Diego Semerene

The juxtaposition between the gorgeous natural beauty of a remote beach with the stubborn human need to escape somewhere, no matter what cost, is what really enthralls in the film.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

It often seems more intent on spelling out its awareness of the politics involved than in lingering on the aching human engaged in the libidinal transactions.

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

Its lightheartedness and overtly traditional narrative structure become a smart strategy for crafting what is ultimately a very nuanced political critique of capital.

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

The film refuses to tease us with suspense, overwhelm us with sentimentality, or defy us with nuance.

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.

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

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

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

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

It suggests that a disease isn't a product of one single person's body, but the eruption of an entire family history of unarticulated desire.

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

What's easy to appreciate in the documentary, however, is the way it reassembles the Dzi Croquettes' trajectory without polishing off its jagged edges. It's through their brilliance and their flaws that they become muses.

The film is at its finest as a catalogue of Yossi's unspoken ache, less so when it begins to flirt with the clichés of the love story.

Lee Isaac Chung's film exudes a wonderful sense of originality, a daring and organic playfulness rarely found in American indie cinema.

The film is at its best when it lingers on intimacy and the characters' incompetency to manage it.

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.

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

Its most redeeming quality is that it isn't so quick to neuter its queer characters into a package-friendly "gay couple" aesthetic a la Modern Family.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

It's the moments when director Alan Brown stops worrying about clarifying plot and character motivation and lets the performances bring those into being that makes this an authentic project.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The unconventional choice of extra-curricular activity for Luz sheds light onto the strange sport of powerlifting, in which teen girls are constantly weighed and sometimes told that they have 40 minutes to get three pounds off their bodies so they can compete.

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.

Queen of the Sun is honey pornography with an activist heart.

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.

At the very least, The Pill could have been a pleasant exercise in screenwriting sharpness if Fred and Mindy's situation had been confined and (un-)resolved within the confines of its very promising first scene.

It's Jonathan Caouette's insistence in going back to his nightmarish old footage, or the old footage that he purposefully renders nightmarish, that seems more interesting.

It finds its strength in painting a portrait of Brazilian heterosexual gender relations as an always-volatile symbiosis between feminine hysteria and ruthless machismo.

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

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

Director Casper Andreas does a good job conserving a simultaneous sense of disgust and attraction for the way big-city dreams end up stripping off wannabes from everything but their bodies.

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

Mahdi Fleifel's usage of a domestic archive of home-video images inherited from his father lends the doc a simultaneous sense of historical gravitas and intimacy.

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

With Earth, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s visual strategy is to wow us with tangibility and data, though he doesn’t give up aesthetic experimentation altogether in this survey of Anthropocene calamities.

Aly Muritiba’s film is always telling the viewer that death-ness and trans-ness bear the intimacy of Siamese sisters.

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye tries so hard to keep up with the quirkiness and theatricality of its subjects that it ends up canceling them out.

Sassy Pants has a slightly ludic atmosphere akin to another tale of teen alienation, Dear Lemon Lima, but it unfolds like a fable in which only Bethany doesn't feel like a canned caricature.

Cargo can feel like a "film about human trafficking" from beginning to end.

The filmmakers aren't really interested in the space between what these women say and what they mean.

Director and co-writer Milad Alami's film feels like several fused-together trial drafts of the same narrative.

François Ozon’s paean to nostalgia wraps tragedy and obsession in a whimsical bow.

Without a consistent stylistic playfulness to match the histrionic scenarios, the action often feels just plain silly.

Against the Current’s style imposes a generic visual language onto a subject who’s anything but generic.

When the distance between uncle and niece shortens, Uncle Frank ceases to be a tender portrait of outsider kinship and transforms into a histrionic road movie with screwball intentions.

Christophe Honoré deposits all his chips on the comedic premise at the expense of character study and gravitas.

The film's educational impetus is to announce to the world that even picture-perfect Norwegians continue to pay a heavy price for the horrors of WWII.

Only rarely does Karim Aïnouz allow for loopholes to refreshingly emerge from the film’s stylistic deadlock.

Shana Betz's too-insistent refusal to commit to the melodramatic or to the suspenseful only makes the film seem like empty dramatization.

The tension between the amateurish interviewer and the star interviewees gives the documentary a layer of authenticity that its otherwise formulaic structure and storytelling fail to find.

It's as though the director, like his subjects, was too comfortable in the safe familiarity of the surface to find the place where it betrays us.

It's an entertaining and unapologetic tale of female risk-taking, filled with clever camerawork, but the characters remain shallow.

From the overtly vibrant colors to the caricaturesque dimensions of the performances, the film's aesthetic promises a great allegorical message that never arrives.

The Magician might have worked better if it could have sustained for its first several sequences a sense of genre confusion.

The focus on Ferragamo’s craft, and the very structure of manufacture, is exciting, but the narrative’s tendency to embody the opposite of his innovativeness feels lazy and contradictory.

Autoerotic's take on the me-me-me generation's inability for actual contact seems appropriate, but it lacks the nuance that makes "Denise Calls Up" so delicious to watch.

The sort of gravitas that seems necessary for the most satisfying of French clichés to amount to playful reworkings, not tired repetitions, only makes a few appearances throughout the film.

Hari Sama never quite manages to seamlessly sync the film’s anti-bourgeois political commitments to its soap-operatic register.

For a while, Olivia Colman’s expressive performance carries the film, with little narrative distraction or stylistic conspicuousness.

While The First Rasta never goes beyond the surfaces of conventional documentary making of the most average kind, its reticence becomes whimsical every time the elderly interviewees break into song soon after reminiscing.

When compared to the high-stakes dramas at the center of Paris Is Burning, where sex workers dreamed of becoming supermodels, Kiki feels rather tame.

Despite the exuberance of the works featured, which are promptly flattened by the film's commitment to a traditional documentary blueprint, Yayoi Kusama's resilience still commands our attention.

The extreme largesse of Anselm Kiefer's project, his radical certainties and devotion, all call for a more intrusive probing.

Juliette Binoche's face, as we know, can tell a million stories in a simple and brief rearrangement of her facial muscles.

The film only feels interesting when it focuses on looking at what the characters aren't doing and listening to what they aren't saying.

Unlike the novel, the film ultimately trades its main character’s account of her own suffering for her therapist’s pathologizing assessment.

There's a Tarkovskian layer of social despair in the web of corruption joining the child and the adult, the bedroom and the nation.

In Joe Swanberg's disaffected little film, the drama is never explicit, or even fully conscious.

Instead of looking for depth or verisimilar romance, director Michael Mayer turns his characters into mere cogs in a pseudo-suspenseful thriller.

It would have been nice if the film had surrendered to its lunacy more blatantly, more carelessly.

It botches itself out of its own epic ambitions, an aesthetic slickness that seems to contradict, if not betray, its subject matter, and a maddeningly subdued critical spirit.

The figure of the poor white girl whose sex work is justified by a really noble cause, set of circumstances or sheer charisma, is, of course, not a new cinematic premise.

The film's moral lesson is too contradictory to be taken seriously.

The film’s tendency to over-explain, over-intellectualize, and over-script events leaves little room for spontaneity and doubt.

Lost, or at least merely glossed over, throughout this hagiographic documentary portrait is the miraculous story of an effeminate Brazilian boy who was actually allowed to blossom through dance and who, because of such permission, has managed to survive his queer childhood a little more unscathed.

The film never explores the depths and nuances that could actually place Jobriath in conversation with figures who came after him, however reductively.

For too much of its running time, Panah Panahi’s film is untethered from any kind of captivating narrative purpose.