Diego Semerene

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Adrian is too flat as a character, his plight too generic, for his tears to count as something other than a sentimental ready-made.

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

The film has, at its source, a pool of affectations that so often constitute, or plague, American indie films--and, perhaps, American culture more generally.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The very act of having kids and demanding perfect conformity from them is never questioned by the film.

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

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's refusal to produce a campy critique feels more like the product of lack of imagination than a purposeful repudiation.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Rarely leaves the realm of the obvious and the literal.

It produces a collection of one-dimensional facts strung together with an utmost respect for chronology and documentary-making's most stale conventions.

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.

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

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.

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

Though there's something refreshing, and disturbingly familiar, about Kevin Sheppard's spontaneity, he's certainly not the most interesting thing about the film.

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

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

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

An over-the-top Russian musical about hipsters set in 1950s Moscow, where getting a non-pastel-colored tie is a mafia-mediated operation and a saxophone is considered a concealed weapon? Yes, please.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The film decides very early on, as part of its premise, to reduce Louisa Krause's King Kelly to a one-dimensional narcissist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It ever so subtly zeros in on the extreme particularities of a remote place to find something universal, or at the very least easily comprehensible about despair.

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

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.

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

Cristián Jiménez's film knows how entangled the will to know is with the will to make love.

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.

Filmmakers Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas have crafted a beautiful tale of alienation, solitude, and existential anxiety.

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

While this uncataloguable and entrancing film gazes back in nostalgia to a time of performance-art priapism when everyone seems to have known Warhol, it also leaves room for a particularly hopeful diagnosis of the present.

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.

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

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

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.

Philippe Garrel illustrates the absurdity behind the myth of the complementary couple with the same cynicism that permeates his previous work but none of the humor or wit.

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.

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

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

The film exposes the incontestable American art of getting more with blunt obviousness.

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

A shallow film that leaves us knowing exactly what we're seeing, and able to predict what the characters will say to each other in the mostly uninspired and overtly familiar dialogue.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rampling is very much aware of the camera's every intention and possibility. Perhaps too aware, like the kind of over-educated narcissist for whom real spontaneity is too costly a risk.

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

Whatever predictable plot the film tries to unfold never lives up to the excitement of its conceptual gimmick.

The film shamelessly announces from the very start that it’s an attempt at atonement for disgraced designer John Galliano.

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.

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