Richard Brody

Listening to Kenny G subtly and surely teases out the mighty and overarching idea of the inseparability of the artist and the art, the notion of art as the embodiment of the artist’s personality—for better or for worse.

Either hour alone would be a wry, incisive, quietly painful drama, set at the intersection of art and life, about foregrounded action and the weight of personal history. Together, the two parts make a radical fiction about the crucial role of imagination in lived experience. Hong’s narrative gamesmanship reveals agonized regret.

Rockwell’s vigorous detailing of personal life—with its evocation of inner lives—is at the heart of its political vision and of its dramatic strength.

The filmmakers, despite their rueful gaze, inspire empathy for all parties to this miserable commerce.

Jude, with his multiple dimensions of inquiry and imagination, poses philosophical questions about conscience and consciousness, media consumption and social order, that reach far beyond the case and era at hand to challenge the deceptions and delusions of ostensible present-day democracies.

With a limited, intimate focus, Little Girl becomes a grandly diagnostic analysis of French society, distilling the country’s fault lines into a few indelible images.

Despite its heroic energy and impulsive youth, it’s a bleak philosophical work of its time, a bitterly terrifying vision of no exit.

The over-all tone of the drama—concerning foxhole friends who end up as partners in crime but rivals in love—evokes the flailings of unformed men whom a heedless society tossed in harm’s way and then cast aside.

Even before the thieves cross the building’s threshold, “The Mastermind” emerges as an instant heist classic. Reichardt’s granular view of the plot, clearly bound for disaster, is both terribly sad and absurdly funny.

Rather than offering a stark and incisive vision, this aesthetic of tacitness delivers a sentimentalized prettiness. The results are merely vague, in a way that seems willfully naïve about Japan, about labor, and about art.

The abruptness, the willfulness, the ferocity of Passages reflect, more than any other film by an American director that I’ve seen in a while, the influence of Pialat.

Sembène depicts a corrupt system that replaced white dictators and profiteers with black ones; the symbolic ending, a glimmer of revolutionary hope, is as gratifying as it is implausible.

In its modest, forthright warmth, “Cane River” is a work of visionary artistry and progressive imagination.

The canniness of Gray’s procedure is matched by the boldness, even the recklessness, of the extremes to which he pushes it—along with his characters, his story, his emotions, and his techniques. The result is to turn Ad Astra into an instant classic of intimate cinema—one that requires massive machinery and complex methods to create a cinematic simplicity that, for all the greatness of his earlier films, had eluded him until now.

For all its intimacy, the drama has a vast scope, a fierce intensity, and an element of metaphysical whimsy (including one of the great recent dream sequences), which all come to life in the indelibly expressive spontaneity of Kim’s performance.

The documentary puts personalities to ideas; it teems with notable characters, spanning a range from righteous to indifferent to ignoble, who excel at speaking their minds and expressing their emotions when a camera is pointed at them.

The immensely empathetic view of Franz is overwhelmed by vague spirituality and vaguer politics; the impressionistic methods dispel the story’s powerful and noble specificity.

Maysles endearingly reveals Apfel’s blend of blind passion and keen practicality, her unflagging enthusiasm for transmitting her knowledge to young people, and her synoptic view of fashion as living history.

The extraordinarily imaginative new feature by Christopher Munch, The 11th Green, stakes out a genre unto itself: poli-sci-fi, a fusion of science fiction and the history-rooted political thriller.

[Hong's] tightrope-long takes of scenes filmed in settings ranging from the picturesque to the banal (restaurants and apartments, café terraces, Mediterranean beaches) have an intricate dramatic construction, replete with glittering asides and wondrous coincidences, to rival that of a Hollywood classic.

It’s a film that’s energized throughout by a sense of artistic freedom and uninhibited creative passion greater than what Gerwig has brought to even her previous projects made outside the ostensible constraints of studio filmmaking.

The Eternal Daughter is very much a two-hander for one actor, an astonishing tour de force for Swinton’s art and for Hogg’s writing and direction—all the more so inasmuch as it’s a sequel, the third in a series.

