David Katz

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Nomadland is initially stirring with its imaginative utilization of a Hollywood star as Zhao places McDormand, sometimes jarringly, right in the real world. But it ultimately reverts to homilies, offering a flinty, exciting character a bland third-act volte-face.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.