Diego Semerene

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

As much as Binoche is the backbone of Queen at Sea, Courtenay and Calder-Marshall’s raw performances are no less impressive.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

A raw, sophisticated, and stomach-turning look at what it means to be a young woman in Serbia, what it means to be a woman tout court.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is pure pedagogic bliss.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While We the Party can be insensitive, or blind, to the misogyny and homophobia of the general culture (the token gay teen is a finger-snapping, head-bobbing fashionista), it takes the issues of race and class quite seriously.

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

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

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.

It's to Carine Roitfeld's own credit and director Fabien Constant's funky and frenetic pacing that the doc feels neither like a corporate hagiography nor like mere fashionista masturbation material.

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

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

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

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

Going back to the scene of trauma is a familiar Latin American strategy for dealing with its wars and dictatorships through art, but The Tiniest Place takes a disturbingly literal approach to such wound-scratching homecoming.

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

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.

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

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.

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

W.E.'s is a kind of dynamic pleasure that allows for non-shameful identification with the feminine and a fantasy of becoming what we see.

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

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

Filmmaker Juan Manuel Echavarría's hands-off approach hinders us from mocking the believers' naïveté.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

A lighthearted critique on the fetishized notion of the "non-actor," the ethics (or lack thereof) of the "docudrama," and the packaging of national despair for exportation.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Though it begins with the aesthetic and conceptual rigor of Blade Runner, it quickly veers toward the gratuitous outlandishness of a Bruce La Bruce film.

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

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

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