The movie sinks, fast and deep, under the weight of dramatic shortcuts, overemphatic details, undercooked possibilities, unconsidered implications.

The late Harry Dean Stanton, in one of his last roles, infuses the slightest gesture and inflection with the weight of grave experience, but this maudlin drama mainly renders his grit and wisdom wholesome and cute.

Nyoni’s frank, confrontational style is both derisive and empathetic; she extracts powerful symbolic images from the oppressive environment.

Arnold, a major artist of cinematic fiction, has made characters’ self-presentation, their sense of performance in daily life, a crucial part of her most original drama, “American Honey.” In “Cow,” Arnold hasn’t considered her subjects or her place in their world as stringently or as originally.

Haroun journeys through the country and films his travels to meet with the regime’s victims. He brings a profound compassion and a controlled rage to accounts of moral obscenities, while also recording accounts of deep solidarity among the victims, even under terrifying circumstances.

Its blend of documentary and dramatic filmmaking, of first-person reflection and reenactment, sets a standard for cinematic inquiry into the political implications of personal experience.

Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson bring joyful energy to Song Sung Blue.

An exemplary work of cinematic modernism, a reflexive film that turns its genesis into its subject and its moral essence.

With eerie point-of-view shots, Buñuel gets inside the mind of a madman whose sadism is inseparable from his high social position; his commanding manner mirrors the folly and the cruelty of society at large.

Mazursky applies a light and graceful touch to matters of intimate agony.

Kolodny’s film is a touching, disquieting, relentlessly fascinating view of a troubled soul and of the world of trouble he belongs to.

Zlotowski crafts a distinctive style to distill and heighten the drama’s psychological complexities and societal analyses. No less than its young protagonists, the film dangerously brushes against the edge of modernity’s enticingly destructive glitz.

With audacious leaps of time and intimate echoes spanning a quarter century of intertwined lives, the director Jia Zhangke endows this romantic melodrama with vast geopolitical import.

For all the specific accusations and denunciations that Y—and Lapid—level at Israeli politics and culture, “Ahed’s Knee” is, above all, a work of cinematopoeia: it looks and sounds and feels like what it means.

Dumb Money, touching on questions of the authority of personality and the importance of nonfinancial—even completely irrational—motives in the investment world, offers a gleeful romp through strange and treacherous territory that merits a closer, more careful look.

This drama, by the director Jessie Maple, from 1981—one of the first features directed by a black American female filmmaker—is a blunt cinematic instrument of immense power.

A wider range of interview subjects might have broadened the perspective, yet before criticizing a tradition, it’s useful to define it, and Jones (a superb critic who now heads the New York Film Festival) offers deep insight into the watershed moment and the enduring forms of Hitchcock’s canonization.

The brisk and lyrical action, filmed in chilly black-and-white tones, is adorned with eccentric, symbolic details; the petty stuff of daily life shudders with stifled conflict and looming calamity.

Despite Cornwell’s striving for reflexivity, for getting behind the onscreen talk to explore his relationship to Morris, nothing so dramatic takes place; the high-stakes mind games that he likes to think he’s playing never really occur. The Pigeon Tunnel is nonetheless an absorbing, colorful self-portrait.

Apollo 10 1/2 unites the inner and outer life in a form of cultural autobiography, and it does so with a unique sense of cinematic style and form.

What matters in Monster isn’t the gamesmanship built into its structure but the imaginative richness, the emotional immediacy, and the vital performances that are concentrated in its extended third section.

The diverging paths and seething conflicts of two lifelong friends, now young Brooklyn professionals, are explored deeply and poignantly in this deceptively calm melodrama, written and directed by Dan Sallitt.

In Our Day is essentially a sort of wisdom cinema, a distillation of the emotional complexity, the aphoristic brilliance, and the severity toward oneself and toward others that marks the world of admired creators—and it’s a work of paradox.

The paradox is poignant: the movie is, at its best, so alive to its characters’ immediate experience that it’s all the more regrettable that we do not really know them at all.

Green’s direction and dramatic sensibility are blunt, but the film’s laboratory-like microcosm of scenarios pointedly similar to recent widely publicized events in the movie business is shocking and effective.

