David Ehrlich

While even the movie’s best moments are derivative enough to deserve that kind of mix-and-match categorization, Welsh shoots the whole thing with such a knowing sense of time and place that its age-old story of revolt can feel like it’s happening for the very first time — like it’s now or never, and there’ll be no going back once the sun comes up.

Combining the knowingly arch style of Abbas Kiarostami (whose "Certified Copy" towers over and belittles this film) with the didactically educational passion of your favorite art professor, La Sapienza alternately feels like a self-reflexive love story or a haunted history lesson—its best scenes play like both.

The great shock of Wild Indian is Corbine isn’t afraid to paint Makwa as more of a sociopath than a victim. The filmmaker destabilizes that false dichotomy to such a frightening degree that audiences might see him as a simple monster as opposed to an overflowing vessel for centuries of genocidal trauma.

Urushadze’s excellent cast imbues their thinly drawn characters with a great deal of life, but the roles are so transparent that the film feels like more of an advertisement for peace than it does an argument for it.

It’s the first Sofia Coppola movie that feels — if only during its flattest stretches — as if it could have been made by somebody else, and yet at the same time it also plays like the loose and tipsy self-portrait of a maturing filmmaker being visited by the ghost of her greatest success.

Durkin’s movie has its fair share of crucial moments in the ring, but none of them would land with a fraction of the same impact if not for the many crystalline little moments in which Kerry, Kevin, David, and Mike get to build each other up.

Creating a lucid sense of reality only so that she can defile it with a wicked pivot towards madness, Asensio’s film creates a vision of immigrant life in America (and its value) that’s all the more urgent for how it uses genre elements to exaggerate the experience.

Here we have another spreadsheet of a movie that conceives of the human mind with the vision of a digital artist and the ethos of a corporate accountant; a film so mercilessly “relatable” that only a chatbot could ever hope to see themselves in it.

The American Dream may be a mass delusion, but it’s the realest thing in the world to those under its sway. Zhuk was able to manifest her destiny and make it across the ocean, and her movie offers a compelling glimpse at why that may have been the only choice her country ever gave her.

Spaceship Earth touches down as a grounded and even clinical analysis of our natural skepticism towards dreamers — of how our hope can sour into hostility as soon as it loses an iota of its shine.

A hyper-stylish and unexpectedly sweet rebuke to the idea that screwing people is a good way to get ahead, Gavras’ second feature manages the almost impossible task of mining something nice from the me-first mentality that’s been sweeping across modern Europe.

The World to Come is at its sharpest when trying to articulate the alchemy that happens when theory and sensation collide with each other and morph into something new.

By highlighting sweet, indicative, or hilarious moments rather than tracing the teachers’ relationships with any particular students, the film is more attuned to the rhythms of Headfort than it is the people in it.

It’s curious that The Fake Case works best as a dark comedy, with one particularly memorable scene finding Ai sneaking up on a couple of newlyweds as they have their wedding photos taken and snapping a few of his own.

Fortunately, the filmmaker’s rare gift for brutal absurdity remains intact, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer only gets funnier as it grows darker.

Wind River may not blow you away, but this bitter, visceral, and almost parodically intense thriller knows what it takes to survive.

Giddy, exhausting, and breathtakingly violent.

The stakes may seem low, but these high jinks resound with abstract generational import, the various episodes cohering into a moving portrait of a nation that couldn’t account for all it had lost in a war that it won.

In its haphazard search for facts, it happens upon a great many truths about how we see each other, and the price we pay for looking too closely.

As with most miracles, Sunset Song is more likely to evoke awe than any one particular emotion; it accumulates an immensely tender beauty that fills up your heart like water rising in a well during a rainstorm.

Yes, this crushingly personal film can make you feel like you’re intruding on a sacred ritual between perfect strangers, but that sense of trespassing (or TMI) is also what allows Last Flight Home to be such an immediate argument for the universal right to die.

Like a time-traveler who sets into motion the same fate they’re trying to undo, Submission is so desperate not to become a cliché that it ultimately wastes a golden opportunity to become something more.

Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform is not a subtle film. But these are unsubtle times, with unsubtle problems, and the most alarming thing about this grimly affecting Spanish allegory — which literalizes capitalism’s dehumanizing verticality with twice the gross-out terror of “Parasite,” and almost half of that masterpiece’s furious grace — is that it sometimes doesn’t seem like an allegory at all.

For almost 45 minutes, Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan is on pace to become the best, most urgent zombie movie since “28 Days Later.” And then — at once both figuratively and literally — this broad Korean blockbuster derails in slow-motion, sliding off the tracks and bursting into a hot mess of generic moments and digital fire.

The Raft, like the people aboard it, floats along the surface of a vast ocean of mystery and memory. The result is a bizarre, captivating, and borderline unbelievable memory play that only supports a hypothesis Genovés wasn’t prepared to consider: We are blind to the world as it is when we only saw the world as we are.

Anaïs isn’t so different in the wonderfully surprising last shot than she is in the first, but at last we can see that she’s having the time of her life.

“Homecoming” works by allowing itself to become an actual genre film, the first of its ilk to recognize that superhero movies might be more interesting if they were also something else.

The parallels between Watergate and Trumpocalypse are so boggling that they preclude any other reason for why Ferguson chose to make this film now. And yet, it’s the film’s deliberate timing that calls its value into question.