Pat Brown

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.