Jessica Kiang

It’s saved from all-out depressiveness by Haigh’s compassion, which cradles the characters within their often desperate situations.

This is an auto-auto-auto-fiction that throws out the occasional fun, cinephiliac in-joke, and teases the odd insight into creative blockage and romantic unfulfillment. But mostly, it serves to prove the old adage that a self-deprecating awareness that your movie has nothing going on in it is no substitute for having something going on in your movie.

“Bride” is remarkable for how honestly it earns every tiny tick of pleasure it gives — for it gives many.

Will Nikola, like Job, regain some measure of grace if he stoically endures enough suffering? The barely discernible uptick of optimism that closes the powerful but grueling Father is a small mercy in suggesting he might

This slight story examines the mystery of the mother-daughter bond without getting much closer to solving it, and when the mist clears is revealed to resemble the hotel it haunts, in being elegant but empty, save for those elusive echoes.

The humdrum and heartswelling Compartment No. 6 evokes a powerful nostalgia for a type of loneliness we don’t really have any more, and for the type of love that was its cure.

Anne at 13,000 ft might look like mumblecore, but it plays as a psychological horror and a ticking-clock thriller that morphs into a wild, windswept tangle of incipient, but never quite arriving tragedy.

Ham on Rye is not obviously political, but it is also deeply political, pointing out, in lazy, absurdist, carelessly clever frames a​ deep-set​ American wrongness that was quietly murmuring away long before the current blowhard moment, and that will continue long after.

Guzmán's essential thesis seems to be that, in turning its back on the ocean, modern Chile lost a crucial part of its identity. But he also puts forward the extraordinary idea that the water has a memory, and that if you listen closely enough, you can hear the voices of the disappeared.

Singular as that story might be, what makes I Am Not a Witch unique, however, is Nyoni’s abundant, maybe even overabundant directorial confidence. It’s rare and exhilarating that a new filmmaker arrives on the scene so sure of herself and so willing to take bold, counter-intuitive chances.

At best a handful of transitory pleasures, Sils Maria threads through the peaks and valleys of weighty, interesting topics, but makes no lasting impression on them.

The sad, wise heart of Drljača’s small, impressively controlled film condemns neither of them, but instead understands what horror stories and fairytales have in common: both are narratives in which the characters have no control, and are instead propelled by forces far bigger than they are, toward destinies they were born into that they cannot avert.

There's a kind of helpless humility to the presentation of these urban impressions, almost a kind of democracy, that allows you to engage as much or as little as you like with them.

Taken as a completed project, Guzmán’s late-career trinity is a stunning achievement in the cinema of the hidden pattern and the startling, unexpected connection.

Quite possibly brilliant, and very definitely all but unbearable, Ahed’s Knee is filmmaking as hostage-taking. If such language seems charged, this is Nadav Lapid: All language is charged.

As polished a film in terms of craft and performance as Nichols has ever made, the director’s trademark considered intelligence shows itself in how subtly it reworks and refreshes the tired conceits of the historical biopic, while still remaining a conventionally appealing and, yes, Oscar-y example of the genre.

It’s having the ordinary in such close proximity to the outlandish that makes November so uncanny. And it’s rooting the bizarre behaviors of its characters in such understandable motivations (usually greed) that makes it so unexpectedly funny and scabrously relatable.

Hitchcock is essential; Truffaut is essential; the book is essential; Kent Jones' Hitchcock/Truffaut is not quite so, but it's a very enjoyable appendix.

While Winter Flies might not tell us anything new, it relates its old story with a vivid specificity and a beguiling sense of mischief that makes it feel fresh.

Director Pavich, his first time at bat, has crafted an unalloyed pleasure of a documentary, especially for those of us who care about "Dune," about sci-fi, and about the value and power of creative passion.

Matching Fukunaga's proven storytelling grace with a story truly worth the telling, the result is explosively authentic and yet lyrical, making an utterly inhumane and alien situation both completely real and completely abstract.

In re-creating life out of life, Liu is quite successful; whether he makes it into drama is another question. Like its characters, Art College 1994 gives the impression of having just too much time on its hands.

Petrov’s Flu is fascinating partly because of the chunky muscularity – the inherent masculine brawniness – of Serebrennikov’s filmmaking, in which dreams are as solid and hard-edged as reality, and reality is a blockish, jostling thing.

Taken individually, there are cherishable moments and performances scattered throughout “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” like so many flecks of gold amid the silt. But as a whole, the film has to be chalked down to a perplexingly minor addition to one of the most beloved cinematic canons of our time.

