Diego Semerene

Freudians will have a field day with Markus Schleinzer’s 17th-century-set folk tale.

Leyla Bouzid’s ability to capture the complexities and contradictions of familial affection is what makes In a Whisper so impressive.

The film is a philosophical account of the shaky ground that human existence stands on.

The film truthfully hints at the sharp whirs behind the smooth façade of everyday life.

The Ice Tower is, ultimately, an aesthetic and nostalgic exercise.

Radu Jude’s cinema isn’t exactly absurdist, though it exposes the absurdities of a present reeling from the unresolved injustices of yore.

The film blooms in moments where, instead of literally addressing Coco's gender trouble, we’re simply allowed to inhabit it.

Despite its initially familiar trajectory, Another End disarmingly and purposefully sweeps us away on a wave of apathy not unlike that which plagues its main character, challenging our sense of who we fundamentally are as humans.

The film finds its profundity in moments where not much is said and nothing is intellectualized, when language is stripped to its bare bones.

Above all, the film captures how easy it is to deposit too much hope on the few who represent dissent, or freedom, when one is trapped.

Maite Alberdi’s film slowly reveals the personal loss of the ability to remember as inextricably linked to the loss of national memory.

Our Body offers, in its unwavering commitment to staring at the fragility of life in the eye, a solace devoid of romanticism or spiritual self-delusion.

The film’s most significant accomplishment is the mood it crafts with its cool black-and-white images, fast-paced editing, unorthodox camera angles, handheld camera, and overall jazzy atmosphere.

Because so much of Hayakawa’s film is given over to depictions of the procedures, formalities, and impersonal administration that define Plan 75, even the tiniest spark of feeling comes as a relief.

The film’s most authentic moments are those that leave its main character breathless, cutting her plans for making up for lost time short.

Joyland is full of extraordinary situations that prevent it from being defined by its topicality or tantamount to a badge of honor.

Femme fascinatingly taps into the radical possibilities of the sartorial as narrative device, exploring the tabooed nuances of queer subjectivity and muddying the lines between gay and trans in the way that lived experience tends to do.

Lack of clarity, it turns out, is what makes Disco Boy so enjoyable, and imbues it with gravitas.

The film is best experienced by simply wallowing in the lushness of its fabrics, sartorial and symbolic alike, refusing the temptation to unspool its poetic parallels.

The film reminds us that any coming of age is a risky business where finitude and mourning are the only guarantees.

Léonor Serraille’s Mother and Son is a lovely film about feminine strength that also refuses to glorify motherhood.

Throughout Andrea Arnold’s film, a kind of affective connection is formed between animal and the cinematic apparatus.

In Great Freedom, the question of love is refreshingly never too far from bodily intimacy, irrespective of what kind of love that is.

The film’s initial aimlessness is pleasurable for the way that it allows the viewer to stare at life being processed on the stunned, confused, and ecstatic face of a teenager.

Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher’s documentary rather faithfully captures the spirit of our times.

Unclenching the Fists is a tale of how the desolation of a nation inhabits and engraves a woman’s body.

Though uneven, the film is clever about avoiding age-old conundrums regarding the disavowal of the language of horror.

At its most accomplished, the film unfolds with a voluptuous slowness and a sense that narrative endpoints are irrelevant.

While Ulrike Ottinger accesses the most consequential of decades through nostalgia, she does so with humility.

The documentary exists within the very restricted pantheon of films that successfully reap the cinematic potential of pedagogy.

If the world outside the Supermercado Veran is rife with poverty and crime, we wouldn’t know it from inside this little cocoon.

Lili Horvát’s film delights in wallowing in ambiguity, contradiction, and doubt.

The film is at its most moving when it lingers on the face of children who are impotent to return to the world they used to call home.

The film reminds us that without investigative reporting there’s no democracy, and that traditional expectations around impartiality and objectivity may be untenable in the face of horror.

Dating Amber rather seamlessly strips itself of its hyperbolic affectations to reveal a heartbreaking story of emancipation through friendship.

Reiner Holzemer’s adulation of his subject feels most credible because he spends a lot of time focusing on the clothes.

Redolent of Claude Lanzmann’s approach, Mehrdad Oskouei strips his images to their barest bones as his subjects openly speak about their traumas, as if trying to avoid aestheticizing their pain.

Václav Marhoul’s film is at its most magnificent when it lingers on the poetry of its images.

We are never quite sure of the extent to which situations and dialogues have been scripted and, as such, it’s as though Herzog were more witness than author, more passerby than gawker, simply registering Japan being Japan.

Throughout the film, it’s as if mundane objects hold the remedies for the wretchedness of everyday life.

David France’s most remarkable accomplishment emerges from an aesthetic commitment of a very particular kind.

The film grapples with the various shapes that guilt and honor (or lack thereof) might take in a context of state-sanctioned death.

Reciprocity might be impossible in a world rigged against queerness, Tsai seems to say, which doesn’t mean that certain things can't still be shared.

Camera, character, and cameraperson are one throughout, and the effect is exquisitely suffocating.

Li Cheng gets much closer to capturing his characters’ predicaments when he trusts the images alone.

The simplicity of bodies barely moving before a camera that brings their quotidian temporality into a halt is nothing short of a radical proposition in our digital era.

It’s fascinating to see Benedetta Barzini in academic action, like an ethnographer of the patriarchy herself, bringing back news from its most glamourous yet rotten core.

Only Marisa Tomei’s face can compete with Isabelle Huppert’s ability to turn even the sappiest of scenarios into a nuanced tour de force.

