Pat Brown

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

Touch Me Not‘s commingling of narrator and narrative, character and actor, fiction and documentary suggests that cinema itself is capable of being a manner of touch, the site of a nebulous and freeing encounter between people.

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

The film’s empowerment fantasy of a woman who steamrolls male egos is as stylish and fun as its portrait of gender relations is dire.

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

Andrei Konchalovsky’s film is fascinated with the creation of great art in the midst of socio-political turmoil.

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.

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

From beneath defensive layers of distanced comic despair emerges a sincere story about a young woman’s emotional reconciliation with her troubled place of origin.

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

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

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

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.

The film’s orderliness of plot somewhat undermines the sense that the family at its center is steeped in a truly messy situation.

Michael Winterbottom’s film succeeds in translating the problematics of intercultural conflict into thriller fodder.

Claudio Giovannesi’s film is more an interesting tweak of Goodfellas than an eye-opening social statement.

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

The film might have better performed if it consisted of more than a smattering of good but relatively isolated ideas.

The second half’s series of hollow visual spectacles foreground the film as a corporate product.

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.

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.

The film's command of action defuses concerns about whether it offers a thorough social critique.

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

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

Despite glimpses of a larger critique of the American project in Afghanistan, it lets us escape from the horrors of war before it finishes demolishing the illusion of a clean one.