Pat Brown

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.

It suggests that a war’s horrors were the ultimate unassimilable experience of the shadowy depths of the human mind.

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.

That Maite Alberdi’s camera itself is present in The Mole Agent as a quasi-ethical concern suits the way Sergio, as he shuffles through the home’s hallways, gradually comes to be uncomfortable with his own surveillance.

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

Derek Jarman’s 1990 film isn’t without hope that we can regrow a paradise.

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 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.

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

A deeply unnerving film about the indissoluble, somehow archaic bond between self and family—one more psychologically robust than Aster’s similarly themed Hereditary. And it’s also very funny.

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

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

A heady rush of ideas, the film’s avant-garde mélange of live-action footage, abstract video art, and multiple kinds of animation just barely masks that it’s a rather simple story about a Zoomer’s inner struggle with both her own mortality and that of the world.

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

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

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

The film draws us through its play toward darker, too-seldom-considered sides of human and doggy nature.

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

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.

Its characters are suffused with a paradoxical kind of fear that can only happen in a dream, the dread before an immense catastrophe that’s unavoidable because it’s already happened.

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

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

The film is an unnervingly beautiful tribute to the lives lost during the Holodomor, and to the people who have seen the world for what it is, instead of the dream of it they’re instructed to believe.

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

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

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.