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.

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.

Perhaps the fairest description of Stallone’s performance is that it’s only as one-note as the material, his stern tough-guy muttering and grimacing just about right for a screenplay that feels like it’s been plucked out of a dustbin left untouched since 1995.

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

Avoiding excessively heightened melodrama, Thirteen Lives doesn’t substitute it with much that one couldn’t already find in the copious amount of available coverage of the real-life incident.

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.

For all of the film’s somberness, its depiction of an era of rigid class divisions and incalculable loss still comes through the hazy, soft-focus goggles of nostalgia.

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

After a brilliantly constructed opening, Dario Argento’s film gives the impression only of a giallo doodle.

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.

Leonora Addio is a wrestling with memory and history through a deeply personal, if at times indulgent, lens.

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.

It’s at a certain point toward the finale that this Scream becomes almost as drearily repetitious as the reboot culture that it skewers.

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.

The film misplaces the root of our current existential dilemma, then covers it with tepid droll comedy and clunky melodrama.

The film’s approach is completely subsumed by the importance of the Mayor Pete persona as the means and ends of the candidacy.

Matthias Schweighöfer’s film puts itself in a box, consistently failing to justify why its story deserves our attention more than the spectacle of the recently deceased rising to feast upon the flesh of the living.

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’s evocative imagery doesn’t compensate for the story being told with such a heavy hand that it dulls, rather than sharpens, Justin Chon’s urgent political message.

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.

Flag Day is little more than a near-two-hour montage of tear-streaked faces shouting blandly melodramatic lines at each other.

Kogonada’s film doesn’t trust us to recognize the legitimacy of the other’s being without filtering it solely through the lenses of the ruling class.

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.

It’s difficult to imagine a high-concept thriller that coalesces around its one-line conceit less convincingly than Awake.

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

The film’s outward liveliness can’t mask the inner inertia it has as just another lifeless product assembled in a factory.

The Woman in the Window never manages to transcend the impression that it’s merely being clever.

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 could be taken as an intentional travesty of the superhero genre, if only it weren’t so tortuously tedious.

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.

The film’s overtly non-specific title is surely meant to suggest some kind of pared-down elementality, but, in the end, it mostly just reflects the story’s lack of definable character.

Expending so much energy anticipating our avenues of interpretation, Malcolm & Marie leaves us with little to interpret.

Supernova is so obviously structured that it often seems to be imposing meaning on its characters.

This tongue-in-cheek gorefest gives the impression of an only semi-coherent joke on the audience.

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

The film never finds the spark that would imbue the love affair at its center with a sense of passion or urgency.

Paul W.S. Anderson has simply combined the established iconography of the popular Capcom game franchise with prefab movie moments.