Jake Cole

Compensation deftly uses intimate methods of character identification to encourage the viewer to imbibe the larger history lived through those figures.

Roma is autobiography as autocritique, and in exploring a point of view adjacent to his own, Cuarón appears to have rediscovered his identity as a filmmaker.

The blatant staging and rich emotional undercurrent of Vertov’s documentary footage presage Werner Herzog’s ecstatic truth mantra, and was a far cry from the utilitarian social-realist mandate that would soon drain Soviet cinema of this experimental edge.

Even when the band plays away from private eyes or songs simply play over disconnected footage of them having fun, the strength of their songcraft is stirring.

In devoting so much time to the dull, counterproductive mechanics of the action assembly, Dunkirk dispenses with nearly all other elements of drama.

The protagonist may feel cut off from the world, but the film is deeply in harmony with it.

The tone of The Apartment differs from both those darkly moral movies and the filmmaker’s farces, finding a middle ground of somber tragedy that undercuts the awkward comedy of manners between the characters.

Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.

Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.

In the film, a man's individual tragedy illuminates the emptiness of the systems that define him.

Patrick Wang's particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles.

Wang’s particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles, and here he manages to defend the importance of art, attack the neoliberal devastation of cultural liberalism, and argue for the renewed public commitment to the arts from a wryly comic perspective that eschews sentimentality.

Jafar Panahi spotlights the act of filmmaking as an act of resistance as well as a possible source of propaganda and manipulation.

In this rueful film about all things unseen, the importance of time is seemingly felt by everyone.

For better and worse, Nolan has often turned to practical and scientific means to demystify his films’ subjects, be it dreams, magic, or the impossible antics of one particularly traumatized billionaire orphan. His best work (The Prestige, Interstellar) ultimately resists the comedown that can accompany such explication as the material retains some fundamental sense of wonder.

Paterson's sunny aesthetic and disposition marks a stylistic departure for writer-director Jim Jarmusch.

Jean Eustache obliquely puts on trail the self-reflexive cool of the early New Wave films.

Armando Iannucci satirizes the manner in which political power is accorded to those who can mask cutthroat ambition behind an outward projection of bland inoffensiveness.

The film is the finest balance yet of Martin McDonagh's bleak sense of humor and offbeat moral sincerity.

As with Sicario, the broad strokes of the film's Southwestern stereotypes gradually sharpen into focus as the story pivots to a look at the systemic forces that shape the characters.

Richard E. Grant is captivating on his own, but his rapport with Melissa McCarthy is so effortless that their characters’ conversations offer deeper pleasures than the main plot of the film.

Lesage pulls focus onto the aftershocks of trauma rather than the traumatic events themselves.

No Austen adaptation, even the most revisionist ones, have ever felt as vicious as Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship.

With its fine-tuned comic timing and feeling of constant action, Into the Spider-Verse is downright invigorating, and that’s evident even before it gets to its dazzling, dimensional-colliding climax.

At last, Pedro Costa appears to be more interested in how people get on with life than how they keep the company of ghosts.

Valérie Massadian's Milla begins with a stylistic bait-and-switch that neatly summarizes the film's overall sense of formal balance.

Baby Driver literalizes Edgar Wright’s fascination with people’s emotional overreliance on pop culture as a cover for arrested development.

Jonas Bak’s semi-autobiographical film is a gentle depiction of modern alienation.

As striking as Mudbound's combat scenes are, they largely exist as setup for the postwar-set second half of the film, which scrutinizes the way that the atrocities witnessed in Europe laid bare the unsustainable hypocrisy in America's own bigoted divisions.

Kantemir Balagov depicts pain in blunt terms, but he traces the aftershocks of coping and collapse with delicate subtlety.

The film synthesizes the nihilistic tone of The End of Evangelion with the more hopeful terms of the anime’s original intended finale.

Sinners is one of the most distinctive, confident mainstream films of the modern era, but it nonetheless leaves an audience with the tacit reminder of the limits of art to set one free in a system that profits as much off its exploitation as that of manual labor.

Marco Bellocchio uses his film, a delicate mix of biography and autobiography, as the catalyst for long-delayed therapy.

