Pat Brown

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.