Pat Brown

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.

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.

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.

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 emotional crux of Alice Darling is less the manner in which it lays out a roadmap for an exit from an abusive relationship and more its attentiveness to the profound ramifications of such relationships for the women in them.

If courtroom dramas are usually about taking a stand, Saint Omer shows us that the most impactful truths often go unspoken.

Shaunak Sen’s documentary is both otherworldly and humanizing, as if it were bridging a gap between different forms of existence.

The film’s storytelling is deceptively straightforward, rooted in realistic dialogue and Mia Hansen-Løve’s light touch as a visual stylist.

Deftly constructed and utterly heartbreaking, Aftersun announces Charlotte Wells as an eminent storyteller of prodigious powers.

In the end, Fernando León de Aranoa’s film suggests that there may not be a lot of daylight between a good boss and a true villain.

Alex Pritz’s documentary provides an affecting look at indigenous lives at the frontline of deforestation in the Amazon.

The Tsugua Diaries is something like Memento for an age of isolation and listlessness.

The film fiercely homes in at the moral perversity of an industry at a particular intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, and digital-age spectacle.

The film oscillates between the playfully on the nose and the existentially profound with the confidence of a volcano chaser surfing on a river of lava.

Implicit in the film’s bleak but sympathetic portrait of a disturbed and shunned young man is that sometimes it takes a village to make a monster.

After a first hour that may well hit Zoomers and their millennial parents in the feels, Turning Red gradually runs out of steam.

The film fleshes out the perhaps familiar characterizations at its center by tying contemporary wounds to the persistent presence of Europe’s ugly history.

Peter Strickland’s playful mockery of performance art and excessively serious-minded “collectives” feels both insular and, at times, a shade too flavorless.

The film goes from biting satire to broad farce and back as Alain Guiraudie fills it with both social observation and ludicrous incident.

A heady rush of ideas, the film’s avant-garde mélange of live-action footage, abstract video art, and multiple kinds of animation just barely masks that it’s a rather simple story about a Zoomer’s inner struggle with both her own mortality and that of the world.

The studied ambiguity of what’s going on in Fire doesn’t keep it from often achieving the suspense of an accomplished erotic thriller.

Small, Slow But Steady is one of the first great pandemic movies because it reflects the lessons about mutual support and communal perseverance that we should be taking from very familiar pandemic struggles.

As a tribute to farmers’ way of life, its effective and at times moving, but as an exposé of the potential losses that a business-centric green revolution is in the process of incurring, it wants for a stiffer punch.

Cyril Schäublin’s precisely framed snapshot of a microcosm of timekeepers ends up being a bit too, well, mechanical.

Strawberry Mansion playfully and delightfully draws parallels between the creative agency of dreams and the waking creativity of filmmaking.

The film extend into impactful hyperbole the tensions inherent in the situation of being subjects of and subjects to incessant surveillance.

The material realities of being a woman in Chad are expressed with profound sympathy in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s film.

Long stretches of the film are simply mesmerizing, but both Sylvain Tesson’s written compositions and the conversation between him and Vincent Munier often lapse into clichés about the distractions and decadence of modern society.

Juho Kuosmanen’s film interestingly thrives off of an ironic juxtaposition of character and environment.

Merciless but affecting, Vortex suggests that one respite from the loneliness of life lived in the shadow of death is the realm of dreams.

Again in a Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, we find spirits lurking behind the everyday world, but in Memoria, they might just be repressed memories emanating from a world that never actually forgets.

The film may be the prime example of how to restore fun, significance, and even a little bit of sex to the well-worn terrain of the romantic comedy.

Sean Baker is dedicated at the same time to the material realities of being poor in the United States and to the irreverent artificiality of snap zooms, smash cuts, and unexpected music cues.

Titane wildly expands on Julia Ducournau’s idiosyncratic interest in the collision of flesh-rending violence and familial reconfiguration.

The film is a demonstrative examination of the way our raising of heroes onto social media pedestals diminishes the messy, sometimes impenetrable truth of human lives.

Wes Anderson’s film is an often fascinating, wondrous exercise in complex narration and visual composition.

Vincent Le Port’s grim morality tale depicts a society caught between differing norms of discipline, punishment, and sex.

The film never sacrifices its ambiguity as it brings various threads about ghosts, relationships, art, and gender to a head.

Writer-director Samuel Theis’s film is a noteworthy repurposing of the coming-of-age social drama.

With Ahed’s Knee, Nadav Lapid plays a game with alter egos that’s at once canny and frustrating.

