Rory O'Connor

As swings go, Three Thousand Years of Longing is a miss, but there is something infectious about Miller’s confidence here: you’re never too far from an idea to enjoy.

A fevered, hypnotizing, meticulously detailed period piece with a protagonist so monomaniacal the film could almost be considered high camp.

Brunner’s doom-metal vibe isn’t always easy on the eye, and while images in Luzifer shiver with portent as early as the opening frames–all muck, rain, and knackered-looking bodies––there is a clarity from cinematographer Peter Flinckenberg that saves it from being too sullen.

It’s compelling viewing, if a bit uneasy—not just for the flashbacks to those early COVID days of respiratory machines and people in HAZMAT suits, or the film’s second half, which covers the lack of egalitarianism in the vaccine rollout, and how those decisions ravaged non-Western countries and accelerated the rise in variants.

A rare and elusive sense of myth is captured in The Tale of King Crab.

Thomas’ Bravo, recalling both Mikey Saber and Mickey Rourke, has a protruding gut, slicked-back hair, an alcohol problem, and some deep-rooted mommy issues. The film is all his.

Drawing a number of deeply felt performances from her cast, it is an aching period piece, if frankly staid, that comes complete with many of the genre’s most reliable tropes: sharp intakes of breath; glances stolen through laced curtains; and love, as ever, in opprobrium.

Yes, Dario Argento’s first film in ten years is pretty fun, for a while—and no, not near his best.

It isn’t difficult to imagine Denis–one of the most cerebral, confounding filmmakers we have–constructing Fire, with its oddly trivial love triangle and omnipresent string section, as a duplicitous farce; a way to upend our expectations of how a film like this should look.

All that flare and stealthy humor give the familiar sense of a young director attempting to flex every creative muscle at once. Seldom is this advised, yet it’s nothing if not thrilling to watch.

The experience is nothing if not grueling, and Fists‘ willingness to heap misery on characters who are already truly down ultimately leaves a callous taste in the mouth.

Belle is the most ambitious work yet from Hosoda.

It is a film of two contrasting halves: Solange’s warm and fuzzy naivety and her cold coming of age.

It will sound like sacrilege, but Days could be the rare case of a Tsai Ming-liang film that doesn’t ever quite connect up and one that might even benefit from some cutting back.

A Hero is perhaps a touch too sinuous and convoluted to be considered alongside his great early works, but it plays to his strengths and sensibilities—a clear return to form.

It is a boiling-hot provocation: funny, revolting, spicy as hell, and with a striking subtext of gender fluidity and sexual identity.

At 145 minutes, few locations, and very little dialogue, this unflinching look at the fate that awaits us is anything but expeditious—yet it demands to be seen, a radical film with as much capacity to shock as it does to burden the tear ducts. It is amongst his very best.

Playing out at breakneck speed, it is awash with flights of fancy: outbursts of sex and violence; aliens and murder; sepia-dripped nostalgia; jarring temporal and spatial uncertainty; homoeroticism; etc. That sense of dizziness is only further confounded by Vlad Ogai’s shifting sets and richly detailed production design, and cinematographer Vladislav Opelyants’ long roving takes. Its cast has the sense of a troupe. The frame is always packed.

Hansen-Løve’s cinema has reached higher ceilings than this, but it is a restorative sojourn just the same.

It’s a graceful, aching film that sculpts and stretches Murakami’s story into an enchanting three-hour epic (my, do the minutes fly by) about trauma and mourning, shared solitude, and the possibility of moving on. The narrative also doubles as a lovely ode to the car itself, and the strange ways that people open up when cocooned inside them.

A blistering work of meta filmmaking.

Though ambitious in reach, its tone is one-note, stilted, and saccharine sweet; its ideas as disjointed as they are ultimately unsatisfying.

Verhoeven, as always, is more interested in playing games and is always at his best when needling an audience’s ideas of good taste.

A daring work of meta-filmmaking in which Hogg loops backwards to re-reexamine her own past.

