Diego Semerene

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.