Diego Semerene

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Hood to Coast mostly suffers from an incessant soundtrack that stuffs the film with a peppiness that blocks the tragedy of its characters from view, as well as their overcoming it.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Judging from The Sleeping Beauty, and the previous "Bluebeard," the provocations stop with the choice of the material, as the tone and style of these films are jarringly well-behaved.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 documentary not only humanizes Ingmar Bergman as the absent lover-cum-father of everyday life, but works as a priceless oral history of cinema.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.