David Katz

Pálmason’s overall sincerity has its dividends, even for what it lacks in candidness: the poignant closing shot distills that this is his vision on this eternal topic, open to the risk that its alternating visual modes won’t harmonize.

[Anderson's] made a largely thrilling populist action movie with some of his most spectacular cinematic formalism, and disciplined, linear storytelling, but lacking the dark beauty and profundity of his best work.

MEGADOC elaborates on what we’ve learned from the clearly partial and biased trade reporting that documented its production. Yet it also isn’t a corrective to that run of media revelations; just by visualizing the mayhem that made Megalopolis can we see that those articles (in the Hollywood Reporter especially) didn’t arise from nowhere.

Videoheaven embalms a world of choice, and greater sociality, that was once the cutting edge of modernity and now is history; so it goes. But as the film’s sucker-punch final line confirms, it matters to commemorate it––not because the video “era” was great. It matters because it was a chapter of American life.

Overall, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire shows us how this discourse falls away––or most essential points are refined––when elaborated upon by such voluptuous cinematic form.

Ultimately, it’s a case in point for how an impeccably styled arthouse-grindhouse crossover can feel both dense with signifiers to unpack (although lacking more commonly understood kinds of “depth”), but also fleet, frothy and fun.

Hovering around the prosody of “simp” is the word “sub” — Paul is certainly a proud sub, as we gradually understand his content isn’t solely cheery scroll fodder, but that he’s also happily exhibiting his sexual preference as an “out” kink enthusiast, shining visibility on himself and perhaps others like him to come as the 2020’s continue on.

Fuori stands apart as one of the filmmaker’s most vibrant and accessible works so far, able to emphasize the story of a powerful and beautiful older woman — with flecks of a classic melodrama or the “woman’s picture” — beyond the heritage concerns of Sapienza’s role in Italian letters.

Ultimately, Two Prosecutors is like a perfect 50-50 cocktail of dread and dialogue, the vodka being whichever you’d choose, making the inevitable feel capable of deferment, before it strikes more devastatingly than you’d even think.

It’s always visually transportive and grimly sublime, focusing on simple plots and conflicts that provide ample space for philosophical and existential contemplation. And “Sirât” is undoubtedly his most fully realized work in his regard, notable too for folding in the visceral pleasures of contemporary genre and even blockbuster cinema.

In the interest of reservation: this isn’t Serra’s most intellectually interesting film, making it less fulfilling than his others, though it achieves the most directness of intention and rhetorical clarity of his work so far, continuing from Pacifiction in displaying how naturally his method and interests fit depicting the modern world

You watch the scraps of footage, and while it might offend conventional critical opinion, then and now, there’s something very pure about the man’s artistry––one feels him struggling to reconcile conflicting desires to be serious and commemorative with his goofball streak, offering that unique Lewis tonal and philosophical recipe present in his best work.

Perry’s film, one of his most accomplished and complete-feeling to date, exists in both a past and conditional tense. It gives a brilliant précis of one of indie music’s most influential artists: in its most conventional passages, it’s a visual and critical biography identifying the key features of their suburban and middle-American backgrounds, their initiation into “alt” culture and the art life as students, and their sometimes loving, often tentative rapport with the 90s’ big-money music industry.

What we have is a domestic thriller initially consigned to the domicile before the impact of its primary, female characters shatter those confines, taking it to the desert-like ex-urban outskirts and the hypothetical beyond.

Just over an hour long, Sleep #2 is one of the most demanding and static features I’ve seen in a while, with darkened, theatrical viewing conditions an imperative. And the old critical saw that it’s “more rewarding to think about than watch” also wandered into my mind, but sometimes you need to play through the pain, to let the impact and results the film seeks bloom in your head.

If Eight Postcards from Utopia is undoubtedly a compilation-essay, it’s an unusually crowd-pleasing one.

True to the title, it’s a long soak in a certain kind of soulful, middle-class malaise, not far removed from John Cassavetes’ more restrained films.

