Pat Brown

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.