The film’s mid-act about-face lends a refreshing sense of complexity to an otherwise superficial depiction of Wrinkles.

The film is much more in synchrony with the haziness of its imagery when it preserves the awkwardness between characters, the impossibility for anything other than life’s basic staples to be exchanged.

Justine Triet is less committed to some make-believe realism than she is to the tricks that memory and language can play on us.

It wouldn’t be fair to call the film hagiographic, but the director’s empathy, if not love, for her subject hinders her from examining Cassandro’s wounds with much depth.

Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar’s documentary is monumental for its clamorous sounding of an alarm.

The film is a tale about how those who spiral so far out of control become blind, if not immune, to the severity of their symptoms.

Lila Avilés’s film reserves the possibility of flirtations with disaster to turn into acts of emancipation.

Claire Simon knows that the best way to capture the anxiousness of a moment is to leave it unembellished.

El Angel‘s greatest accomplishment is in the way it charges the relationships between characters with so much eroticism but never grants us the right to watch desire — other than desire for violence — actually unfold.

The film exposes the idea of places as metaphors, mirrors, and symptoms for the people who inhabit them.

Much more interesting than Jacques and Arthur's relationship is Christophe Honoré's subtle portrait of the early '90s as a time of accelerated mortality and mourning, but also of material encounters of all kinds.

As Ian Bonhôte's documentary reveals, Alexander McQueen's suicide was perhaps the all-too-predictable ending to a history of violence.

Rüdiger Suchsland’s film is a master class in the relationship between image production and ideology writ large.

With a tender and respectful gaze, 12 DAYS (@distribfilmsus) sheds light on the relationship between the French state and the mentally ill.

Rainer Sarnet is as invested in telling a convoluted story that feels rooted in millennia-old folklore as he is in unabashedly experimenting with form and style for the sake of visual pleasure alone.

The film is full of astute, and poetically staged, critiques of the parallel worlds resulting from Iran's police state.

First the film inhabits the eye of a storm—which is to say, the storm of Italy’s wretched peripheries—before submitting to the more ersatz cinematic will of filling Pio’s life with beginnings, middles, and ends.

Childhood in Peter Lataster and Petra Lataster-Czisch's documentary is the terrain of contradiction and ambiguity.

Writer-director Francis Lee captures not only what masculinity does and how it comes undone, but the complex apparatus that keeps it into place: the family’s surveillance, the silence, the shame.

The film too often puts too much trust in dialogue, as Marie and Boris's predicament is sometimes perfectly conveyed by the actors' facial expressions and body language.

There’s something liberating about such a steady creative hand that rejects justifying the twists and turns of a storyline, which becomes in 4 Days in France something akin to cruising itself.

Here the organic and the frivolously material aren't oppositions or rivals, but partners in a spectacle for men's eyes only.

Like most great essay films, Paraguay Remembered is driven by associations not just with art works with which it shares a kinship, but a stream-of-conscious relationship between word and image.

Agnieszka Smoczynska's film is most poignant when it simply stares at its own strangeness.

Very few films accept the contradicting velocities of gay desire, and present them in such blunt yet graceful fashion, the way Paris 05:59 does.

The filmmakers and performers show great maturity in refusing to settle scores or spill secrets.

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's documentary raises important questions about the limits of pedagogy.

André Téchiné does justice to the closeness between repulsion and desire, difference and sameness, heterosexuality and homosexuality.

In the logic of the film, for the camera to move at all would feel like a betrayal of its contemplative hunger.

It's when Stephen Dunn dares to inhabit the how and not the what of queerness that Closet Monster feels authentic and deliciously strange.

This is a film that isn’t afraid to inhabit the maddening ambivalence of pleasure, recognizing that desire simply doesn’t recognize good manners.

The film's structure, however stifling, is filled with gorgeous imagery and nuanced symbolism.

The film unapologetically warns us at every turn that fashion is nothing but a business, fueled by naiveté and rape.

Catherine Corsini depicts feminists in lighthearted ways, at once humorously caricatured and sensitively human.

Anne Fontaine's film is an allegory for women's condition more generally, in times of war or peace.

The landscape seems to push the characters away at the same time that it anchors them into place, suggesting that elsewhere is a promise that only dreams can keep.

The film renders visible a very complicated, and awfully repressed, truth not only about gay desire, but desire in general.

The drag in the film rejects the U.S.-centric obsession with "realness" and the acrobatics that come with it.

Throughout the documentary, the question of truth is equated to the essence of the tango.

The film enables us to feel the emotional weight of a posthumous letter precisely because we can only imagine its contents.

Bleakness, Arturo Ripstein's film implies, demands different kinds of labor from a man than from a woman.

Writer-director Alanté Kavaité's film is a string of softly weaved pictorial metaphors steeped in reverie.

Cinema hasn't been this close to the dusty cogs of desire's machinery and unapologetic about pleasure since Pasolini.

It leaves room for a few flights of fancy where the lack of verisimilitude feels less like screenplay filler and more like unabashed poetic license.

Caetano Gotardo's triptych of short tales features a sense of experimentation and poetic license mostly seen in European cinema.

It exploits the military aesthetics that lend themselves so well to breathtaking sounds and visuals without fetishizing them.

The film's denouement is at once shocking and organic because it echoes a well-paced but nasty children's fable.

The film dabbles in the French romantic-comedy tradition and simultaneously spoofs it, committing to neither.

It chooses the delicateness of a fable instead of the narrative recklessness we've come to expect from Bruce La Bruce.