It’s dazzling as handiwork and world-building, but more questionable if we scrutinize it as just as a work or piece of psychological realism, which it has aspirations of being.

With inspiration taken from the somber wave of ’70s American buddy movies, To a Land Unknown will comfortably endear itself to audiences, avoiding anything overly discursive so it can thrive provoking anger and pathos.

Through their concentrated and pared-down survey of institutional power, Asgari and Khatami show foremost how no behavior and social practice is spared the state’s gaze, and personal autonomy––especially for those outside the elites––remains only a myth.

Chastain and Sarsgaard––ably supported by Josh Charles, Jessica Harper, and Elsie Fisher across the ensemble––are just fantastic, and find an ideal emotional register for Franco’s dramatic somersaults.

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial succeeds as many adroit legal thrillers have, probing the limits of the law (and its inability) for all its protocol and safeguards, to provide a full accounting of “justice”: it is always so much more complicated.

Coup de Chance is an amiable, sometimes-profound amuse-bouche.

For what a discomforting and despairing experience much of The Beast is, when I’ve thought back to it, its moments of real, uncomplicated cinematic pleasure, its verve and sense of joyousness, are what mark my memories. It’s romantic, without a capital-R.

As a director Cooper gives it all he’s got; his eye and visual sense are possibly still developing, but he knows how to corral lively, motivated performances out of leads and supporting ensemble.

Klondike stands as one of the stronger dramatizations of this crucial moment in recent history.

Whereas I Saw the Devil was relentlessly violent and mean-spirited, Cobweb has a softer heart, and fixates on sloppier ensemble staging and to-the-hilt acting performances to the detriment of Kim’s considerable skills with the camera, and his ability to manipulate audience attention in a quasi-Hitchcockian manner.

Erice and co-writer Michel Gaztambide satisfyingly resolve the primary mystery while letting possible accompanying details and circumstances swim teasingly in our minds.

It’s an immensely enjoyable, idiosyncratic entertainment.

Reeder boldly conceives of the patriarchy as an extractive force, not just harming female solidarity and individuality, but using it as a resource to grotesquely mine from.

It’s a fairly flattering picture as one of the world’s oldest, most powerful institutions attempts some crisis PR in front of the contemporary world’s gaze.

It’s also perhaps the first leading role of his glittering career to date where Franz Rogowski is miscast, feeling inappropriate or perhaps too worldly for the naive military grunt at the center; either way, the film’s debuting director Giacomo Abbruzzese attempts drawing out a performance that hits predictable notes of machismo, despair, and anguish.

Miller spreads herself too thin here by relying upon an even more sprawling ensemble of prestigious actors, among whom Brian d’Arcy James and especially Hathaway are the most awkwardly miscast.

With a work like Scarlet, so gossamer-airy and enchanting that it could almost be family-adjacent viewing like Petite Maman, we are witnessing Marcello in a mercurial, mid-career stage, watching his sensibility truly take shape.

Criticism can be poetry, but in Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power it is definitely prose, reserving the expressiveness for her own oeuvre.

The director’s bravery and ingenuity—by continuing to create new work, advocate for himself, and also entertain us—remains an utterly inspiring thing.

It’s important to note how successfully and stylishly Poitras and [her editing team] cross-cut between exposition and narration on Goldin’s long, fascinating biography and present-day passages where more information on her various campaigning efforts against the Sacklers comes through.

Ana de Armas’ portrayal of Norma is powerful, her performance suggesting layers and levels Dominik just isn’t interested in probing, perhaps because it would disrupt the headlong intensity of his thesis, and of course, the often brilliant cinematic language through which he creates a woozy sucker-punch impact on the audience––though there’s no question the rush of momentum he harnesses also manifests in a sadism towards her.

It feels condescending to brand Baumbach’s White Noise a “nice try,” considering how much the director has accomplished in the past, but it’s sadly quite accurate—if also more nuanced than calling it a failure or something that shouldn’t have been pursued.

