David Ehrlich

The movie is every bit as bloated as his last few, but its charms remind us of his great potential (and potential greatness).

Subway is a rush of youthful energy so raw and well-realized that it steamrolls any of the director’s attempts to cohere it into an actual story.

Eventually so generic that it might as well be about anyone, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool creates a foul tension between the paint-by-numbers quality of its approach and the uniqueness of its affair.

Even at its most absurd, the movie is chilled by an ominous and ever-present feeling that the world has become smaller than we ever thought possible, and that real nightmares are waiting for us on the other side of every window.

The Hidden Fortress is a bracing adventure in its own right — not a frivolous outlier from one of cinema’s most formative oeuvres, but rather a Cervantes-inflected delight that complicates and enriches Kurosawa’s signature humanism by exploring the value of morality in an amoral world.

This is a proudly traditional oater that travels down old trails with new sadism, as though the Western genre only died off because the movies weren’t cruel enough.

Quick, vibrant, pulsing with all sorts of crossover appeal until a slightly moribund energy takes hold toward the end, Trier’s film is never more fun than when Julie is second-guessing herself and/or trying to keep time from slipping through her fingers.

Lester treats the whole thing with breezy exuberance, with colourful cinematography by legendary Carpenter, Zemeckis, and Spielberg collaborator Dean Cundey, and best of all, a killer late-disco soundtrack sweeps all your cares away.

For a biblically-scaled film cycle so rich with irony that it seems to be chipping off the walls of the brutalist apartment complex where most of it takes place, perhaps the greatest irony of them all is that Dekalog is ultimately defined by its humility.

The result is a film that lucidly traces the specter of fascism (never extinguished, always waiting to exhale), and how unreal it feels for it to cast its shadow across Europe once more. It’s also a film that feels stuck between stations, so doggedly theoretical that it borders on becoming glib.

Welding the flow and logic of a romantic comedy to the faintly ridiculous soul of a melodrama, the film is never clear about whose story its telling, or what it might want for them.

The film has the power to make our bodies catch up with our hearts — the power to help us safely experience the kind of terror we need to remember in a way that makes it impossible for us to forget.

At times a frustrating experience, Vengeance Is Mine transforms over the course of its running time, Enokizu’s impenetrable nature eventually bottoming out and blossoming into a perverse relatability.

A characteristically playful documentary.

Robbie, for her part, has never been better. Making the most of her first leading role since Z for Zachariah, she does a brilliant job of skating along the thin line that runs between glory and the gutter. Sympathetic but not too sympathetic, her performance is all that allows the film to maintain its tenuous hold over its queasy tragicomedy.

An immense, brave, and genuinely earth-shaking self-portrait that explores sexual assault with a degree of nuance and humility often missing from the current discourse, The Tale is undeniably primed for the #MeToo movement, but it’s also so much bigger than that.

Dano crafts an unsparing portrait that’s harsh and humane in equal measure.

While some of Bispuri’s scripting can be a bit too pointed for a story that traffics in such elemental textures (a brief flashback scene is particularly ill-advised), the film renders each of Vittoria’s mothers with such riveting and unvarnished empathy that you hardly even notice how their daughter is growing up before your eyes, stronger than the both of them.

Each scene is so quietly compelling because Haigh doesn’t focus on cruelty, but helplessness.

If The Villainess sounds like derivative junk, that’s because it is — but rarely is derivative junk executed with such panache and personality.

While Farrier is extremely likable — and his subject the polar opposite of that in every possible way — the documentary he’s made about Organ inadvertently complicates the matter of who is trapped with who, or if anyone is trapped at all. The finished product often feels more like watching a strained pas de deux than it does someone latching onto their prey.

In an overwhelmingly dense film that never feels as if it’s only ever doing one thing, Decker’s form never forces you to choose between the story and its very meta shadows.

The whole movie is suspended in a pleasant and intimate space between order and chaos, love and abandonment, leaving the nest and building a new one. Every time Shithouse borrows from something else, it only seems to become more itself.

August 32nd on Earth takes way too long to get going, but the chemistry between its leads helps things along. More than anything, however, it’s the incredible economy of Villeneuve’s images that keeps things together, his shots becoming tighter and more expressive as the story falls apart.

Gyllenhaal has been too good too often to label any one of her performances as her best, but she’s certainly never been better than she is here.

The Visitor might be a hot mess, the byproduct of tailspinning egos and the best drugs movie money could buy in the late 70s, but it certainly isn’t an accident.

Rather than forge a believable relationship between Grace and Del that stokes our interest in the future, this uneasy two-hander strings us along by raising dull questions about the past.

A ravishing neo-romantic takedown of Victorian repression, spooky and scathing in equal measure.

Leave No Trace sprouts into a modest but extraordinarily graceful film about what people need from each other, and the limits of what they can give of themselves.

For a film with so few secrets of its own to hide, Eva also offers little to see on the surface.

No matter how iffy the story gets, or how clinical Eyre’s direction becomes, Thompson makes it absolutely heartrending to watch Fiona’s veneer crack one line at a time.

Colette is a costume drama for people who have yet to figure out that they love costume dramas. It’s fleet enough after that first act, and the squeezed plotting of its second half ensures the story never gets too long in the tooth.

Disobedience is a beautiful, fraught, and emotionally nuanced drama that wrestles with hard questions about the tension between the life we’re born into and the one we choose for ourselves.

Much less consistently enjoyable than many Hong films twice its length, Grass compensates for its dramatic slackness and deviant sobriety by honing in on the ideas that its director’s work often skirts around.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a small movie, far too modest and knowing to surrender to melodrama and apply cosmetic fixes to deep wounds...but it beautifully articulates the need for young people to realize the validity of who they are, and even more beautifully crystalizes the moment when that starts to happen.

Crucially, these characters are so believable that every scene has an internal logic and justifies itself.