David Katz

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’s an immensely enjoyable, idiosyncratic entertainment.

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.

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.

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.

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