Tori and Lokita initially feels like something special as it breathlessly moves through the story, drawing you in utmost empathy towards the characters who are so bravely trying to claw themselves to dignity. But there’s this residue you can’t escape, of just how written and jerry-rigged it all seems: how the filmmaking has sacrificed that vital sense of plausibility just to keep the plates of story spinning, and the catharsis on the verge of spiking.

Embracing Close will depend on how willing you are to forgive the filmmaker for overriding some nuances he’s established, compared to the insightful things he’s able to say when not aiming to emotionally provoke us.

Her latest work is not one that feels fully achieved and realized, suggesting an absolutely confident mastery of her primary source material, but it’s still deeply watchable, laden with sex and intimacy in a way that doesn’t apologize for itself, and provides an alternate gloss on her key themes of power, bodies, and postcolonial afterlives.

Overall it seems Abbasi got caught between the social righteousness dictates of the “message movie” and pure amorality of what, disturbingly so, often makes for great genre cinema.

Skolimowski uses cinema to create a non-headset-required virtual-reality experience of another creature’s life—an empathy machine, if you will.

Brother and Sister holds the line of his recent strong, if under-distributed work, but still doesn’t get within inches of his dazzling 90s-00s run. Yet it also gains credence and relevance as an epilogue (or mature re-consideration) of his past themes, a reminder of how few filmmakers contain his sensitivity, originality, and literary gifts.

Armageddon Time is a quietly seething work, funnier and lighter than anything Gray has made to date, but undergirded with mournful tragedy.

Meet Me in the Bathroom’s depth is so cursory it can’t quite re-convince us how significant this all seemed at the time.

Ozon wants to show us how committed a student of Fassbinder he is whilst successfully aping his dramaturgy and tone. But Fassbinder answered to no one.

To twist the common literary-critical saying, Nobody’s Hero is indeed three characters in search of a story, but not an author, whose conviction in his ideas and unique method of shaping a film still marks him as un vrai original.

Bonello looks at the Zoomer state of mind, as he does for much else of importance, and has cutting, perceptive and troubling things to say.

This is red light district cinema in its language and humor; as it reaches its second half, people who lament that film has lost its love of sex and horniness will have their heads turned.

Utama is a slow-motion look at how communities can falter, how rich heritage can be lost—to indifference from governments as well as a climate crisis that will decimate their way of life. If only it weren’t so gentle in its reminder.

Through its slippery cinematic language and elusive point-of-view, Kapadia depicts a moment happening urgently in the film’s present-day strand––a wave of anti-government student protests and their resulting crackdown––and treats it like memory, which we know operates as anything but a direct mental recording device.

This is a midnight movie/B-movie-type work that knows exactly what it is––there’s no pretensions of “elevated horror” here. Mona Lisa is smart, politically aware, and reaffirms a bit of faith in Amirpour’s talent.

[Gyllenhaal’s] chief successes are in making her adaptation of The Lost Daughter as intellectually engaging as the novel, whilst bringing the characters to life with performances beautifully appropriate for cinema––one thing an author doesn’t have in his or her arsenal, is summoning a camera “close-up,” with an actor creating that particular emotional transparency in tandem.

This is a film that will potentially delight, challenge, and force its wide target audience to take seriously on its own terms. A dream ballet of a dying star.

As always, Wright is a tad too slick: there’s a tidiness that doesn’t quite capture the flintiness of on-the-record inspirations Repulsion and Don’t Look Now. But for the majority of Last Night in Soho he provides a beautiful, thrilling surprise.

A director comparison I hoped wouldn’t hover in my mind was Zack Snyder. This is relevant in two important senses. It’s kindred spirits with his 2009 Watchmen in its utter fealty to the text, an impressive piece of mimicry unbothered by its source’s troubling ideas, the sense of subversion bubbling below. (The Dune novel is profoundly politically incorrect by today’s necessary standards––but it makes us nostalgic for risks.) It also undoes some fine initial storytelling work and artfully gnarled production design by collapsing into a relentless barrage of explosions and violent carnage as the clock ticks towards the end of its runtime.

