Richard Brody

Baker revels in the power of clichés and the generic energy of his low-fi cinematography, which is done with a cell phone. The results are picturesque and anecdotal.

Its mighty ambition and mighty power are suggested by its unusual length (it runs nearly four hours) and its distinctive, original style and tone. Yet it’s rooted in a familiar kind of story, a tale of the sort that lesser filmmakers could easily dramatize in familiar ways but which Hu expanded into a vision of life.

As the cinematic equivalent of an airport read, Anatomy of a Fall is adequate—not brisk but twisty, not stylish but unobtrusively informational. But the artistic failings are obvious and distracting throughout.

The film locates extraordinary political and cultural tributaries, marked by archival footage, that arise from the history of Dawson City and the gold rush.

It’s a quiet, candid, sharply conceived and imaginatively realized masterwork, her first film of such bold and decisive originality; it’s Reichardt’s first great movie.

Italy’s crises of employment and housing are the subjects of its sentimental story, which is also a wildly imaginative tale brought to life with astonishing special effects and slapstick stunts.

There’s something in Schoenbrun’s sense of style that captures the alluring yet alienating essence of screen-centered lives: the feeling of not being where one is, the feeling that what’s happening elsewhere, on those screens, is more important, even more real, than one’s own life.

The movie’s dramatic framework is bound up tightly and sealed off, and Haynes doesn’t puncture or fracture it to let in the wealth of details that the story implies—of art and money, power and presumption. The result is engaging and resonant—but it nonetheless feels incomplete, unfinished.

Manfred Kirchheimer’s 2006 documentary, only now being released, is an exemplary work of urban romanticism, intellectual history, and visual analysis.

Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and performances are embedded in the lugubrious pace and tone of Pedro Costa’s modernist fusion of classic melodrama and documentary.

It’s a movie that, in adapting a novel by Ferrante, indicates the grievous lack in the current cinema of dramas that do what is done all the time in literary fiction: consider women’s lives in intimate detail and in the light of wide-ranging, deep-rooted experience.

With an unfailing eye for place, décor, costume, and gesture, the director glides his camera through tangles of memories to evoke joys and horrors with a similar sense of wonder.

Ford is more than a witness—he is a crucial participant in the events of the film, and its elements of pain and guilt are reflected in his grief-stricken, self-interrogating aesthetic.

The filmmakers’ probing analysis reveals the basic principles of freedom and dignity within the political essence of labor issues.

The American Sector is an exemplary work of cinema as political action, and proof (if any were needed) that the activist element of a film is inseparable from its well-conceived form.

Keene films the supernatural tale of timeless rusticity with fanatical attention to the barren and craggy seaside setting; her stunningly spare yet phantasmagorical images fuse the forces of nature with the spirit of mystery. Björk brings an otherworldly calm to her visionary role, and occasionally sings.

Bergman blends a theatrical subjectivity—scenes of the inner life that defy physical reality and depend on special effects, whether in the film lab or on set—with a tactile visual intimacy, with his characters, the objects close at hand, and the superb coastal landscape.

The unusual power of “My Father’s Shadow,” for all its subjectivity, comes from its elements of impersonality—from the seemingly scriptural authority with which memory is sublimated into myths and relationships into destinies.

It’s a strange movie—far better as a concept than as a drama, though the concept is strong enough to provide a sense of inner experience, making up for what the outer, onscreen experience lacks.

Diop films the characters and the city with a tactile intimacy and a teeming energy that are heightened by the soundtrack’s polyphony of voices and music; she dramatizes the personal experience of public matters—religious tradition, women’s autonomy, migration, corruption—with documentary-based fervor, rhapsodic yearning, and bold affirmation.

In The Green Knight, Lowery revises a legend, in style and in substance, in order to evoke a way of telling different stories, and of telling stories differently. He takes the risk of perpetuating a deluded gospel of evil, or of seeming to do so, in a daring effort to dramatize a world in desperate need of artistic redemption.

Though “Afternoons of Solitude” shows only the present tense of bullfighting, it looks deep into history and spotlights the tragic contradictions of modern life itself.

Peele’s perfectly tuned cast and deft camera work unleash his uproarious humor along with his political fury; with his first film, he’s already an American Buñuel

The best things in [Spielberg's] version of “West Side Story”—the songs, their acerbity, the view of racial discrimination and class privilege—are already in the old one, while the best things in the old “West Side Story” are missing.

Bezinović presents the story of D’Annunzio’s autocratic rise, reign, and fall in a way that’s as unusual as it is revelatory.

The cultural richness of Birds of Passage is overwhelming, its sense of detail piercingly perceptive, and its sense of drama rigorously yet organically integrated with its documentary elements. Fusing the sociopolitical, the natural, and the mythopoetic realms, the movie offers a model to filmmakers anywhere regarding the dramatic power that inheres in the cultural specifics of any story.

Filming with long, ironically balanced takes, Porumboiu delivers an ingeniously intricate goofball comedy that evokes heroes of legend while bringing sociological abstractions to mucky life.