Richard Brody

Asteroid City demonstrates (for anyone who ever doubted it) that, far from being a mere stylist, Anderson is a far-seeing and deep-thinking political filmmaker.

Nouvelle Vague isn’t a portrait of Godard by Linklater but a feature-length thank-you note, from Richard to Jean-Luc, for freeing him to make films his own way.

Perhaps a filmmaker whose powers were less orderly, less morally driven to soothe and pacify, could have pushed Fabienne—and Deneuve—to tragic and stylistic extremes that would have rendered the film’s reconciliations as mighty as its conflicts. Instead, he offers half a film of magnificent fragments.

Audiard may know and understand something about romantic entanglements, family commitments, and professional lives. But by centering his characters’ desire and pleasure, and then filming these aspects of their lives with smarmy smugness, he sacrifices the realm of knowledge in yielding to fantasy.

With its tangled shadows, fun-house mirrors, wrenching angles, and glaring lights, the wide-screen black-and-white photography evokes the psychological distortions of reckless and rootless outsiders, the disproportion of their seedy circumstances to their doomed heroism.

Cedar plays Norman’s story for tragedy but never develops his inner identity, his history, or his ideals; the protagonist and his drama remain anecdotal and superficial.

Ford creates a title character, played by Aubrey Plaza, who seems to carry a world with her, and he sets the action in a shadow realm of workaday grifters which emerges in fascinating detail. Yet that core of cinematic power gives rise to a modestly engaging but undistinguished, mundane movie, one that speaks as much to the givens of film production as to Ford’s own ambivalent achievement.

American history bursts forth in the present tense in Robinson Devor’s probingly associative documentary.

The method is effective; “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” is no radical advance in documentary form, but its emphasis on the auditory over the visual subtly suggests the disconnect between a private individual and her public image.

This arch, bold, and tender transposition of elements of the Nativity to the cramped secular life of a high-school student in current-day Paris is as much of an emotional wonder as a conceptual one.

Breillat directs her cast with precise clarity, and her exacting staging produces both intensely evocative moments and a rare, quietly terrifying pugnacity that permeates the drama.

The movie is a virtual documentary of city sights and moods, and also a bitter exposé of a country without a social safety net.

The French Dispatch is perhaps Anderson’s best film to date. It is certainly his most accomplished. And, for all its whimsical humor, it is an action film, a great one, although Anderson’s way of displaying action is unlike that of any other filmmaker.

Borden’s exhilarating, freely assembled story stages news reports, documentary sequences, and surveillance footage alongside tough action scenes and musical numbers; her violent vision is ideologically complex and chilling.

The principal story that The Automat tells is that of a commercial vision meshing with an aesthetic one, the transformation of cheap dining into a sort of theatrical experience, complete with a stage setting of authentic craft and luxury, in which the banal purchase of food becomes a tour de force of industrial ingenuity.

With one foot in the French New Wave and the other in the Ballets Russes, Cocteau fits a raging confession into a serene, sensuous neoclassical vessel.

For all the film’s quietism regarding the particulars of secession and rebellion, “Civil War” is a piece of propaganda, a veritable recruiting video for its own rebels.

Porumboiu cinematically constructs—both through the patient, subtly but decisively shaped interviews and the cannily gradual editing—a life story that engages, at crucial points of contact, with the political history of his times and that reflects aspirations and inspirations that are themselves of a historic power.

Ousmane Sembène, in his first feature film, from 1966—which is also widely considered the first feature made by an African—distills a vast range of historical crises and frustrated ambitions into an intimate, straightforwardly realistic drama.

The new movie by Robert Greene is a tour de force in the blending and bending of genres.

DuVernay embraces Wilkerson’s work wholeheartedly and rises to the artistic challenge with one of the most unusual and ingenious of recent screenplays.

Despite its physical horrors, the movie is also a celebration of the body, of the bond between pleasure and pain, agony and ecstasy—and that fusion proves to hold for family bonds as well. But the psychology and the practicalities of the story are ultimately thinly sketched, the abrupt transitions calculated to elide reflection in repose. The movie is too specific and detailed to be starkly and abstractly symbolic, yet too vague and general to convey the complexity and density of a relationship.

The no-holds-barred, extravagantly playful methods by which Audley and Birney conjure the audacious yet coherent tale of supernatural menaces and splendors are the movie’s prime achievement.

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

Southside with You, running a brisk hour and twenty minutes, is a fully realized, intricately imagined, warmhearted, sharp-witted, and perceptive drama, one that sticks close to its protagonists while resonating quietly but grandly with the sweep of a historical epic.

The experience of watching Bottoms is weighed down by the movie’s thin drama, hit-or-miss comedy, and merely functional direction—pictures of actors acting.

May directs with bristling restraint: the camera runs at length, keeping the characters trapped in the excruciating moment, and, with the central trio of typecast actors tightly held on this side of parody, the humor oscillates between sour comedy and droll tragedy.

Most of Lindon’s fellow-actors are nonprofessionals who do their real-life jobs onscreen, and the intrinsic fascination of their performances—and of the world of work itself—opens exotic speculative vistas.