Pat Brown

Shaunak Sen’s documentary is both otherworldly and humanizing, as if it were bridging a gap between different forms of existence.

The film’s storytelling is deceptively straightforward, rooted in realistic dialogue and Mia Hansen-Løve’s light touch as a visual stylist.

Deftly constructed and utterly heartbreaking, Aftersun announces Charlotte Wells as an eminent storyteller of prodigious powers.

In the end, Fernando León de Aranoa’s film suggests that there may not be a lot of daylight between a good boss and a true villain.

Perhaps the fairest description of Stallone’s performance is that it’s only as one-note as the material, his stern tough-guy muttering and grimacing just about right for a screenplay that feels like it’s been plucked out of a dustbin left untouched since 1995.

Alex Pritz’s documentary provides an affecting look at indigenous lives at the frontline of deforestation in the Amazon.

Avoiding excessively heightened melodrama, Thirteen Lives doesn’t substitute it with much that one couldn’t already find in the copious amount of available coverage of the real-life incident.

The Tsugua Diaries is something like Memento for an age of isolation and listlessness.

The film fiercely homes in at the moral perversity of an industry at a particular intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, and digital-age spectacle.

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.

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.

For all of the film’s somberness, its depiction of an era of rigid class divisions and incalculable loss still comes through the hazy, soft-focus goggles of nostalgia.

After a first hour that may well hit Zoomers and their millennial parents in the feels, Turning Red gradually runs out of steam.

After a brilliantly constructed opening, Dario Argento’s film gives the impression only of a giallo doodle.

The film fleshes out the perhaps familiar characterizations at its center by tying contemporary wounds to the persistent presence of Europe’s ugly history.

Peter Strickland’s playful mockery of performance art and excessively serious-minded “collectives” feels both insular and, at times, a shade too flavorless.

The film goes from biting satire to broad farce and back as Alain Guiraudie fills it with both social observation and ludicrous incident.

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.

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

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.

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.

Leonora Addio is a wrestling with memory and history through a deeply personal, if at times indulgent, lens.

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

Strawberry Mansion playfully and delightfully draws parallels between the creative agency of dreams and the waking creativity of filmmaking.

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

The material realities of being a woman in Chad are expressed with profound sympathy in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s film.

It’s at a certain point toward the finale that this Scream becomes almost as drearily repetitious as the reboot culture that it skewers.

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.