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.