Drawn from experience and benefiting from some standout performances among its well-selected young cast, The Plague has a familiar coming-of-age narrative, but stranger, subtler undercurrents of creeping dismay at the men these boys will become when, at this formative age, cruelty chlorinates the water they swim in.

Neither switch-your-brain-off-escapist, nor the kind of arthouse filmmaking that makes heavy demands on your time or willpower, Hong’s cinema remains one of the most reliable sources of this particular pleasure.

The extraordinarily perceptive How to Have Sex pulls off many feats of daring: Nicolas Canniccioni’s alcopop-hangover photography, James Jacobs’ chemical club-anthem score, Mia McKenna-Bruce’s star-making central turn. But the most impressive is first-time writer-director Molly Manning Walker getting us not just to forgive her central triad their brash and brainless bravado, but to grieve for it when it’s gone.

It’s an offbeat, fun, and frequently very funny film, lifted out of disposability by some wonderfully rich production design, music cuts and photography, and by the cherishable performances of the leads.

A later-life love story of the gentlest kind, Li Ruijun’s Return to Dust is an absorbing, beautifully framed drama that makes a virtue — possibly too much a virtue — of simplicity.

It’s Vaughn’s caged-beast charisma (that bounces off the screen long before he is actually caged) and way with a wink or a pithy putdown that keeps us riveted through the substantial sections of the film where heads remain, for the time being, unstomped.

This superior chiller is both a satisfying genre exercise and a minute observation of the process by which young children acquire morality; its most striking aspect may just be the empathy Vogt displays for his 7- to 11-year-old stars, and the extraordinary juvenile performances that empathy brings out.

Though he gets fine performances from many quarters...the film is scuppered by an approach that sees it build on the bones of the novel without ever quite animating its heart.

The Age of Shadows has no pretensions to being a particularly deep or politically resonant piece of filmmaking. Its more that Kim Jee-woon has found in this era and this milieu the perfect inspiration for a blisteringly entertaining and exquisite genre exercise, one that may not be recognised as such only because we we have never expected genre films to be this good.

It’s a film that requires you to indulge its patience-testing pace, monotonous dialogue delivery and frustrating anti-characterization for a very long time before you earn the right to unwrap the borderline transcendent gift of its absolutely beautiful ending.

This is "All Is Lost” with a spinning moral compass and a topical dimension that proves even more gripping than its brilliantly achieved visceral action.

Achieving a delicate balance between drama and deadpan comedy, Guan’s approach gives the scenes of violence or tragedy a certain antic, Buster Keaton quality, which is enhanced by both Peng’s impassive yet physically expressive performance, and that of his wonderful canine co-star.

Laura Moss’ superbly performed, enjoyably queasy Birth/Rebirth proves just how well the classic tale of scientific hubris and the desire to conquer death maps onto a gory maternity morality play, reanimating the truism that there’s little more (un)deadly than a mother’s love.

A sublimely crafted saga about child soldiers discovering their own hearts of darkness in an unnamed, untamed Latin American wilderness, Monos presents an ugly reality in terms so profoundly paradoxical it becomes surreality: an experience at once jagged and lyrical, brutal and beautiful, angry and abstract, scattered and wholly singular.

A docufiction that tenderly, wordlessly and rather too obliquely recreates a 1961 speleological expedition to measure the depth of an unexplored crevasse in Italy’s Calabria region.

As The Shadowless Tower ambles onward, it reveals its arcs of change not in dramatic showdowns or sudden revelations, but in ellipses, in the occasional mysterious fold in chronology and, most rewardingly, in the casual, unforced repetition of certain motifs.

Defiantly peculiar and only a little overlong at three hours, Dry Leaf is a joy for devotees of the strange, singular and sometimes transcendent. It’s a movie to ride shotgun alongside, with the windows down on a lazy trip to nowhere in particular, that ends up taking you everywhere in particular.

Right up until the film’s very closing moments, in which the carefully maintained tension and tone snaps under the ratchet of one melodramatic turn too many, it is not just an absorbing performance piece, but a film of real directorial confidence and flair.

Visually and sonically, Enys Men is utterly intoxicating, but a lack of any nourishing interplay between form and content makes it feel like getting drunk on an empty stomach, alone on an island where everything happens at the same time, and nothing really happens at all.

Part John Ford, part Sam Fuller, the film’s old-fashioned approach is oddly impressive: To tell this kind of story in such blunt-edged, straightforward style is a distinctive choice when the temptation to veer into revisionist war-is-hell commentary, Malickian nature-study or Herzogian descent-into-madness bombast must have been strong.

