David Katz

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

[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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.