For all its flaws, Widows is McQueen’s most fascinating, bracing feature to date, a demonstration of the filmmaker embracing his commercial instincts instead of trying to pass them off as weighty and important.

Carson Lund treats the power of a shared interest with profound, elegiac empathy.

The second installment in Wang Bing’s trilogy of documentaries about garment workers similarly leans into durational extremes but eventually and sneakily reveals a broadened scope.

As much as the film seeks to understand how such major cultural figures navigated a political minefield, it nonetheless never takes its eyes off of its characters as people.

The film proves that Hong Sang-soo has yet to exhaust his methods of deriving significance and beauty from the most quotidian of details.

The film is a celebration of oral traditions as a means of giving purpose to even the most hopeless of lives.

The film thrillingly captures the social, economic, political, and material character of Rwanda in the age of global communication.

One of the Ryan Coogler film's greatest traits is its reticence, its refusal to say 10 words when two will do, or to say one word when silence says it all.

It’s in its depiction of the communist party’s response to a peaceful demonstration that Andrei Konchalovsky’s latest is at its most effective.

The film is never more intense than when it’s finding parallels between its main character’s anomie and Korea’s dehumanizing expansion.

The anti-P.C. scorn that establishes a white boy's nervous entry into rap gradually becomes a sincere, if hilarious, treatise on the impossibility of reducing art to value judgments.

The actors’ hammy performances only compound the amusement of watching a dynasty propped up by largesse fall to pieces at the very thought of actually having to earn their way in life.

La Cava’s supple but cutting romantic comedy is one of the finest works of class-conscious comedy in Hollywood history.

A showcase for director Alfred Hitchcock’s intense study of the German Expressionist movement, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog boasts artfully animated intertitles, plunging shadows, and oppressive camera angles.

Little Amélie or the Character of Rain changes up its breezy account of a toddler’s growth with the occasional moment of slowed-down rumination.

Steven S. DeKnight's film lacks for Guillermo del Toro's visual acumen, but it makes up for that with an energetic sense of chaos throughout its front-and-center skirmishes, and in the end hedges closer to the nightmarish intensity of such inspirational texts as Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Compared to your average Disney princesses, Moana is neither selfishly rebellious nor simplistically innocent.

The documentary’s aesthetics strikingly channel the euphoric feelings induced by Ethopia’s top cash crop.

The action consistently snaps the film into focus, but it also further illustrates how badly the decision to split this narrative into two parts throws off the delicate rhythm that’s made Mission: Impossible arguably the most consistently entertaining American action franchise of all time.

At a time when the nation continues to weigh the fate of its auto industry, James Mangold’s depiction of the Ford Motor Company facing its first major financial threat transparently plays to nostalgic reveries of the industry’s golden age.

This is a rare case of a film that’s stronger when it colors inside the lines than radically traces outside of them.

Young Mothers is a welcome return to form for the Dardenne brothers, balancing social observation with character study.

Biopics ascribe titanic importance to a subject's every gesture, but Ferrara stresses the reality of creation, of its ordinary activities that nonetheless give an artist a sense of fulfillment.

The film embodies the idiosyncratic, tongue-in-cheek sensibilities of Ron and Russell Mael’s long-running cult American pop band.

In the Blink of an Eye feels less like a film than a commercial for life insurance that got out of hand, or perhaps more accurately one for the kind of hollow Silicon Valley tech optimism that has been thoroughly exposed as a sham by now.

A rape-revenge narrative so streamlined that even the gimmick of its achronological editing never muddies the progression of Yuki’s journey.

The film is a blistering laceration of the contradictions and hypocrisies of European racism.

Red Rooms interrogates how the only thing preventing someone from being sucked down a moral whirlpool is to catch sight of their own zombified reflection on their computer screen.

Good as the cameos are, however, the lasting draw of the film is its exceptional aesthetic. Gilliam keeps his camera low in a child’s perspective, and wide-angle lenses only exacerbate the magnified sense of scale that everything has.

The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.

It's the first segment that feels the most fleshed out, for how well it presents characters with actual lives as compared to the thinly veiled talking points of the film's second half.

