Mark Asch

It’s a bit difficult to find your footing in the first half-hour of “Concrete Valley,” and it’s arguable that in addition to starting too shapeless, the film ends too shaped. But niggles about calibration aside, the on-the-nose ending is a gut punch.

The Boy and the Heron is richly self-synthesising and achingly sentimental, collating artistic motifs from across the Miyazaki filmography and nakedly articulating the hopes it places in the next generation.

If this cynical and funny consideration of the distance between a person and their curated image in the collective (un)consciousness comes with any caveat, it’s that it, itself, feels ever so slightly synergistic.

It’s also shot through with the outré symbolism and impulsivity that have long characterised its director’s long, strange career, particularly its late, nothing-to-prove stages. In short, Jerzy Skolimowski is 84 years young, and he is absolutely vibing.

A gorgeous and grave anti-epic, Pacifiction proceeds in scenes that serve as pristine containers for Serra’s idiosyncratic style, slow and digressive, full of flabby jokes and windy talk. It’s like watching a tropical aquarium slowly fill with algae.

To an even greater degree than in most Hong films, the film’s scenes of casual small talk, awkward silences, polite smiles, and glasses clinked to change the subject, open up faultlines in the characters’ lives.

Sarah Walker is great in an unself-conscious way, foggily conveying Star’s blinking on-off struggle to bridge the gap between her inner monologue and the outer world. She speaks in a thick voice that sounds effortful and takes in the world with watchful, silent eyes. It’s the rare performance that’s magnetic in its passivity.

The African Desperate is the work of an artist who has moved fairly seamlessly from the gallery to the cinema and has more than enough vitality and insight to join the canon of films about the Black experience in higher education

Onoda – 10,000 Nights in the Jungle, which runs two hours and 45 minutes, is an achievement: a moving and multifaceted film about one man’s quixotic attempt at leading a meaningful life.

Though it lacks the near-spiritual dimension of the recent “In Front of Your Face” (Hong’s best in years), The Novelist’s Film is another focused, charming autofiction, well-structured yet open to the inspirations of serendipity.

Wiseman shows us the “how” of art appreciation, from politics to philosophy, in a film vast in scope, and richly suggestive in insight.

Mizrahi films one-on-one interviews with a shallow depth of field, so that her subjects appear with the occluded intensity of their own remembrances.

The Mule is a beautiful, troubling film. It is a pearl formed around a grit of unease in the oyster of our nostalgia.

A timely story of broken trust in institutions.

Rich, mysterious, rigorous and generous.

This is breathtaking filmmaking, but would be a little hard to take for two-and-a-half hours. Thankfully, Serebrennikov has more tricks up his sleeve.

Like the best of the director’s work, Memoria lulls you into its rhythms, gives you the sparse outlines of an intellectual framework, then hits you with the full weight of accumulated lyricism that must be pure cinema.

The Tsugua Diaries has something of a chiasmus structure, with each half of the movie, each layer of reality, and each direction of time doubling back on and rhyming with itself.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is hyperbolic, surreal, and, yes, obscene. Its over-the-top ending meets the moment at its own fever pitch—it’s a true masks-off moment, in more than one sense.