Jake Cole

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

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

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.

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

The film is marked by an empathetic understanding of the inkling of belief that can be exhumed from even the most rational of minds.

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

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

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

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

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.

At its finest, this psychedelic, horror-strewn romp’s artistry perfectly reflects the intensity of Strange navigating endless alternate realms.

In the film, the literal union of bodies is the only logical means of conveying the reestablishment of emotional bonds.

Walter Hill’s 1984 film combines everything from seedy bars, street fights, motorcycles, beefy heavies, and tough dames in a smorgasbord of tawdry, moral-flouting clichés that distills decades of imagery that represents youth in cinema.

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

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

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.

The film’s open affection for the Looney Tunes franchise has a restorative quality.

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

Throughout her directorial debut, Suzanne Lindon paints a concise and truthful portrait of her protagonist’s feelings of estrangement.

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

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

Peter Farrelly manages to respect the severity of the characters’ social context while ensuring that Green Book never steps outside its protagonists’ relationship, a delicate balancing act that credibly makes a feel-good, effervescent comedy out of its thorny subject matter without ever sanitizing it.

Its bizarre melding of moral-panic melodrama with the filmmaker’s signature wrong-man theme is fascinating.

Romulus ends up as the franchise’s strongest entry in three decades for its devotion to deploying lean genre mechanics.

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.

Miracle Mile is one of the most fascinating curios of the ’80s, a disaster movie that turns the decade’s optimism back onto itself.

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.

There’s a hint of Jane Campion’s own uncanny perversion of the banal throughout Lara Jean Gallagher’s film.