There are tonal issues, awkwardly on-the-nose dialogue and plotting; the acting from leads Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit redeems matters with their expressive emotionality, and with the controlled discipline through which they put over their director’s convoluted writing.

The Power of the Dog has attributes that recall her past work but pleasingly seems––if not a new direction––that Campion is drawing upon a fresh skillset to best do this tale justice.

Nitram here pulls off the delicate eye of the needle: it has compassion for Nitram’s circumstances without providing an alibi for his actions.

The pile-up of characterizations, melodramatic plot points, time jumps, and the prestigious, overqualified cast gives for some juicy narrative momentum, and Moretti himself approaches this material with absolute conviction––which for some viewers has given the impression of unintentional camp.

Though France holds water as a black comedy and faintly realistic character study, hitting plausible yet predictable satirical targets, what makes it a good, characteristic Dumont film is its sense of experimentation.

To be as suggestive, yet covert as possible, the great innovation of this film is the notion of how sounds can be memories—all too often in the popular imagination, we think of them as mini-movies of the mind, or visual spots of time as in The Tree of Life or the Romantic poet Wordsworth’s concept.

A body of work like components of a house: one film is a corridor, another a small bedroom window. Others are the structural backbone. A looming jewel of a career, right in front of your face.

[Baker] carefully straddles over the does-depiction-equal-endorsement question. But for something so embedded with ideas and volatile associations, maybe Mikey and Strawberry’s story deserves less of a fairy tale hue.

It’s a real giddy rush of a film, perhaps not as fundamentally moving or sensitive at his top-drawer work, but taking his micromanagement-heavy film craft to noir-ish new peaks.

A piece of would-be American classicism, this is a hackneyed, unevenly written hybrid between a con-man antihero drama and an emotive, heart-bruised coming-of-age film. Like his last, disastrous effort The Last Face, the good intentions are palpable but chased with a real streak of vanity and self-regard.

Even if the impact Bad Tales creates ultimately feels cheap, there’s no denying the force and expert construction of it.

Some might accuse him of over-editorializing or simply telling a story on behalf of its victims––blending trauma into a series of arty tableaus. However, Rosi skirts these accusations by showing his characters coming to terms with the magnitude of their ordeal.

Harcourt-Smith’s story is ultimately tragic, but still triumphant. She retains nothing but integrity, whilst her associates were on a path to extinguish all of theirs.

Fabian – Going to the Dogs is well-meaning, but Schilling’s portrayal of Fabian is a poor symbol for this malaise.

A Cop Movie is too gentle to rouse new disdain for an institution currently subject to such piercing critique. It chooses to make the self-consciousness about its subject matter into a twee form of guilty self-awareness, when what’s needed is bitter medicine, or just insights that better challenge our moral certainties.

Introduction is a thick, tangled ball of yarn, compact but dense; like beloved Hong influence Bresson’s off-screen space, non-narrative information is ample and cosmic. But for all the deliberate choices and teasing ellipses, this is one of the director’s more meager works, appearing unfinished and misshapen rather than productively clipped at the edges.

Wild Indian is a bold, anger-wreaked character study, creating a deeply unsympathetic antihero who nevertheless inspires some pity and understanding.

What emerges most clearly, in Wang’s argument, is the pandemic being as much of a battle between citizens and their lawmakers, as against humanity versus an ever-mutating virus.

Soul likes jazz very much. That’s a rare certainty in this ambitious film, which attempts to contemplate nothing less than the root of all human experience on this planet.

Almodóvar’s work always evokes other artforms beyond the cinema. The Human Voice shows how great texts are malleable: this is his particular take, and not a definitive, canonical edition.

Perhaps we’re comedy-starved in today’s cinematic landscape, but Dupieux’s rollicking adventure generates rare laugh-out-loud moments and even a few applause-worthy bits.

Pieces of a Woman engages with many topical issues surrounding women’s health, and the connection of biology to psychology. It won’t quite leave one in pieces, but the film has a subtle grace all of its own.