If the tone of the film is uniformly admiring, Taylor is often critical of the younger woman who appears in these frames, frankly expressing regrets and self-recrimination about those less enlightened days when sub-aquatic hunting was her bread and butter.

Diop’s small but potent act of subversion, in choosing disparate lives and moments that could seem linked by a railway line and nothing more, is not just to enlarge the idea of who is meant by the collective French “We.” It is also to reclaim the selection process for inclusion within that tiny, divided pronoun.

The actions and events are naked to our eyes, not couched in reasons and justifications, not softened by explanations, by words.

Stately and serene from a distance, but up close riven with the fissures and follies of a friendship that costs both men so much but gives them even more, the movie, too, is a mountain.

The subtlety of [Tatiana Huezo‘s] approach interlaces ideas, resonances and emotions in ever-shifting, eternally edifying ways. And it ultimately promotes the film from human interest journalism to a grand work of socio-political critique and a quietly radical remodeling of familiar documentary formats.

Mr. Holmes is not so much the story of Holmes' last case, as the story of his last choice: whether to go gentle, or whether to rage against the dying of the light.

We can't help but feel that by comparison with the meaty and compelling issues he takes on so fearlessly, so scabrously in the other entries, Paradise: Hope ends up somewhat toothless.

This kinky, often grotesque melding of genre science-fiction with all-out body horror is an audacious project, but the scope of its ambition is cleverly reined in by the low-key presentation, its more salacious potential muted down to an insistent threatening hum, like the background radiation of Stuart Staples’ score.

It's an overwrought, stagey muddle that suggests that Davies, ever a-quiver on the extreme high end of the sensitivity meter anyway, has quivered right off it and plunged into the depths of bathos.

Rasoulof’s film, while understandably angry, is nothing if not singleminded . It’s a saturnine morality tale that unfolds in shades of rainy gray beneath leaden, overcast skies, gritting up the nation’s cinematic tradition of humanist drama to an almost unrecognizable degree.

Liu’s storyline may be a slight and generic madcap gangster/hitman/thief movie, but the details of aesthetic design and character interaction flesh it out into something a little more wittily resonant, if not exactly deep. The pointed inventiveness of the carefully premeditated form doesn’t just compensate for the banality of the content, it becomes the content.

His new film Zero Days may ostensibly be an investigation of the 2010 malware worm known as Stuxnet, but over its swift-moving 116-minute runtime, Gibney does a much broader and more important job: relating the rather airless, abstract concepts of cyber-terrorism and internet espionage to their real-world consequences.

This first section is so charming and well-observed, and creates such real chemistry between the two terrific leads, that it's almost a shame that it's there to invest us in them just so the fast-paced genre flick to come has an anchor.

In doing justice to the stories of thousands, Rathjen has somewhat undersold the personal story of its single protagonist.

It’s all so horribly familiar — even for those who have never traveled, never tended bar, and never found themselves the only female in a roomful of drunken, lonely men. The central terror of Green’s ferociously tense, intelligent movie is the terror of recognition.

Personal Shopper is a mess — not an uninteresting one, and better that than a staid, unadventurous bore, but a mess nonetheless.

For the most part an assured film, confident in both the drama and the truth of the scenario it observes, this ground-level view of the immigrant experience feels both pinpoint specific and all too representative of the obstacles and attitudes that face so many illegals, in so many parts of the world.

Left-Handed Girl is an assured and lovely portrait of difficult motherhood and painful daughterhood, but it’s perhaps most entrancing for its turning-kaleidoscope-view of the director’s native city, where the characters are the bouncing beads, but Taipei is the glitter and the dazzle.

This tiny little movie makes seemingly effortless work of convincing us that a comment, a story, a film and maybe even a whole filmography can be both important and casual — in Hong’s case, radically casual — at the same time. It makes Introduction as bracing as a brief dip in a freezing sea after a rather too soju-soaked luncheon.

With all this evocative material available it’s unfortunate that Kent lavishes so much of the overgenerous runtime on repetitive and redundant plotting.

The last quarter of Child's Pose is so remarkably strong that it makes a sometimes grim journey worth sticking with to its destination.

The film is undeniably moving at times, and there are moments of metatextual elegance that feel as though they tremble on the brink of genuine insight.

Not everyone will appreciate the ambiguity of a climax that can be read as either an uplifting act of pure and selfless love or a depressing capitulation to the malign forces of inevitable decline, but either way, “art-house horror” has its 2020 tidemark set high.

