Diego Semerene

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

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

Jimpa’s exploration of non-binary identity ultimately proves superficial.

Whatever the post-colonial lessons are, I Only Rest in the Storm’s characters articulate them too evidently, as if preemptively justifying the making of a film in or about “Africa” on the condition that the white man’s presence is relentlessly denounced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 Stroll is overtly broad, detached, and full of ready-made empowerment rhetoric.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Marry Me plays out as the logical culmination of a multi-hyphenate icon’s indiscriminate commercial voracity.

The film makes no attempt to embody the themes that form the core of Annie Ernaux’s story in its aesthetics.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

Heidi Ewing’s tale of immigration and deportation afflicting the lives of a Mexican gay couple flashes its reason for being at every turn.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The film is an unending source for the worst possible clichés and most overdone series of graphic matches in the history of film editing.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Erin Derham’s unadventurous aesthetic inoculates her from taxidermy’s subversive spirit.

The film’s mid-act about-face lends a refreshing sense of complexity to an otherwise superficial depiction of Wrinkles.

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.

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

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

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.

We never spend enough time with the characters to believe the urgency, and lushness, of their cravings.

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

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.

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

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

Unlike My Life in Pink, Daughter of Mine sidesteps all ambiguity, as the film reveals everything about its characters straight away, leaving little room for unexpected complexities about their predicaments to develop.

Zain Al Rafeea's naturalness, however uncanny, only makes the film's maneuverings seem all the more obvious.

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

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.

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

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

The Children Act stages the clumsiness of belated domestic confrontations with the very coldness that’s kept its characters from having discussed their emotions for decades and from having had sex for almost a year.

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.

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.

Glenn Close's perennial look of astonishment and resilience commands the action to the point of turning every other screen element into a gratuitous prop.

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

The film is a rebellion of surfaces that never quite reaches, or emanates from, the underpinning roots of its fable.

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

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

The sexual outbursts in the film are tempered with a tenderness that one hardly associates with Bruce LaBruce's career.