David Katz

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Popov is meditating on relevant themes, but what she diagnoses about the superficiality of the self-serving media and fashion worlds is already received wisdom, rather than the lethal satire she’s aiming for.

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.

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

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.