As written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, the movie offers enough moments of sharp emotion and keen perception to keep anticipation high throughout. Yet the movie stays on the surface, to yield, for the most part, a simplistic, unexplored celebration of characters who are molded to fit the story’s amiable tone.

Amid its tightly plotted action, it seethes with a rage that seems pressurized by the sealed-off grimness of the pandemic years.

Fiennes and Tucci, in particular, spin dialogue with athletic deftness, but they and the rest of the cast are burdened with embodying stock characters who exist only through a salient trait or two. Instead of rising to the awe-inspiring heights of their settings, the refinement of the performances is narrowed to monotony.

Filming cityscapes and intimate gestures with avid attention, adorning the dialogue with deep confessions and witty asides, Piñeiro conjures a cogently realistic yet gloriously imaginative vision of youthful ardor in love and art alike.

Kaufman seeks admiration for his warmhearted and gentle humanism and also for his extravagant creativity, even when the latter gets in the way of the former—when his cleverness stands like a child’s antics in front of the screen where the movie is playing, defying viewers to pay attention to what’s going on behind him while amiably indulging or ignoring his trickery.

Whether pushing the camera close to the performers or zooming in from afar to survey them intimately, Simon captures the lavish life of theatrical imagination that inspires them and makes gender itself seem like an urgent performance.

Lou breaks apart the veneer of narrative perfection, in order to show where the power lies.

July’s aesthetic imagination is inseparable from her empathetic curiosity and emotional urgency; it tempers a howl of anguish at a world of pain into a kind of cinematic music that unfolds it in nuanced detail and extends a hand of consolation, even offers a note of hope.

Wood lacked both the dramatic sense to unfold his speculations in action and the technique (as well as the money) to embody, in any plausible way, his spectacular fancies, but their crude approximations vibrate with his stifled exaltation.

What’s most impressive about Top Gun: Maverick is its speed—not the speed of the planes in flight but the speed with which the movie dashes in a straight line from its opening act to its conclusion. The flights at the center of the film are vertiginously twisty, but the drama is a bullet train on a rigid track.

BlackBerry plays like a prototype still waiting to be realized, a sketch that’s still undeveloped.

After Yang shows how easily the taste for beauty can be tainted, subverted, distorted, and abused by the powers that be.

In excluding conversation, commentary, analysis, context, and personality, Frammartino is a cinematic Icarus: he strains high for sublimity and finds a deck of picture postcards.

Lynch’s powerful depiction of Merrick (played by John Hurt) moves a viewer from revulsion and fear to empathy and tenderness.

In short, the last half hour or so of the movie’s nearly three-hour span is giddily intense, swoony, swashbuckling, and sensational yet superficial fun. Right after I saw the movie, I couldn’t stop talking about that ending. It makes the rest of the movie worth sitting through.

The documentary is a mere encyclopedia-like info-product, which reduces its rich audiovisual archival material and its heartfelt interviews with people who knew and loved Bourdain to freeze-dried sound and image bites. It hardly deserves the attention it’s received—and Neville’s audio stunt, far from marring the film, merely serves as a brazen form of self-promotional publicity.

Above all, the film decries the impunity that the war’s masterminds and the country’s leaders enjoyed while William and other frontline grunts took the blame. It’s that notion of the prevailing order’s insidiously hermetic system of self-protection that gives The Card Counter its furious energy.

The film’s relentless intensity, its concentration on highs and lows, on extremes of sensation and emotion, is in itself a profound view of the very nature of trauma.

He stages the clashes of idiosyncratic characters that give the enterprise its life while observing the infinitesimal details of which that life is made—how to make new friends, how to hook up cable TV—as well as the ethereally intimate connections that result.

With this film, Wenders crystallized his style of existential sentimentality. His cool eye for urbanism and design blends a love of kitsch with a hatred for commercialism, historicism with a fear of history’s ghosts.

The overarching and underlying question that the film poses is nothing less than: What is art? And, for that matter, is the conventional definition of good art too narrow to account for the merits of such works as these?

