Mark Asch

After so many punishing stories, most recently 2022​’s Tori and Lokita, it’s hard to begrudge them the raw sentiment and mostly happy, hopeful endings of their newest one. But it comes too easy, in a film so artfully and opportunistically structured, which jumps from dramatic peak to dramatic peak as if skipping tracks on an album.

Like Imitation of Life, The Last Showgirl treats high-gloss femininity as a form of false consciousness, an ideal imposed upon women that ends up alienating them from each other, particularly mothers from their daughters.

Timely, anguished, and ultimately cathartic, the movie meets its moment.

The film is fan fiction about real-life celebrities.

The challenge, such as it is, of watching a Mike Leigh movie is simply the challenge of being a person in the world – the challenge of paying sustained attention to others – and Pansy is among his most demanding and rewarding tests.

This is simply a generic and brutally efficient tearjerker – like its title, it aspires to archetypal grandeur and lands somewhere blander.

By halfway, Trump gets more flagrantly cruel, delusional, thin- skinned and aggressive. It’s the kind of charismatic antihero’s journey that might fly in a Scorsese film – arguably the ultimate Trump film is The Wolf of Wall Street – but Abassi and Sherman’s take on the material is largely dutiful.

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.

In Next Goal Wins, Taika Waititi depicts Samoans the same way he depicted Hitler in Jojo Rabbit: as absolutely adorable.

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.

After the self-contained and simmering Assistant this feels like Green’s attempt to make similar material more accessible.

It’s a rosy, adoring view of pubs and clubs as explicitly, perfectly Marxist – a coal country – accented chorus rising in a single voice to inspire us all to a more perfect union.

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.

The film doesn’t have the detail or imagination to fill in the gaps of a well-worn story with anything convincing.

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.

Seidi Haarla gives a winning, intelligent performance as a naturally very clever person made to feel small and helpless in a strange land. But Yuriy Borisov pops from the first moments you see him: his hunched-shoulders posture; his abrupt, agitated movements and boxer’s duck-and-weave walk; the animalistic way he tears into food, impatiently and avidly.

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.

Sono has flow to spare, but samples heavily from icky fanboy culture.

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.

The scenes of Jennifer’s childhood are endless montages, with repetitive blown-out happy-families memories and blatant Terrence Malick ripoffs of the same hand caressing the same strands of wheat from several different angles, and the whole thing is tied together with pretentious and solecistic voiceover delivered by Dylan Penn and surely written by her father as they laboured to salvage the movie in the edit.

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.

Without the captivating veneer of fiction, Stone’s “JFK Revisted: Through The Looking Glass” comes off as a much more rhetorically dishonest work. And without the brio of Stone’s highbrow-Sam Fuller imperial-phase filmmaking chops, it’s merely a wan appendix.