Diego Semerene

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.

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

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.

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.