Jessica Kiang

If part of the great power of cinema is in being a visual medium that can somehow give form to the intangible, Esparza’s sophomore film is exemplary: it makes manifest such enormous, politicized intangibles as race, class and gender relations through the authentic portrayal of real lives, real people, vividly played.

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.

Titane is bold in its reference points, no-holds-barred in its approach to some of the hottest-button issues of the day, and brash – and often very funny – in its deliciously grisly and inventive image-making.

On both a political and a personal level, the film is pessimistic, yes, but it feels truthful, and never lapses into easy cynicism.

An unfeasibly charming film full of little wisdoms and quiet comforts where we might expect to find provocations, its only deception is that it is so much richer than it seems at first glance.

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.

Without overly romanticizing it or suggesting that, ultimately, it is anything more than a business built around the talents of some very singular men, Sunada's film becomes a love letter of a most unusual kind, because it is addressed to a place that is unremarkable in every way except for the spirit that flowed through it.

The superb Vega’s steady, liquid, fathomless gaze is so direct that we come to understand that behind it, behind the barricade of defenses she’s built up against an unfriendly world, she is no enigma at all: she is completely known to herself.

Gloria is an endlessly watchable creation—a wonderful example of an actress melting into a role, and a co-writer/director with almost superhuman levels of sensitivity and empathy for his characters.

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.

Sweet Country is unmistakably a western in iconography and spare, taciturn tone, but it is also an incendiary slave narrative, in which the poetry of the filmmaking can barely contain a simmering fury and disgust at this most shameful of human institutions.

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.

Puiu scoops up storylines and arguments and revelations armful by messy armful and the inexplicably titled “Sieranevada” becomes by turns pit-of-stomach-sad, flight-of-fancy funny and pin-in-heart moving. And never less than wincingly true in its deadpan acknowledgement of the beautiful absurdity of family life.

The current of informed anger, directed at those who stand by while injustice and bigotry flourish, is unmistakable and turns the whole film into a kind of clever folk fable-cum-protest song.

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.

"Pigeon" is a near-perfect cap to a near-perfect trilogy, a cavalcade of oddness, humor, banality and even horror.

whether because of its personal nature, its occasional ferocity, its unusually dark undercurrents, its audacious defiance of expectation and explanation or Kim Min-hee’s essential performance, On The Beach At Night Alone feels like it will be exceptional even for longtime diehard Hong fans.

Force Majeure is a brutally smart and original film.

Gyllenhaal’s film is a story of self-ascribed transgression and of shame buried and turned bitterly inward, and it too, is made with such alertness to the power of cinematic language – particularly that of performance – that even as you feel your stomach slowly drop at the implications of what you’re watching, you cannot break its spreading sinister spell.

A wise, beautiful film summoned up entirely from things authentically seen, felt, and thought.

The real war of A War is waged within Claus, with Lindholm's camera trained mercilessly on Asbæk as he delivers yet another faultlessly committed performance, within a large ensemble in which every performer feels note-perfect.

Mahaffy’s uncompromising approach, and the quality of its performances, make it a rare and valuable testament: to the terrible danger of believing in miracles, and to the cruelty of a world that might make such belief necessary.

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.

The formal rigor that made Oldroyd’s “Lady Macbeth” such a striking debut is in evidence here throughout, but this time that directorial precision is applied to a narrative of bold, even garish ambition, which “Eileen” conceals, along with its unhinged heart, beneath a controlled, placid exterior.

Meticulous and majestic, epic in scope and tattoo-needle intimate in effect, this scrupulous recreation of the lead-up to and aftermath of the Novocherkassk massacre six decades ago is excoriating proof that not all filmmakers are made sloppy or slipshod by anger. Some are made ever more righteously, icily precise.

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.

A gorgeously playful oddity glimmering with insight into ideology, photography, cartography, telegraphy, celebrity, solidarity, the flow of capital, the unruliness of time and the somehow noble lunacy of trying to tame such a massive concept into a brass doodad small enough to fit in a waistcoat pocket

Simon’s nonjudgmental, empathetic curiosity is the film’s great strength. But it’s also shocking that still now, in 2023, it can be such a revelation, as women, to see “Our Body” portrayed without sexualization and without stigmatization — without, in a word, shame.