Eli Friedberg

At times, Resurrection seems to outright taunt viewers for trying to make sense of it all.

On the whole, Blue Film’s raw, skin-crawling interrogations of aberrant sexuality and trauma ring fearless and true.

Nadav Lapid’s film locates a dire spiritual crisis facing the nation of his birth.

The film is a satiric look at Stalinism and bureaucracy with shades of Kafka, Orwell, and Gogol.

What it lacks in formal finesse or educational scope, the film more than compensates as a taut illustration of the profound disconnect between high-level social engineering and the lived social realities that totalitarian policies entail. It’s quiet, feminist rage against Big Brother.

Evangelion 3.0 + 1.01: Thrice Upon a Time is so bewilderingly maximalist in its ambitions, so conflicted in its heart, so dense and idiosyncratic from its title on down that it’s hard to know where to even begin gauging one’s own reaction to it except by probing inward.

What I can’t help but miss in all this is the poetic free spirit and deep human interest that once defined most things associated with Hideaki Anno—his concerns, it seems, have shifted from individual to structural, and perhaps people just aren’t so compelling to him anymore. Higuchi’s evidently having a great deal of fun, however, and surely has more of those rubbery monsters up his sleeve. He’s doing fine.

If there’s still anyone uncritically repeating Riefenstahl’s narrative of naïveté, they’ll find it hard to sustain by the end credits.

A timely but confusing mess of styles, tones, and subject matter.

François Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’s novel is haunting, transportive, and tragically humanist, a worthy introduction to the text for the skeptical (or a refresher for the lapsed) and a memorably grim drama in its own right.

The surprise heart of the film, in this respect, is Pamela Anderson, who takes effortlessly to the kind of broad, marker-drawn, boiled-too-hard noir caricature that would’ve slotted right alongside Canada’s late king of deadpan, and effortfully to the kind of boisterous clowning and physical comedy erupting out of this po-faced caricature that would do the Zuckers proud.

Inoue’s film is not just an effective youth melodrama––much as it is that––but a fully sensory action film that deeply understands the raw appeal of its subject beyond wide-angle shots from the bleachers.

In Suzume, they deliver a general lack of focus or full realization of any one of dozens of well-intentioned ideas.

Having come upon a provocative allegory for the endemic dissociation of the hyper-digital age, though, Nikou does not interrogate it as intensely or from as many angles as possible in the lean, character-driven 90-minute film.

This is Imaishi’s world. Every cut, gesture, and line of dialogue here is punctuated by maximum comic book-style exclamation points. Every spectacular action feat is escalated several different times over the top, crossing from coolness through self-parody and back to coolness in a way that’s bound to make the attention-deficient among us stand up and cheer.

Fatih Akin’s Amrum is a delicate coming-of-age parable tracking national identity and violence to their most intimate origin points during the waning days of the Third Reich.

The Holocaust is one of the most exhaustively documented events in history, yet it can seemingly never be documented enough. This is not only due to the relentless persistence of antisemites and fascist sympathizers in trying to sow doubt as to its veracity, but because many more seemingly benign parties have managed to distance themselves from fascism’s warning to the West, and the world.

This is an immensely effective tropical island-set chamber drama in which two characters see their gender and labor relations start to reverse in ways that eventually reveal surprising ambiguities.

Kathryn Bigelow’s nerve-shredding A House of Dynamite stares down impossible questions about an unthinkable scenario.

Though not a film as big or bombastic as North Korea’s political gestures, nor one to ruminate on larger questions about the political state of East Asia’s former Third World and the Western observer’s role to bear, White’s picture pokes its head above the masses of drably shot, dryly informational documentaries currently dominating streaming services with both its clear and concise journalism and its deft command of narrative and genre.

It falls well short of providing any satisfying exploration of its weighty theme of persuasion versus violence in the face of oppression.

In a rare moment of open self-criticism, Gorbachev ponders that he was perhaps “too soft” on those traitorous countrymen who rallied to unseat him; that he ought to have had them “sent away.” It’s the lone sobering, tantalizing, self-aware peek into the savage realpolitik lurking beneath his noble words.

Hit or miss as it may be, Borat 2 at least doesn’t fall short on sheer audacious vulgarity.

The narrative is nonsense, but it’s at least an arch and sweet kind of nonsense as it jumps through its fairy-tale hoops on the way to the next splash of artful color and manically doodled creativity.

The film isn’t slight on effort, and the Studio Ponoc crew isn’t lacking talent (better realized in their short-film anthology Modest Heroes). But The Imaginary seems crucially lacking in the very quality it so breathlessly extols: it’s technical competency without imaginative vision, nor deep understanding of children.

The film’s intentionally amateurish visuals are deployed on audiences with the precision of a jackhammer, all in the interest of obscurantism.

Action sequences are choreographed and edited with a degree of tight conceptual and spatial coherency that puts nearly any Marvel movie to shame, whether close-quarters scuffles or epic woman-on-kaiju confrontations.

Retaining its narrow action-mechanical focus, the film struggles to paint a convincing interpersonal relationship as much as demonstrate the value of a co-op partner.