Leonardo Goi

Shot by Jenkin on 16mm color negative with a 1970s clockwork Bolex and scored with post-synch sound, the film looks and sounds as a relic unearthed from one of the island’s caves. A chest stashed with stories in turns seductive and chilling, woven into a tale that will keep on unfurling, in an endless and confounding maze.

If the aftertaste is one of cinematic delight–the feeling of being invited to take part in those chats, not just to listen to them–credit goes to Assayas’ writing and a handful of phenomenal performances from the quartet and supporting cast.

It is as compelling and urgent as it is impossible to stomach.

La Flor shares Extraordinary Stories’ ambitious scope and structure, but takes them to a whole new level of resolutely rebellious narrative freedom.

At Eternity’s Gate is a film made by an artist (“plates painter” Schnabel) less concerned with a painter, more with the way a painter saw the world. In its rupture from traditional biographical narratives, it does not merely stand out as unconventional biopic–it also comes close to resuscitating the idea of cinema as moving pictures.

Music is a beguiling film, one whose steady, exquisitely crafted frames only amplify the strength of emotions thrumming just beneath them.

If Smoking may feel like an amalgam of leftover ideas, it finds a tenuous through line in the contagious love Dupieux imbues in the very act—and art—of bringing those fables to life.

Ghost Town Anthology percolates with the sadness of a place bracing for its untimely death–a landscape populated by psychically damaged wanderers, fumbling after an identity within and beyond the town that wouldn’t exist without them, and vice versa.

Yannick may boast fewer visual flourishes than the director’s previous, but this more minimalist approach only heightens the young rebel and the film’s own fight: an attempt to change the rules of the game, to blur the divide between author and viewer, and open up the medium to the absurd––if only for 67 exuberant minutes.

It’s a work as faithful to its peculiar milieu as it is universal in its themes—a coming-of-age that feels, in a wistful and cumulatively moving way, like going back in time.

For a first half so rich in plot, subtext and genres, it feels somehow frustrating to see Good Manners’s potential stall a little as the feature enters its second part.

Queer’s hollowness––its inability to fully flesh out its hero’s psyche––feels all the more conspicuous: a failure of the imagination.

The African Desperate is an electrifying, riveting odyssey, and Stingily—with her deadpan humor and no-nonsense swagger—makes its ending all the more cathartic.

Zhu Shengze’s poignant Present.Perfect. follows a dozen anchors over a period of ten months. It distills some 800 hours of live footage into a 124-minute documentary–a black-and-white collage stirring questions that far transcend the country and the zeitgeist it captures.

There’s no denying the affection Winocour pours into Mia’s healing. For a drama dealing with a wound that’s still unbearably vivid, Memories is both tactful and heartfelt. But as time went on I found myself wondering how much more affecting the film might have turned out had Winocour chosen to complicate some of its heavy-handed metaphors and cliches.

Poking fun at those who left and those who couldn’t, Take Me Somewhere Nice conjures up a love letter to a restless generation mired in a frustrated quest for belonging — one that stretches far beyond the country and time it’s set in, and reads as an engrossing, bittersweet memoir.

Stranger Eyes belongs to Lee. Whether or not Yeo wrote it with him in mind, I can’t think of a better performer to flesh out the chasm that powers the film: between different ways of looking, between fears as old as time itself and the state-of-the-art technology used to bring them to light.

Even as it routinely threatens to get lost in a head-spinningly knotty plot, the director’s kinetic approach and gallows humor makes Kubi a singular addition to Kitano’s oeuvre.

If Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s 2015 Mustang – a feature that would make for a terrific double bill – shares with Sibel a perceptive eye for the way a cancerous patriarchy can stifle a girl’s coming of age, Sibel takes the critique a step further, shedding light on its cross-gender repercussions.

With its deep, bold dives into the nightmarish and the surreal, The Sparrow in the Chimney is that rare film that feels like a catharsis for protagonist and director both.

Blanchett gives a committed turn as the conflicted nun, but all her emphatic exertions cannot resurrect a story that forsakes its mysticism for a calculated parable, as well-intentioned as it is turgid.

Serebrennikov’s English-language debut is as muddled as its subject, but––for all these glaring and convenient omissions––it is also one of the director’s strongest in quite some time, a film whose form feels wholly in service of the story and man at its center.

By the time Dream Team comes to its enigmatic ending, the journey has accrued a disorienting power––it’s the vertigo that comes from watching a film fearlessly pushing against the limits of what can be told, and how.

Where the new entry lacks in bloodshed and bone-splintering violence, it still confirms Zahler’s penchant for complicated characters, and conjures up a bad cops action movie which, despite blips in tension and a second half far superior to the first, crystallizes Zahler’s as a key name to watch for lovers of the genre.

Matthias & Maxime lacks the raw, blazing energy Dolan can excel at.

Taste is a lot more than the sum of its influences. The strange, disquieting world Lê beckons us into is entirely his making, and it brims with spell-binding images.

Take it as a real-time thriller, an intelligently crafted study in cinematic minimalism, and 7500 works. The trouble starts when Vollrath’s feature debut (a follow-up to his 2015 Oscar-nominated short Everything Will Be Okay) attempts the landing.

There is something so perceptive in the way Giovannesi zeroes in on these embryonic mafia bosses–especially as Piranhas ventures into the kids’ relationship with the adult world around them–which makes for an enjoyable if patchy 105-minute ride.