Pat Brown

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

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

By uniting these four interviews in particular, Claude Lanzmann emphasizes the impossibility of moral clarity in the unthinkable circumstances into which Germany’s invasion of Eastern Europe threw its Jewish population.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The film's slotting of two African women into a familiar romantic structure represents a radical and important upending of contemporary Kenyan sexual mores.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The documentary brings to the foreground a fascinating and, moreover, beautiful culture lurking in the background of other stories.

The fabric of the fantasy world depicted in the film lacks the cohesion of its central theme about appreciating one’s place in a family tree.

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.

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 diverts us away from its hint of a social message using a series of tired twists and turns that don’t signify much of anything.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

With its naked celebration of self-sacrificial combat and idealization of the soldier as an avenging angel, it strikes a tone redolent of old-school war propaganda.

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.

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

Chris Hemsworth’s hyperbolically skilled soldier is borne of childish fantasies about the order of the world.

There isn’t anything in the bleeding-heart positions espoused by Jorge Bergoglio that complicates Pope Francis’s public persona.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sienna Miller lends credibility to a character that in other hands might seem like a caricature of the white underclass.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The film is inspirational only in the sense that it may inspire an uptick in Amazon searches for running gear.