Ed Gonzalez

R.M.N. is more suspense thriller than procedural, and it’s content to have the audience walk on the razor’s edge of doubt and fear through much of its two-hour running time. Perhaps too content.

A New Era’s acknowledgement that some things must die for new things to be born works to justify the film’s title by quietly linking its themes of entitlement and survival.

The plot, geared as much for comedy as horror, is wound with efficient build-up, and its revolving-door atmosphere is consistent enough to paper over some iffy acting, baggy dialogue, and more than a few minutes of wasted real estate.

Carné’s France, unlike the fiddle-dee-dee of Victor Fleming’s cotton pickin’ South, is a poetic realist’s wonderland, a gateway to a dreamworld where human laws are mere judicial errors and love is so painful to hold onto it can only be savored in the moment.

For Patricio Guzmán, to gaze at the Cordillera is to comprehend the range of history and the possibility of its distortion.

Every scene here feels as if it begins with a grenade being thrown into a room, leaving one to wonder how it will be diffused, and after a while, all you see are the gears of various sublots turning separately until they mesh together and move in unison.

Castro’s feature-length directorial debut is a profound and casually artful expression of the lengths to which people go in order to not have to embody their desires.

The film is a haunting portrait of the island as a purgatorial realm between the poles of isolation and liberation.

There’s something undeniably ballsy about a children’s film that’s so insistent about pushing young viewers to think bigger, to be open to new ideas and question culturally coded notions of good and evil.

Gaspar Noé's camera captures every freak-out, recrimination, stolen kiss, and betrayal in what is a miracle of synchronicity.

For a spell, Boots Riley's cultural ire is so cool-headed that Sorry to Bother You easily distinguishes itself from Mike Judge's similarly themed Idiocracy, but along the way it, too, settles for swinging for the fences—so much so that the target of its satire is no longer in its crosshairs.

In the end, Disobedience is less about the subjugation of the self to the group than the courage to embrace uncertainty if one were to break out of the prison of a world one has been born into.

The way that Dominika is at once completely transparent and at the same time impossible to read is Red Sparrow's most intriguing through line, not least of which for the way that Jennifer Lawrence makes you grasp the canny mental gymnastics that her character has to do in order for everything that she says to be at once truth and obfuscation.

The film is a doodle, but in its offhanded way, it effectively attests to the resolute nature of the Russian character.

Sean Baker spends much of The Florida Project charging in vigorously nimble fashion up and down the stairs of the Magic Castle, in and out of its rooms, investing the minutia of the down-and-out lives within this little ecosystem with a bittersweet energy and significance.

In between raids, in between the meetings with ACT UP members and those who hold the keys to their possible survival, BPM is at its most intimate when observing the exchange of war stories.

The film may not reimagine our sense of how the ties that bind bad men are rewritten in times of war, but it nonetheless gives a casually electric sense of how hardscrabble lives persist in such times.

Throughout the film, one wishes for a bit more depth regarding Jessica's professional struggles.

It has the decency to recognize that only Elián González has the right to define his sense of truth for himself.

At its best, the film demonstrates that no art is more political than that which depicts the lived experience of the oppressed with accuracy, empathy, and moral clarity.

The film complements its goose-pimply frights with an unabashedly naked emotional gravitas.

The Lost City of Z links every weathered look that Percy Fawcett throws to the heart of his spiritual yearning.

Tim Burton's direction reminds us of the distinct, peculiar coyness that was always at the heart of his best films.

The haphazard blending of fact and clips from disparate films unrelated to Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee's ordeal confuses an already intricate tale.

The film's sustainment of its corkscrew tension is so elegant and methodical as to feel dance-like.

The film slightly reorients our perspective on the familiar tropes of both the teen and apocalyptic genres.

When divorced of message-mongering, the film’s scare tactics are among the most distinctive that the zombie canon has ever seen.

The film's unbelievably precise choreography of action seeks to tap into a universal feeling of powerlessness.