Richard Brody

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

With microcosms of microcosms and reflections of reflections, Greene offers a passionately ambitious, patiently empathetic mapping of modern times.

The shaded black-and-white cinematography and the dialectical romances mimic the styles and moods of nineteen-seventies French classics without their intimacy, rage, or historical scope.

Despite clichéd depictions of Nazi atrocities, the movie persuasively evokes, with its wealth of details, the slender threads on which historical events—and historical truth—depend.

It’s more than the portrait of an artist (or even of two); it’s a revelation and exaltation of the artistic essence, of the very nature of an artist’s life as an unending act of creation in itself.

This takeoff on the children's-book series refreshingly balances sweet and bitter tones; Pooh's innocence irritates Christopher before it redeems him, and Madeline undertakes a bold adventure to gain her father's attention.

Minding the Gap is a personal documentary of the highest sort, in which the film’s necessity to the filmmaker—and its obstacles, its resistances, its emotional and moral demands on him—are part of its very existence.

The vigorous cast enlivens the conventional action, and brilliant comedic sallies by Awkwafina, as Rachel’s college friend, and Nico Santos, as Nick’s cousin, knock it for a loop.

Decker pushes the action to the breaking point of fury, which the cast—and especially Howard, in one of the most accomplished teen performances ever—embodies with a flaying and self-scourging vulnerability.

The director, Desiree Akhavan, who wrote the script with Cecilia Frugiuele (adapting a novel by Emily M. Danforth), expresses and elicits apt outrage, but the action is schematic and the characters are thinly sketched.

Gavagai is an extraordinary and memorable film; its strong and clear emotional refinement arises from a rare force of imagination, a rare power of observation, a rare cinematic sense to fuse them, and a rare skill to realize them together.

Though the story goes a country too far and gets lost in its dénouement, the movie is, for the most part, a playful and giddy delight.

The director, Radu Jude, unfolds the horrific treatment, involving long needles, tight wraps, and a full-body cast, with an unflinching and fascinated specificity that contrasts with the teeming theatrical tableaux in which he films life in the lavish facility.

The specifics of The Other Side of Everything far overleap the facts of regional politics; the movie is, in effect, a film of political philosophy, not only in Srbijanka’s trenchant, stirring, and tragic observations, but in its ever-relevant observation of the endemic reactionary counterweight to political progress: populist ethnocentrism and nationalism.

Burnham’s eye for detail and nuance is keen, and several scenes...have a tightly scripted tension, but he smothers the story in sentiment, stereotypes, and good intentions. Despite Fisher’s calm and vivid performance, Kayla remains merely a collection of traits.

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

Reed, a comedic wizard, generates some moments of giddy wonder, but the earlier film’s freewheeling, low-key loopiness is replaced by a dull and dutiful plot that, with its forced references to other Marvel installments, squeezes the action to fit the franchise.

The Zellner brothers, David and Nathan, wrote and directed this Western near-parody; though methodically conceived and occasionally tense, it’s slight and sluggish.

The script, by Robert Rodat, skips around in time to elucidate the amped-up drama, but it never gets close to Berg’s own character. The film, directed by Ben Lewin, strongly suggests that Berg was gay, but leaves the theme undeveloped.

Filmworker amounts to yet another rite of devotion in the ongoing cult of Kubrick—a cult that worked its power not just on Vitali but on all of modern cinema.

Avowals of literary ambitions and familial devotion, stories of death and faith, and a bold dramatic structure—based on flashbacks and leaps forward in time—set the vagaries of work and love on the firm footing of destiny.

The exaggerated, unambiguous expressivity and the connect-the-dots definitions of character (featuring pat confessions and reheated memories) reflect the closed-off academicism of acting workshops and screenplay pitches rather than the open-ended complexities of life.

Serge Bozon’s sharply political comedy—a giddily imaginative reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale—stars Isabelle Huppert, who revels in its sly blend of dissonant humor, intellectual fervor, and macabre violence.

The dramatic fusion of physical and administrative power captures nothing less than the bloody forging of modernity.

Dumont films Joan’s spiritual conflicts and confrontations with playful exuberance but avoids frivolity; the ardent actors infuse Joan’s spirit of revolt with the eternal passions of youth.

The movie’s panoramic cityscapes teem with the gritty details of emotional life: romance and chores, hope and despair and loss, bitter resentments and rowdy reckonings with mortality.

[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.

By means of ferociously intimate images, tensely controlled performances, and a spare sense of drama, Ashley McKenzie’s first feature, about two young drug addicts in Nova Scotia, conjures a state of heightened consciousness.