Diego Semerene

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

The documentary is committed not to some pseudo-factual documentary tradition, but to a more engaging realist poesis.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Alain Guiraudie's film portrays cruising as a danger-seeking and astoundingly repetitive affair, intimately linked to death itself.

This is a film about the invisible things passed down from generation to generation, that nasty inheritance that cages us into patterns and puzzles we try to solve in someone else's name.

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

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

One of the most distinct pleasures of Beginners is the way it puts together fragments of someone's life-presumably the filmmaker's, although little does it matter-with humility, and without vying for some complete whole.

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

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.

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

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

Cruising for Alain Guiraudie seems to be the way of nature, a drive that doesn't discriminate.

The film’s diligent script and nuanced performances are such that the depressing material stops short of turning into a depressing experience.

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

Driven by a no-nonsense ethos, the film avoids sentimentality the same way its main character avoids sentiment.

The film provides welcome context for the semi-hysteria that recently took over the U.S. media in regard to Uganda's "Kill the Gays" bill.

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

The pleasure in watching the film becomes a linguistic one as Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart masterfully sharpen their words and hurl them at each other like projectiles out of a blowpipe.

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

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

Gastón Solnicki's mapping out of his family's narrative from within never feels exploitative or self-absorbed.

An exposé of how the financial structures that make businesses possible in America seem to conspire against genuine good will and non-self-serving ambition.

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’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.

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

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

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

For its general ludic obsession with all things generally thought of as disgusting, the German film Wetlands is stuck in the anal stage.

Mitra Farahani rescues the doc from becoming a talking-head fest by embracing her creative self as a character and exposing the travails of her own authorship process.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Hovering over the narrative is the fear of the domino effect that change can enact, the dread that one person's "queerness" may perhaps expose everyone else's.

The documentary not only humanizes Ingmar Bergman as the absent lover-cum-father of everyday life, but works as a priceless oral history of cinema.

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.

Tomboy is one of those little big films whose simplicity and concision suggest the excess of meaning that language (cinematic or otherwise) could never account for.

The film works as a charming aesthetic exercise with its jerky camera and inadvertent cuts, as a contemplation on intergenerational female bonding.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Desiree Akhavan's tale of queer post-breakup funk shows more nuance, and racial dimension, than its cinematic cousins.

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.

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.

We experience the delay of the fantasy of the happy old couple in their country home in cinematic time as, for most of the film, the only body these lovers have is the spellbinding combination of visual fragments serving as apparitions to their voices.

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

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

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

Slavoj Žižek manages to explain some of Lacanian psychoanalysis's most inscrutable notions with disarming clarity and infectious urgency.

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.

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

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is pure pedagogic bliss.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The film captures Vreeland's perhaps unwitting philosophical integrity just as much as it drowns us in the exuberance of her work.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

As an auteur film, Nanni Moretti’s Caro Diario inhabits a kind of beyond, because instead of presenting a world filtered through his subjective lens, the filmmaker allows the viewer inside his very subjectivity.