Diego Semerene

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The sexual outbursts in the film are tempered with a tenderness that one hardly associates with Bruce LaBruce's career.

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

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

Huppert is such a master of her craft that even the silliest sequences give way to tour-de-force moments.

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

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.

First the film inhabits the eye of a storm—which is to say, the storm of Italy’s wretched peripheries—before submitting to the more ersatz cinematic will of filling Pio’s life with beginnings, middles, and ends.

Writer-director Damon Cardasis follows a rather didactic approach to his 14-year-old's protagonist's plight in Saturday Church.

Lost, or at least merely glossed over, throughout this hagiographic documentary portrait is the miraculous story of an effeminate Brazilian boy who was actually allowed to blossom through dance and who, because of such permission, has managed to survive his queer childhood a little more unscathed.

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

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

The film is an interminable saga full of soap-operatic plot twists involving quickly broken marriages, sexual assault, a secret porn career, terminal illness, and a quasi lesbian love affair.

If the global reunion that the cruise ship presents here is such a panacea, why is there so much moping?

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.

It begins as a clever pseudo-mumblecore provocation with shades of Bruce LaBruce only to quickly turn into indefensible nonsense.

Michael Roberts's documentary is an unabashed exercise in deifying its subject matter with superlatives and hyperbole from the mouths of talking heads, which ultimately results in the cheapening of the artist.

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

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

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.