Pat Brown

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.

It suggests that a war’s horrors were the ultimate unassimilable experience of the shadowy depths of the human mind.

Balancing rough-edge verité with highly composed images and a meticulous structure, it doesn’t preclude itself from finding something like poetry in its subjects’ struggles.

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

Derek Jarman’s 1990 film isn’t without hope that we can regrow a paradise.

The film simultaneously announces itself as an expressive portrait of a city, an endearing ode to male comradery, a leisurely paced hangout flick, an absurdist comedy, and a melancholic reflection on gentrification and urban black experience.

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.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film takes a leisurely approach to narrative that’s both intensely dialogical and transfixingly visual.

A deeply unnerving film about the indissoluble, somehow archaic bond between self and family—one more psychologically robust than Aster’s similarly themed Hereditary. And it’s also very funny.

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

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

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.

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

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

The film taps into universal truths about the passage of time, the inevitability of loss, and how we prepare one another for it.

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

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

The past comes off in Mascha Schilinski’s film as an onerous, if unseen, weight on the present.

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.

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

Antonio Méndez Esparza crafts a revealing portrait of life as lived under a regime of race and class oppression.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Michal Aviad’s film forcefully brings home a reality that many of us have been aware of only intellectually.

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.

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.

It's an R-rated teen comedy that proves that you can center girls’ experiences without sacrificing grossness, and that you can be gross without being too mean.

The film is remarkable for capturing a brewing conflict between women while also celebrating their connection.

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

Ana Brun’s performance as Chela anchors our attention where Marcelo Martinessi’s understated visuals might otherwise lose it.

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

The film’s playful tone is a corrective to a century of scholarship that insisted on projecting the image of a moody spinster onto Emily Dickinson.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

In verbally recounting her history, Morrison proves almost as engaging as she in print, a wise and sensitive voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s the way the film’s humor specifically subverts its genre’s expected emotional valences that makes it so effective.

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.

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

Olivier Meyrou’s ironically titled documentary weaves a tightly constructed story about success, power, and mortality.

There’s a surprising sense of communal exchange between the male strippers and their fans in Gene Graham’s documentary.

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

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.

Its depiction of the perpetual terror of living in a war zone will stick with viewers long after The Cave’s doctors have left Ghouta.

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.

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

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.

The film’s slow reveal of its fantastical elements, which evoke the erratic, dreamlike strangeness of folk tales, makes them all the more unsettling.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

On the whole, the film is an unvarnished reflection of the ugliness of American attitudes toward assimilation.

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

The film seamlessly interweaves fun escapades and earnest emotions, but it lacks the visual power of its predecessor.

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.

Rachel Lears’s film is a rebuttal to the position that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's election victory was an incidental event in American politics.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Touch Me Not‘s commingling of narrator and narrative, character and actor, fiction and documentary suggests that cinema itself is capable of being a manner of touch, the site of a nebulous and freeing encounter between people.

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

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

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

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

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.