For anyone with even a halfway developed sense of justice The Hunt may prove stressful, frustrating, even enraging, but it’s also an unbelievably effective watch, that, if nothing else signals an undeniable return to form for Vinterberg, and yet another blistering performance from Mikkelsen. See it, if only for the debates it will cause afterward.

The people of Jia’s film are mysterious, their reactions and motivations, outside of that first segment in which we get the best-drawn and therefore most anomalous character, are all but unknowable.

The Beguiled only ever lets its freak flag fly at half mast, and until the end where some very enjoyable archness is allowed to creep in, this Southern Gothic tale of female sexual jealousy feels surprisingly dated.

This is a merciless film, and whether the process of teasing its meaning out for yourself feels like a punishment or a reward will depend entirely on your patience and your point of view.

Mesen’s delicate yet earthy, thoughtful yet sensual movie never tips its hand as to whether Clara’s abilities are real or imaginary — indeed it makes the line between fact and fantasy seem as nonsensical as it might to a horse — and it pays off in one of those obscurely uplifting endings.

First Love may be a fluffier, more eager-to-please bauble than Miike’s more challengingly outré titles, but like the cutesy mechanical toy puppy that turns up yapping in the middle of the film, it is wired to explode, and it is a blast.

Perversely episodic, strangely empty, and unfolding in a series of beautifully composed but static wide shots (giving us the unusual experience of literally yearning for a close-up), the film is a test of patience.

The Immigrant is contained, restrained, thoughtful filmmaking that satisfies on nearly every level, except for the desire for a little chaos.

mother! is something truly magnificent, the kind of visceral trash-arthouse experience that comes along very rarely, means as much or as little as you decide it does, and spits you out into the daylight dazzled, queasy, delirious, and knock-kneed as a newborn calf.

Father Mother Sister Brother is consistently beautiful. It is not easy to create visual variety and interest in scenes in which by design the most important thing that is happening is that nothing is apparently happening.

No pulsating, psychedelic, pop-punk phantasmagoria ought to be as moving and smart as We Are Little Zombies. But Makoto Nagahisa’s explosively ingenious and energetic debut (imagine it as the spiritual offspring of Richard Lester and a Harajuku Girl) holds the high score for visual and narrative invention, as well as boasting [insert gigantic-beating-heart GIF] and braaaains, too.

Full of odd glitches and deliberate flubs in period detail, the film feels like an invitation into a secret conspiracy to reach back through time and, with deft, irreverent 21st-century fingers, loosen the stays on Empress Elisabeth’s corsetry just a little.

99 Homes is by no means a perfect film, but it can achieve something more precious, and rarer than glossy perfection: it can take you by the shoulders and shake the apathy and complacency away.

An offbeat internet-age drama that devolves into a vengeance actioner so deconstructed it’s almost existentially abstract: Beckett giving it both barrels.

As a low-key romp with a twisty, globetrotting plot The Whistlers is an enjoyable affair with just enough of a slant to feel a little offbeat. But Porumboiu aficionados chasing the same weird high he has delivered time and again before — wherein a single moment can transform a ridiculous scheme into a fairy tale, or a silly notion into a grand philosophical quest — are just going to have to whistle for it.

Empowering, saddening, amusing and aggravating in roughly equal measure, with a very small side order of social critique, Bravo’s film marks a huge step up for her and a definitive answer to the question that @_zolarmoon posed to Twitter in October of 2015: yes, y’all do wanna hear the story about why she and this bitch here fell out!!!!!!!!

Structured as a low-key chase movie, unfolding with the dark urgency of a conspiracy thriller, living mostly not in your heart or even your mind but in the hairs on the back of your neck, "Midnight Special" actually emerges most resonantly as an almost mournful ode, or maybe a psalm, to the primal instincts of fatherhood.

It may refer inescapably to genre classics from elsewhere, but The Wild Goose Lake is like an organic feature of the Chinese cinematic landscape, as though it pooled onto the screen in all its oily, murky glory, having welled up from deep inside the ground. Suddenly, China feels like the noirest place on Earth.

Sergio Vieira de Mello was, by all accounts, not a man who let fear of making the wrong decision stop him from acting decisively, and it’s a shame that the soft-edged romantic prevarications of Sergio prevent the film from embodying that same dynamism.

Murina is rife with symbolism, but it’s a mark of Kusijanović’s command — an astonishing quality for a first-time feature director — that the recurring motifs and metaphors are worn so lightly and feel so organic to the film’s microcosmic universe.