Rafaela Sales Ross

It is an experience as moving as it is unnerving, and as the piercing screeching of iron rods announces the Rose of Nevada is to leave port once more, it is we the audience there to wave a pained goodbye, quietly stunned by the ethereal aura of Jenkin’s striking creation.

Alas, for a film that sets out to understand the specific malaises of the bourgeoisie at a time of increasing sociopolitical unrest around class inequality, Mundruczó’s drama feels not only tone-deaf but also egregiously vapid.

The Secret Agent is, of course, a film of its own, and feasibly Mendonça Filho’s most refined, outright-auteurist work yet. Moura anchors this tale of history as an afterlife with a terrific encapsulation of the kind of hopelessness that masks itself as resilience, his gaze infused with the aching longing of a future condemned to remain possibility.

The always great Farrell attempts to imbue his doomed gambler with a sliver of naïveté́ as he stumbles towards the story’s foregone conclusion, but there is little that can be done to compensate for this feeling of inevitability.

Despite the frustrations of its labyrinthine rhythms, Landmarks is a worthy companion to Martel’s Zama in its prodding at the contradictions of a country whose denial is so grave it will bend its language and its laws before acknowledging truths that shed light on the horrors of its past that painfully echo in the present.

Despite this welcome insight into the muddy rules of their relationship, the approach to Kerr’s addiction is the only time “The Smashing Machine” feels a tad slight, the filmmaker proving perhaps a bit too close to its subject to properly gnaw at the ugliness of chemical dependency and rehabilitation.

Although the narrative is faithful to the book, del Toro rewrites the dialogue almost completely, an exercise whose only chance of success relies on his ingrained understanding of Shelley’s writing and tonal cadence. The result is a stunning piece of text, acutely aware of the labyrinthine nature of our most primitive emotions, and zigzagging through musings on love and loss and want with the careful rhythms of a writer who gets that tackling the grandiose often merits delicacy.

A bothersome, ever-present sense of constraint permeates this twisted drama on the complexities of Gen Z morality. The Italian auteur, renowned for gnawing at the knotty edges of controversy with the unrestrained hunger of the unbothered, seems somewhat hesitant to fully dig into the messiness of the piping hot issue at hand.

It is Clooney, of course, that anchors and crowns this dramedy milimetrically envisioned to tug at the hearts of cinephiles (and, for the sake of addressing the elephant in the Netflix room, awards voters).

Earnest, pulpy fun at the movies is always a welcome sell. Still, it’s hard to settle into the easy rhythms of amusement when looking for answers not to the film’s central mysteries but to the nagging gaps in a story that seems carelessly scribbled together to accommodate a character that, although compelling enough, has very little to chew on.

Whenever it leans into these poignant metaphors to ask questions of guilt and duty, A Private Life grasps at something real and raw. It’s a shame Zlotowski so willingly refuses to take her finger off that pulse, even if the result remains a pleasurable ride.

This is a film about anger, felt as deeply by the characters whose lives unspool in front of the camera as by the filmmaker who sits behind it. Such anger is a long river that bifurcates into two opposing forces: violence and empathy.

Lawrence is the undeniable propulsive force of “Die, My Love,” a performer whose rare ability to swing from the effortless charm of the classic movie star straight into the dark abyss that houses the odd and the grotesque lends itself perfectly to a role as tangled as Grace.

Urchin puts forward a sensitive, promising director. And an even more promising writer.

No one is more seen in The Chronology of Water than Poots, who allows herself to be consumed with the urgency and hunger of Lidia.

The director is an expert in this precise kind of world-building, one intricately related to yearning – for another, for belonging, for redemption.

It is a disorienting, all-consuming sensorial experience and made all the much better to those willing to surrender to its mysteries.

I’m Still Here triumphs in pairing Salles’s intrinsic understanding of the emotional potential of realism with two brilliant performers in Mello and Torres.

The horror comes from seeing seismic consequences closer to newspaper headlines than history books. Figureheads die, but words live on, with grifters always waiting in the wings, spouting the same hate.

Of all the things Phillips does better in Joker: Folie à Deux than he did in Joker, the best is by far his course correction in catering to radical misogynists. The director isn’t subtle in his nods to the controversy stirred by the original.

There is something not quite right about this one Almodóvar film, a dramedy that emulates all that makes a story Almodovarian but bypasses its essence entirely.

At a time when more and more filmmakers seem to be looking back at the basics of classic genres like cop procedurals, romantic comedies and crime thrillers, Watts brings to the table a tightly written and directed action comedy that is reminiscent of the era that crowned the genre without alienating itself from the time in which it was made.

It is hard to conceive of a director this young and early in his career to be able to deliver a film that comes out of the gates with the confidence and grandeur of a classic. And not a classic in the making, but one already made.

This back and forth between assuredness and doubt also makes “Babygirl” a refreshing look at BDSM and questions of consent and desire. Reijn is unafraid to have her characters play out all the wobbles that come with negotiating one another’s boundaries, reinforcing how pleasure comes from good communication. That the Dutch director manages to do so while crafting some of the hottest sex scenes in a major film in years and without dropping the ball in pacing this satire on the era of the politically correct feels almost impossible.

By creating — and persisting — on this on-the-nose parallel between the tragedy of opera and the one of Callas’s life, the duo sees this woman solely through the tragic value of her woes, denying her talent and her craft from the light that is true human connection, built not only through shared griefs but the deep understanding of one another that only great art can promote.

While the first act feels dynamic despite its stationary setting, the latter sections unravel oppositely. The gags that played so well the first time around grow tiresome through repetition, and the mystery around the big event that seems to lead them all into doom takes center stage to the detriment of the relationship between the characters.

What is grief if not a non-linear, mood-spanning, incongruous mess? In this, The Shrouds feels like one of the greatest encapsulations of loss and one we might look at more and more fondly as time goes by.

Abbasi manages to thread the lines between tabloid fodder and veiled endorsement with great skill.