The movie, directed by Mark Robson and based on a novel by Budd Schulberg, packs the ambient violence of a sports world and a media scene that are infested with gangsters; it’s an exposé not just of boxing but of the American way of business.

It’s a freestanding, freewheeling work that relies on familiar characters to tell a story closer in substance and tone to the sexual fury, social outrage, wild humor, and outlaw freedom of John Waters’s films, and it has a vociferously didactic streak that’s playful yet focussed.

Though the violence never uncorks and the story takes a sentimental turn, the deep shadows, the jarring angles and cuts, and the idiosyncratic whims of gesture evoke a sorry underworld that’s out of joint, out of luck, and out of time.

With “It’s Not Me,” Carax confronts the aberration of celebrity (even art-house celebrity) by means of a cinematic self-creation that’s both a matter of sincere reticence and an audaciously assertive work of art.

Blue Moon revels in a fine mind and a great soul, and Hawke’s embodiment of both is exalted and startling.

The filmmakers’ self-imposition of a pristinely clean aesthetic results in the kind of emptied, tranquillized, minutely calibrated experience that’s no less a matter of fan service than the latest installment of comic-book I.P., and offers no more meaningful a view of life.

Despite situations aching for parody, Assayas is anything but satirical: as his characters give the book business, the Internet, and infidelity a vigorous but empty dialectical workout, he comes down squarely on the side of business as usual, which the film itself embodies. Yet Macaigne, quizzical and impulsive, invests a rote role with brilliant turns.

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?...is an overwhelming experience. It fills the current American landscape with the hatred, oppression, and violence that also scars its history.

Boots Riley’s first feature is a scintillating comedic outburst of political imagination and visionary fury.

The so-called long take serves as a mask—a gross bit of earnest showmanship that both conceals and reflects the trickery and the cheap machinations of the script, the shallowness of the direction of the actors, and the brazenly superficial and emotion-dictating music score.

In Logan Lucky, Soderbergh, for all his felicitous exertions, falls back on a certain artistic facility. This doesn’t mean that the film was easy to make; it means that Soderbergh relies on what he knows rather than wandering off into what he doesn’t. He knows a lot, and it shows; his pleasure in sharing it is substantial.

The images aren’t only stripped of superfluities; they’re hermetically sealed off from anything that could impinge from offscreen, from the world at large. They feel designed, deadeningly, to mean just one thing.

A Man of Integrity is both a work of political defiance and of artistic audacity. The movie’s extreme contrast between the bland surfaces of daily life and the maddening pressures of ambient power looming beneath them turns its starkly realistic images into calmly furious denunciations, journalistic revelations, and even wildly disorienting hallucinations.

Above all, Till is a work of mighty cinematic portraiture, with a range of closeups of Mamie that infuse the film with an overwhelming combination of subjective depth and an outward sense of purpose.

Every step depends on stifled emotions and closely guarded secrets, resulting in a buildup of operatic passion that endows everyday gestures and inflections with grandeur and nobility.

The hard-won consolations of seasonal sentiment emerge in the searching performances as well as in the impressionistic handheld images.

Nope is one of the great movies about moviemaking, about the moral and spiritual implications of cinematic representation itself—especially the representation of people at the center of American society who are treated as its outsiders. It is an exploitation film—which is to say, a film about exploitation and the cinematic history of exploitation as the medium’s very essence.

Through Glassman’s diligent and empathetic investigations, it becomes a film of documents, in which the aura of the letters—the worlds that they contain in their text and evoke in their sheer physical presence—generates overwhelming emotional power.

The film’s real charge lies elsewhere—in Preminger’s view of a jolting, disoriented age of rock and roll.

The exceptional, often overwhelming power of the script that Polley wrote, based on Miriam Toews’s novel, is, if not undercut, not amplified by the filming.

The hallucinatory power of ayahuasca and the incantatory lure of rituals fuse with existential dread in this darkly hypnotic drama.

The actors’ skill is in the foreground, and it’s impressive—it’s the one thing worth watching the movie for (remarkably, this is Zendaya’s first major dramatic-movie role). But Levinson spotlights that skill at the expense of emotional risk, including—indeed, especially—any of his own.