Todd Haynes’s documentary excitingly captures an era’s explosion of creativity, one that bespoke new and challenging kinds of freedom.

Joanna Hogg’s film is a work of understated warmth, profound emotional complexity, and eminently British dry humor.

Throughout Benedetta, Paul Verhoeven builds up a heady, campy mix of religious imagery, corporeal abjectness, and masochism.

The musical format proves a natural fit for Leos Carax’s love of the visual fantasies created by the cinema’s most basic means of illusion.

The film is a j’accuse aimed at those complicit in oppressing the most vulnerable in order to protect the powerful.

The film brings us somewhere where we aren’t, and probably could not be, but nevertheless feels tangibly real.

In the film, Manaus is a place of irreconcilable tension between the lush natural world and the cold, metallic world of industrial modernity.

The film’s throwback nature is in sync with Ephraim Asili’s interest in wanting to keep the legacy of black activism alive.

Its characters are suffused with a paradoxical kind of fear that can only happen in a dream, the dread before an immense catastrophe that’s unavoidable because it’s already happened.

The film evinces Céline Sciamma’s profound knack for visual economy, communicating much with silent looks and structured absences.

Andrei Konchalovsky’s film is fascinated with the creation of great art in the midst of socio-political turmoil.

Throughout, Lynne Sachs undercuts the image of the past as simpler or more stable than the present.

The film’s empowerment fantasy of a woman who steamrolls male egos is as stylish and fun as its portrait of gender relations is dire.

The film’s orderliness of plot somewhat undermines the sense that the family at its center is steeped in a truly messy situation.

The film translates the often difficult realities of a specific kind of marginalized love into a story with broad appeal.

Even though it’s about a person who speaks with courage about the urgency of the global crisis, I Am Greta itself doesn’t possess enough of that urgency.

Freaky doesn’t reach for any arch commentary beyond the suggestion that, hey, Freaky Friday the 13th is a pretty funny idea.

The film slides seamlessly between empathizing with its clueless bros and making them objects of unsparing derision.

Radha’s remaking of herself contains an uplifting, unpretentious truth about aging: It’s never too late to make a new start.

The film draws us through its play toward darker, too-seldom-considered sides of human and doggy nature.

It reminds us in eminently cinematic ways that behind the numbers and procedures of a court case are actual lives existing in actual, human time.

American Utopia feels as much like a balm as it is a surprisingly direct call to political action and social betterment.

The film’s experiential approach emphasizes that the fragments of life it captures aren’t impersonal events on a timeline.

Maïmouna Doucouré has a remarkable grasp of the irrationality and volatility of middle-school social dynamics.

That Maite Alberdi’s camera itself is present in The Mole Agent as a quasi-ethical concern suits the way Sergio, as he shuffles through the home’s hallways, gradually comes to be uncomfortable with his own surveillance.

The film suggests that our political system is a popularity contest that functions for no one but those jockeying for power.

Ciro Guerra never quite finds an imagistic equivalent to the novel’s apocalyptic mood and subtly hallucinogenic atmosphere.

The film justly draws attention to the perpetual work that must go into preserving democratic institutions.

The film never feels as satisfying or as haunting as its bow-tying epilogue strives for.

With great clarity, the film conveys how discipline can be directed both inward and outward.

The film is an unnervingly beautiful tribute to the lives lost during the Holodomor, and to the people who have seen the world for what it is, instead of the dream of it they’re instructed to believe.

Russell Simmons’ victims’ sense of their own complex relations to historical power structures emerges from the film’s lucid recounting of the sexual assault allegations against him.

From beneath defensive layers of distanced comic despair emerges a sincere story about a young woman’s emotional reconciliation with her troubled place of origin.

In more than one sense, Justin Kurzel’s aggressively strange film queers the myth of the oft-lionized Ned Kelly.

It’s difficult to imagine a more socially engaged or powerful condemnation of the exploitative gig economy than Ken Loach’s latest.

This lively adaptation plays up the novel’s more farcical elements, granting it a snappy, rhythmic pace.

It has almost enough genuine charm and heart to compensate for the moments that feel forced.

Admirably, Yaron Zilberman’s film focuses on the cyclical nature of violence in a decades-old conflict.

Think Michael Mann’s Heat but in East Africa and with real-world stakes.

An airport novel of a movie, Bill Condon’s The Good Liar is efficient and consumable, if a bit hollow.

Matthew Barney re-instills nature with some of the mystic aura that modernity, with its technologies and techniques of knowledge, has robbed it of.