Kenji Fujishima

Carla Simón’s instinct for sketching in crucial narrative and character detail within a naturalistic context remains as unerring as ever.

Hong Sang-soo’s aesthetic is key to the resonance of his latest examination of an artist’s life.

The film shares with Crimes of the Future an alternately intrigued and critical fascination with the ways technology encroaches on humanity, and a paranoid interest in rooting out underlying conspiracies.

RaMell Ross’s remarkable film finds an expressive power in formally adventurous technique that fashions mesmerizing, cumulatively affecting poetry out of Colson Whitehead’s prose.

The level of detail with which the filmmakers depict the unionization process is eye-opening.

Under Sora Neo’s direction, each number becomes a mini-study of Sakamoto and the grand piano he plays on.

Annie Baker’s spare dialogue style remains intact, with each line revealing of character and mood.

Living has the feel of a film afraid to fully step out of its predecessor’s giant shadow.

The warm, rueful, and sometimes angry All the Beauty and the Bloodshed accomplishes the goal of any documentary worthy of its genre by shining an insightful light onto what informs an artist’s vision.

The film is a historical action epic that, for all the novelty of its setting and subservience to contemporary attitudes, traffics in a lot of cliché narrative beats and ideologies.

The climax has a certain primally cathartic power, but it doesn’t quite dispel the air of self-satisfaction that envelops the script.

Bros is ultimately let down by its pat perspectives on modern romance and social justice.

Even when it edges toward sentimentality, Broker is redeemed by Kore-eda Hirokazu’s customarily bracing humanism.

The Fabelmans is a provocative investigation of the cinematic medium from one of its great masters.

Brett Morgen is less interested in factual biography than in eliciting a sense of the man as an artist and personality.

It isn’t without its pleasures and insights, but it’s ultimately little more than an excuse for Hong to try out a new stylistic color in his auteurist palette.

Brain On Fire is often effective, and at times positively enraging, but one can’t help but lament the much more disquieting film that might have resulted had the filmmakers been more willing to trust the facts of Cahalan’s case to speak for themselves instead of feeling a need to shove them into uplifting platitudes

The film's approach to exploring the Sonoran Desert and topic of immigration often veers toward the avant-garde.

The filmmaker brings enough original aesthetic touches to the table, as well as a fresh cultural perspective to the broader socioeconomic issues he broaches, that Diamond Island rarely feels derivative.

The film is less contemptuous of Brad than compassionate: brutally honest about his faults, yet ultimately understanding of them.

With its impeccably framed wide compositions, immersive long takes, and a cross-cutting narrative style that touches on the work of Matthew Barney—or, in a considerably more mainstream vein, Christopher Nolan—The Challenge feels like avant-garde art more than anything else.

Dickinson, in his film debut, almost makes this familiar narrative feel fresh.

Rahul Jain’s film conveys with revelatory force the mechanization of people in an industrialized milieu.

Hers is a humane vision that refuses to cast easy judgment on her deeply flawed characters, never excusing them for their unwise decisions, but understanding the inner anguish from which they arise.

What makes it play as more than just another activist doc is its focus on the power of images as a way to inspire change.

Hawkins’ performance in Maudie is as indelible a feat of psychological imagination as it is of physical dedication.

Score may be little more than a superficial primer on a dizzyingly expansive subject, but Schrader offers just enough to satisfy both film-music novices and dyed-in-the-wool fanatics.

Cohn’s film is ultimately a genuinely inspiring one, noteworthy in the way it achieves its uplift honestly and without sentimentality.