Pat Brown

There’s a self-reflexivity to the game’s artifact-y textures that’s lost in this film adaptation, where the finely detailed look of just about everything says nothing in itself about the endless possibilities of a digital world’s malleability.

While the film features a strong performance from Judy Greer, it’s essentially a patchwork of broad strokes that rarely feel like they’re bringing its world to credible life.

While Hannah Peterson, with her emphasis on quiet moments and mementos mori, effectively suffuses The Graduates with a mournful absence of life, she also reminds us of the warmth that can be so typical of high school.

With exceptional lucidity, No Other Land reminds us of the human stakes of Israel’s resettlement of the West Bank, and that fighting for justice starts from the ground up.

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala depict Agnes’s plight with empathy but with a horror maven’s sense of ratcheting unease and encroaching doom.

Mati Diop’s captivating, fabulistic documentary Dahomey confronts the reality of how modernity has been shaped by the West’s theft of cultural heritage.

Spaceman seems to want to be an allegory about men’s emotional unavailability and its impact on heterosexual relationships, but instead of coming across universal, the film’s human characters, along with much of the drama, are mostly empty space.

What we’re confronted with in the film may be less the quaint idiocy of four dull simians and more our own inability to loosen up and just live.

One may wish that the absurdity of the conceit had been matched by a bit more irreverence in the script and audacity in the imagery.

In the end, it’s a memorably girthy, if not evenly muscled, ode to the treacherousness but ultimate value of romantic love.

Olivier Assayas’s film is a gently smart and warm-spirited look at love as the core term of human existence.

Orlando, My Political Biography languishes in an undefinable interstitial space, floating between fiction and essay film.

Bas Devos’s trademark placidity and restraint constitutes a challenge to narrative convention.

The film interrogates both the state of our world and the lines between fiction and document.

By turns wry and tragic, but never glib or mawkish, this is a visually rich and evocative drama about navigating the often treacherous path to adulthood.

Initially, more than mere fun, Angela Schanelec’s approach to storytelling is surprisingly affecting, but once you’ve figured out how to play, the game begins to feel a bit, well, ancient.

Afire builds a story that begins as a hangout comedy with a sad-sack at its center but gradually becomes a slow-motion conflagration that offers no easy answers.

An epic adventure in the guise of an arthouse flick, The Survival of Kindness makes up in visual power and moral clarity what it lacks in subtext.

Kumakiri Kazuyoshi counters the comic absurdity with a genuinely discomfiting sense of the manhole’s atmosphere, and threads of intrigue that are already mostly spun by the time you see them.

The Adults affectingly captures the uniquely American ennui provoked by the banalities of a hometown and the lost utopia of childhood.

While there’s much acute pain in this compact but resonant drama, it can also be funny in a way that smacks of self-deprecation.

Diverging from romances in which lovers are expected to move heaven, earth, and themselves in order to make a moment of love last forever, Past Lives asks us to embrace the changes that come with time.

The fatal flaw of the film is that it genuinely believes in the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.

Magazine Dreams melds the alluring and the horrific in an unsettling mixture suited to its account of the peril of pursuing physical perfection.

The film is an imperfect but affecting portrait of social isolation that captures both the pain and the warmth that comes with finally letting others in.

The film could aim with a bit more precision at the price of its characters’ evident comfort.

The film has a rather perfunctory feel, as if it were unwilling to go all in on its ludicrous concept.

Promising but failing to deliver the colorful characters and winding, breakneck plot of a caper, Operation Fortune may itself be a ruse, but it’s not a convincing one.