Diego Semerene

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

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

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

The drag in the film rejects the U.S.-centric obsession with "realness" and the acrobatics that come with it.

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

Anita Rocha da Silveira’s slasher-film plot is simply a tease, as there are no scares here, and the filmmaker’s attempt at genre hybridization never coheres conceptually.

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

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

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

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

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.

Instead of looking for depth or verisimilar romance, director Michael Mayer turns his characters into mere cogs in a pseudo-suspenseful thriller.

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

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.

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

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

Rarely leaves the realm of the obvious and the literal.

It produces a collection of one-dimensional facts strung together with an utmost respect for chronology and documentary-making's most stale conventions.

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.

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

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye tries so hard to keep up with the quirkiness and theatricality of its subjects that it ends up canceling them out.

Queen of the Sun is honey pornography with an activist heart.

Though there's something refreshing, and disturbingly familiar, about Kevin Sheppard's spontaneity, he's certainly not the most interesting thing about the film.

The film refuses to tease us with suspense, overwhelm us with sentimentality, or defy us with nuance.

From the overtly vibrant colors to the caricaturesque dimensions of the performances, the film's aesthetic promises a great allegorical message that never arrives.

It finds its strength in painting a portrait of Brazilian heterosexual gender relations as an always-volatile symbiosis between feminine hysteria and ruthless machismo.

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 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.