Diego Semerene

Huppert is such a master of her craft that even the silliest sequences give way to tour-de-force moments.

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.

Although João Moreira Salles tries to tap into the pleasurable elements inherent to the essayistic as a cinematic form, such as making the merging of intimate and social reality poetically visible, his storylines never quite gel.

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.

Writer-director Damon Cardasis follows a rather didactic approach to his 14-year-old's protagonist's plight in Saturday Church.

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.

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

Cross-dressing in the story is merely a tool for survival, but such border-crossing is inevitably rife with unintended consequences beyond narrative ones.

The film is an interminable saga full of soap-operatic plot twists involving quickly broken marriages, sexual assault, a secret porn career, terminal illness, and a quasi lesbian love affair.

If the global reunion that the cruise ship presents here is such a panacea, why is there so much moping?

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.

It begins as a clever pseudo-mumblecore provocation with shades of Bruce LaBruce only to quickly turn into indefensible nonsense.

Michael Roberts's documentary is an unabashed exercise in deifying its subject matter with superlatives and hyperbole from the mouths of talking heads, which ultimately results in the cheapening of the artist.

School Life is unfortunately committed to keeping its subjects, especially Headfort’s students, at arm’s length.

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

Anita Rocha da Silveira’s slasher-film plot is simply a tease, as there are no scares here, and the filmmaker’s attempt at genre hybridization never coheres conceptually.

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.

The film eventually replaces the captivating smallness of everyday life with an inconsequential drama.

If not for its performances, the film would belong in the category of Hallmark Channel tearjerkers.

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

If there’s anything worth mulling over about The Drowning, it's the way it proffers the East Coast couple as an inevitably miserable institution without really meaning to.

The film is essentially an exercise in forcing a female genius back into her proper place of dependence on both the father figure and the Prince Charming.

Ritesh Batra's film is a tale of white nostalgia that should have found its footing on dramatic grounds.

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.

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.

Justin Kelly's film is more interested in rushing through the narrative's events than contemplating their environment.

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.

At first, the film’s dark humor is amusing, only for it to wear off once an actual plot kicks into motion.

What the film embodies, unfortunately, the listlessness of its slacker characters.

Its fatal mistake is to make up for blindness, instead of embracing it as something other than a liability.

Writer-director Tim Kirkman tries to peg depth of character on the character of Dean instead of having him earn it.

It’s difficult to find a reason for the film's existence beyond a spoiled platform for James Franco's ersatz boldness.

Glenn Close's face teems with a flawlessly controlled gravitas that’s completely at odds with the film’s ordinariness.

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

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

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.

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

Clea DuVall crafts an entire film out of aborted attempts at a revelation that feel completely anodyne.

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.

The very few instances where stereotypes are challenged are forced and didactically delivered.

Essentially a post-apocalyptic telenovela, it sanitizes the concept of sisterhood, and even womanhood.

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.

It's more interested in borrowing terminal cancer as a narrative shorthand for intensity than investigating it as a lived experience.

The ingenuity of writer-director Jeremy LaLonde's film ends with its title.

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 hygienization of Rio into what at times looks like a soulless Southern California town is so scandalous it feels like a spoof of the Cities of Love series.

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

It's difficult to believe in Ryder's gullibility, if not willingness to be caught in his uncle's strange web of provocations.

Xavier Giannolli consistently glosses every sequence with a stagey kind of humor, and at the main character's expense.

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.

The film uses its critique of white privilege as a means to woo the legitimizing gaze of international audiences.

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

The allegorical possibilities of a disintegrating wall point to a film that could have been.

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.

The unapologetic lack of political correctness never goes beyond a one-dimensional and tentative provocation.

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

The dialogue is so disaffected it's as if humans were replicants even before going through the aforementioned twin-making procedure.

Writer-director Anders Morgenthaler's film is practically an exercise in over-explication.

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

Throughout, Sonja Bennett embodies slackness as an affectation, not a raw response to a culture of authenticity-killing productivity.

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

The film is, like its main character, too naïve to understand or, at least, to deploy the reparative powers of camp.

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 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.

It's a quiet thud of a film, which embraces, with grace and precision, the nastiness of growing up with desire stuck in one's throat like a muffled scream.

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

This is kind of didactic topical movie that distributes its rhetoric evenly between characters with clear distinction as to who's playing devil's advocate to the other one's points.

The film is simply too conscious of its form and its global-market ambitions to ever feel honestly interested in the themes it purports to cherish.

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

It's difficult to swallow the premise of yet another tale of a heroic white Westerner with good intentions trying to give hope to Middle-Eastern misery.

The drama over dinner comes in small analgesic portions, and the secrets feel canned and the dialogue is too pretty to be believable.

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

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.

If the film defies conventional form, it does so without the gravitas that conceptual cohesion brings, quickly rendering its experimentation into gratuitous aesthetic masturbation.

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.

The film is a hybrid of a Lifetime movie focused on a "strong woman," a run-of-the-mill murder mystery, and a yogurt commercial from hell.

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.

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.

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

For a film so bent on naturalizing the presumably hilarious incongruity of "the sexes," it sure features lots and lots of that site of horror: a naked male body. And for comedic purposes, of course.