Gregory Nussen

Bigelow's film, disconnected as it is from the very people this type of situation would actually harm, is a futile salute towards hope, which unfairly assumes powerful people's positive intentions, underscored here by largely cookie-cutter characters and a lack of complexity.

It is the type of film that asks for a deeper engagement than it is willing to offer, but Hadžihalilović may just be pulling us into her conception of image-making as a process of self-actualization. If that is the case, the film does well to break from Andersen's tragic tale for something a bit more existential.

Thompson and Greer really are extraordinary, however, and their tête-à-tête nearly saves Kirk's enterprise from the doldrums.

What the film does exceedingly well is make us see the inherent irony of moderating online violence to the exclusion of the real-life violence in front of our faces.

In the end, Waltzing with Brando will leave you with more questions about the man than you probably had going into it, which would be interesting enough if Fishman leaned harder into the murky waters of this particular celebrity's mythology. But, like the land upon which Judge tries to build an island escape, the film is in a constant state of drowning under its own ambition.

Unlike the comedy, Ungar does know how to shoot action decently well, and it's in those scenes when the film momentarily comes alive.

That the film is so admirably sex-positive, especially as it is from the too-often silenced perspective of female pleasure, makes it all the more refreshing.

A battle cry of uncompromising political ideals, One Battle After Another is amongst Paul Thomas Anderson's most forceful work.

The film is comic yet vicious and cynically bleak in its portraiture of Japan’s silent plague.

The Amateur is a relaxed and pleasurable throwback to the spy pulp of the 1970s and ’80s, yet told with a (mostly) honest appraisal of the C.I.A.’s ethical failings.

Throughout, the filmmakers’ sympathies are lost in a confusing haze of cynicism.

It presents all the complex and seemingly contradictory emotions of a forced life on the road.

Juror #2 casts a morally inquiring side-eye at the American legal system, questioning whether it’s reasonable to convict anyone on the basis of something so fallible as memory.

The film isn’t interested in anything that would detract from providing audiences with the sustained pleasure of watching a clock-ticking thriller.

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.

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

As an anguished cry against colonialism, Pepe works best when illustrating the micro ways in which culture is erased by capital interests.

The witty repartee between Clooney and Pitt feels like the only thing holding the film together.

Through her use of recreation, Asmae El Moudir suggests that the act of documentary filmmaking can turn historical truths into fiction, in which everyone becomes an active participant.

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.

June Zero is a tender, if sometimes cynical, portrait of a new country on old land struggling through the growing pains of establishing its presence both to the international community and its own people.

Throughout Power, Yance Ford draws a startlingly clear line from the origins of modern policing as a slave patrol to its present-day iteration.

Though Egoist can sometimes feel overly tidy, there’s something refreshing about its straightforward approach. Consistent with its style, which is so free of ornament, it pursues its themes with a welcome directness.

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

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

The Breaking Ice is fixated on intense in-between states that work to separate people from each other and from themselves, as if to say self-acceptance and love aren’t destinations so much as journeys, at once formidable and worthwhile.

There’s an elegiac beauty to many of Night Swim’s pool scenes, but everything that surrounds them is leaden, from Wyatt Russell’s comatose performance to the baseball metaphors that have been unsubtly shoehorned into the impossibly routine narrative.

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