Gregory Nussen

A clarion call from across space and time, like a message in a bottle, its very existence is a wild gift.

Tótem is a film of unexpected beauty, using its main character as a conduit for exploring the quandaries of a family navigating matters of love, heartbreak, class, innocence, and, perhaps most prominently, mortality.

Shyne is less concerned with a unified story, instead dipping in and out of her subject’s lives and in the process giving us a much more involved experience of a fading subculture.

Diaz's previous work is both longer, cheaper and mostly in black and white. Magellan is still long, but by comparison, a breeze; it is also clearly expensive and centers a massive global star in what is essentially a biopic. But Diaz's work is subversive by design, a bait-and-switch as a matter of course.

Rugano Nyoni’s critique of her native country’s gender-based discrimination is as acerbic as it is unforgiving.

Resurrection is both testament to the importance of storytelling, as well as the dangers of falling too far within its rabbit hole. But with stories as wrenching and images as evocative as these, why not jump in?

The film instinctively and lucidly shows how sometimes a coming of age can be thrust upon a person against their will.

Hersh and Poitras fit together like hand in glove. Exceptional warriors for absolute truth and justice, both have made careers out of exposing systemic abuses of power in ways that have often made them enemies of the state - and yet, both have been granted unusual access to the truth.

Yes is an astonishing protest film whose comedy belies a broken heart.

It's a breathtaking film from a new visionary of the queer indie scene.

Underneath its story of the sudden animation of household products is a layered critique of late-stage capitalism, a plea for the humanity of queer folks, a rebuke of the erasure of history and of memory, and a challenge against traditionalism which holds back a people from necessarily breaking free, to the next stage of life.

Despite Earth Mama’s bleak subject matter, it exudes a beatific warmth, in large part because Leaf takes remarkable pains to dramatize a web of solidarity between a group of Black women alongside her depiction of the very system that disenfranchises them.

What's most fascinating about The Friend's House is Here is that it makes its protest heard through a story that remains adamantly vivacious for nearly its entire runtime.

This uncommon image of survival accentuates the devastation of loss. Fatma is just one victim; what other worlds have we lost with each new death?

In its depiction of actors flourishing through artistic struggle, Sing Sing ultimately argues that the most effective liberation happens through the freeing of the body as well as the soul.

There’s an alive-ness that emanates from the characters, in large part due to all those visible fingerprints and indentations on their skins—a tactile counterbalance to a story about humanity’s over-reliance on technology.

The film feels unexpectedly mournful, bringing to life a time that does not exist anymore.

The soft-pedaled approach to its narrative strands gives the film the feel of an extended TV pilot.

Anselm is ultimately an extension of Kiefer’s “protest against forgetting,” as it reminds us that art is an act of remembrance.

To put it in a kinder way, Little Amélie is a delicate testament to the power of solidarity and the ability of children to heal wounds across space and time.

Wilson showed with his television series just how life-affirming it can be to just observe, and, with his triumph of a feature doc, he shows us how merely looking around can reveal entire histories.

From top to bottom, Brian just really works. It knows what game it's playing and does it with grounded honesty and the kind of blistering comedy that can only emanate from a truly genuine place.

At turns heartbreaking in its acuteness, at others exhilarating in its access to the dangers of pleasure, Djukić's is a rare kind of coming-of-age film. It is langorous in delivery, yet fast like lightning when it lands.

We are never not an integral part of this couple's evolving understanding of mortality, art, and partnership.

Director Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab is a shattering docu-film which utilizes a novel mix of real audio and footage with actors' reconstruction in a Herculean effort to make this profound loss even more immediate. Hers is a utilitarian mission: to embed the audience in the sensory experience of being in a war zone without letting them scroll past or swipe to the next video.

The magic of DaCosta's film is that it tells us that, regardless of who you are, what we're all searching for is the same thing: community, and a place to call home.

Through the period and genre trappings of a 1970s heist film, Reichardt explores the inherent isolation of staying neutral at a time of ballooning cultural and political unrest.

The film is at once a journey of self-actualization and a testament to female solidarity.