has a moderately compelling pair of performances at its center, with Claudio Rissi’s take on a fun-loving road warrior providing an amusing, if obvious, counterpoint to Paulina García’s reserved homebody.

While many documentaries about notable figures feel the unfortunate need to legitimate their subjects with hyperbolic praise from recognizable sources, the film immediately runs the gamut in a manner that would be worthy of a mockumentary were it not completely serious.

The film tends to literalize its theme of unfulfilled desire by having characters explicitly lament their lost pasts.

The film curiously steers toward surmising Hedy Lamarr's psychological state as it pertained to love and pleasure.

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.

Elvira Lind's film is closer to an advertisement for Bobbi Jene Smith than a film about the contemporary dancer.

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

Inherent to director Theo Anthony's misappropriation of the essay form is a conflicting account of precisely which history his documentary seeks to investigate.

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.

Justin Chon fumbles the take on how his characters' anger fits into the greater landscape of a L.A. during the aftermath of the Rodney King beating.

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.

A routinely assembled mélange of provocative material consistently undone by its maker's perplexing need to foist himself into the center of every conversation.

The divide between meaningful journalism and ethical filmmaking seldom seems as wide as it does in The Wrong Light.

The House's limp comedic pieces are only sporadically enlivened by a game cast.

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.

The documentary mistakes its access to quotidian behaviors as evidence of the need for comprehensive educational and financial reform.

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.

The film is intended to be placed at the altar of Julian Schnabel, an artist so singular that words simply fail.

The film ascribes to a conventionally contrapuntal take on the lives of those who spend all day surrounded by death.

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.

The film’s depiction of friendship seldom pushes past insights predicated on a fundamental tension between characters.

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

The Institute seems constantly on the verge of dipping into spoof, though of what exactly is difficult to say.

The film wants to have its flesh and eat it too, but even more damning is how little meat is on its bones to begin with.

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.

Celia Rowlson-Hall's Ma has had its subtext dragged kicking and screaming to the surface.

It predictably lurches toward acts of extreme violence with little interest other than the instant titillation such moments afford.

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.

For a film that warns against believing in a mirage, Burn Country seems all too comfortable perpetuating one.

It believes that the avenue to proving humanity is through banalizing gestures of quotidian significance.

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

The film plays like it's been methodically configured to snuff out an even marginal indulgence of its characters' emotions.

The entirety of the film seems increasingly constructed around ill-begotten attempts at dark humor.

A deliberately offbeat characterization of mental illness, Hunter Gatherer is ultimately a failed act of empathy.

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.

There's a fundamental lack of dramatic exigency in writer-director Puk Grasten's storytelling.

Its enervated address of both mental-health treatment and gun laws receives few constructive articulations beyond a single scene.

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

Any perceptive dialogue or contemporary socio-political subtext is pummeled by Jonás Cuarón’s preference for empty genre thrills.

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.

It provides materials for discussion without directing the viewer toward a particular solution or easy answer.

Robert Kenner's stylistic choices amplify the film's fetishistic fascination with the nuclear weaponry itself.

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

Christian Carion's film shamelessly wrings excitement from the recreation of violent ideological conflict.

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

The film appears to have been devised to pander to the presumptions of Western, liberal viewers.

Lars Kraume's tinkering with the historical record would be more welcome were he also shifting away from the standard biopic template.