Denis Villeneuve’s film, like its predecessor, offers an object lesson in the visual splendor made possible by meticulously storyboarded minimalist maximalism.

Jane Campion upends staid genre convention with an impressionistic approach to character.

One Second is as much a tribute to the struggles of a man whose life has stolen from him as it is to a bygone way of looking at movies.

The film fully surrenders to the grandiose fun that’s marked the best of Tom Cruise’s recent star vehicles and reaffirms Joseph Kosinski as a blockbuster craftsman par excellence.

The film subjects its main characters to one indignity after another, and to such a suffocating degree that it crosses the line between representation and exploitation.

The film’s open-ended narrative tends to be undermined by the simplicity of its thematic signifiers.

The characters’ generational angst humanizes the film’s view of a nation at a crossroads.

With expert visual precision, the film flows into each new, wild narrative wrinkle as if it were the most logical thing in the world.

Olivier Assayas drains the film of the playfulness at its margins, leaving only an esoteric lecture in its place.

The most thrilling and haunting details here are actively undermined by the chief technical gimmick of the film.

Erica Tremblay’s granular attention to place makes sure that you take note of the root causes of the defeat felt by the Native characters.

Joel Edgerton's boilerplate direction is a blessing for a genre increasingly saddled with literal visualizations of madness.

The film explores the extent to which Olivier Assayas’s characters have always found, and lost, their identities through the aid of their surroundings.

Not even Alvin Ailey’s peers can articulate the innovations and soulfulness of his choreography half as well as his work itself.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller put a comedic spin on Andy Weir’s more straightforward 2021 novel Project Hail Mary, recasting the author’s hopeful vision of productive communication with extraterrestrials as an unlikely buddy comedy.

Other films of this ilk use widescreen composition to highlight a terrifying existential void, but these cramped frames tend to produce the nutty energy of cabin fever.

It recognizes that the thinly veiled secret of Wolverine’s loner act is that he’s always been a cog of some kind.

James Franco's The Disaster Artist perfectly conveys the surreal hell of what the production of Tommy Wiseau's The Room must have been like.

As a writer and director, Rebecca Miller is at her best when she finds the shared wavelengths of her lead cast's divergent styles.

One of the greatest films of the Soviet era.

Aaron Henry is prone to pulling back from any moment that might give greater depth to his revenge tale.

Had the filmmakers taken a more easygoing approach, Locked Down might have landed in the realm of The Thomas Crown Affair.

Though lacking the thematic depth that characterized the Archers’ earlier work, The Tales of Hoffmann ranks among their finest triumphs for its purely aesthetic self-justification.

Ali & Ava once again showcases Clio Barnard’s uncanny ability to capture the insoluble complexities of life.

Chromatically, The Load makes Saving Private Ryan look like The Band Wagon. Yet Glavonic still manages to convey the devastation and numbness that results from atrocity without resorting to exploitation. Trauma is approached obliquely, more a subliminal fact of life than a single psychological rupture to be confronted and mended.

Huo Meng’s patient, nonjudgmental study of these people tacitly reveals the ways, healthy and otherwise, in which they’ve compartmentalized and continue to process the pain of everything from hard labor to political oppression.

Philippe Garrel's film uses its characters' stodgy, formal language to betray their self-consciousness.

The film reinforces only the most simplistic and patriotic vision of Churchill, its closed-off view of the man reminiscent of the many tracking shots that wind through the underground tunnels of the U.K.‘s war command, constantly peeking into rooms with classified meetings as doors are abruptly closed to keep them secret

John Wick: Chapter 2 remarkably balances its predecessor’s spartan characterizations and plotting with a significant expansion of scale.

A Private War ultimately sides with the late journalist’s assertion that the whos and whys of war matter far less in journalism than finding the right human-interest angle to hook an audience.

The undeniable fun of Civil War's action scenes only exacerbates the failure of the narrative to adequately contend with its own themes.

The film’s occasional gestures toward pseudo-feminist empowerment only compound the hollowness of its protagonist.

The film is an unbroken chain of one-liners, sight gags, and pop-culture references, and the hit-to-miss ratio is high.

Mann’s focus is so esoteric that he slowly turns the garish thriller into a kind of poetry.