Carax has delivered something gloriously gnarled and uncomfortable: a bludgeoning rock opera that takes aim at the entertainment industry and the dregs of toxic masculinity; that flourishes just as it drips with self-loathing; and that gestures toward such far-flung places as Dadaism, A Star is Born, Pinocchio, and even the director’s own life.

Chen is never blatantly forthright in showing the prejudice at work in Ling’s day-today, allowing it instead to subtly seep into the film; we need only sift the tea leaves.

Contrary to the setup’s illusions, Brühl distances and thus absolves himself by making Daniel a nasty caricature–arrogant, speaking in brooding actorly tones, eager to pose for selfies and flirt with fans. Had he played it straight, Next Door might just have been vital.

There are plenty of laughs but also, of course, moments to trouble the tear-ducts.

Nagy’s is a story of bleakness, a test of endurance, and a reminder that war is a hell that, atypically, refuses to rely on gratuitousness. And it ultimately, just about, earns that overbearing solemnity.

It feels a complete whole––a wry intertwining dialectic on modern desires––yet each scene is uniquely bracing: beautifully poised, exquisitely observed, and even erotically charged––rife with unabashed seduction, though always close enough to farce to keep things kösher and to keep you guessing (it’s telling that we barely glimpse a kiss).

It is an incendiary, playful, and wonderfully exasperated piece of filmmaking that shows a director trying to draw some threads of sense from our current malaise.

The director’s charms and gamely energy make foreknowledge something of a moot point here. The passion has clearly remained, most keenly pronounced in the moments when the octogenarian reveals his own influences.

Indeed, the strangest thing about Mainstream (and it is a strange, strange film) is just how out of touch it feels. Granted, if it were easy to make a viral video we would all be doing it; yet what Coppola and her team have come up with is just so lame and off the mark and nauseatingly self-satisfied.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in Hopper/Welles is that you can’t quite tell if the battle-scarred veteran is looking to wrap an arm around the younger man or is trying to defeat him.

It is a thoughtful, unquestionably moving piece of work with much to say about the inner lives of the women at the center, but it could have used another gear

The protagonists of Wife of a Spy often act out of character, which all bodes efficiently well for the film’s slippery web of conceit, but ultimately quells a great deal of something the film is otherwise lacking in: feeling. It is, for my money, Kurosawa in low key; an interesting inclusion to a wonderfully idiosyncratic career.

It is not a flawless achievement, but The Disciple has that feel of a burgeoning master: the patience and sureness of touch; the controlled surrealist flourishes; the sheer ambition and scope.

With all its sex and brutality, and the allegations surrounding its megalomaniacal creator, Khrzhanovsky’s project might not be for this world. However, it remains that rare thing: an artwork with the capacity to tap into our fears and even our hatred; to live in the imagination and to astonish. A shock of the new.

It is a staggering film; one that defies categorization and a unique achievement that must be seen to be believed.

Jia’s earnest approach has always been endearing and Swimming Out sees it in full flight.

In taking a centuries-old piece of mythology as its source material, Undine ultimately forgoes the inventiveness and sensuality of its first half by slipping into relatively bland predictability. And for a filmmaker who thrives on disregarding narrative conventions, it feels a fatal error. “Relatively” is the key here. This is still Petzold after all, if not peak Petzold.

Woman Who Ran looks and feels like a pleasant farce in comparison to much of Hong’s recent output.

The vast majority of the film functions as a hypnotic if frankly monotonous dialectic (ruminations on Christ, honor, “we were just following orders,” war, love etc. that become more heated as time goes on) that is assured to alienate most anyone without a minor in philosophy or the vocabulary of academic text.

The characterizations are threadbare and simple: Saul and Zama are the downbeat 99% (his creepy mask recalls both Joker and Anonymous); Miller’s character represents soulless commerce. What Funny Face lacks in social commentary, however, it makes up for in mood.

As darkly comic as it is foreboding–and boasting an outrageously rich and nuanced central performance from the great Icelandic actor Ingvar Sigurdsson, who plays the larger than life Ingimunder, a man more than capable of living up to the scale of his own name–A White, White Day takes the tropes of a psychological thriller but presents them with a virtuosic and austere visual flare.

Like the ramshackle family it so fondly depicts, Babyteeth is not without its flaws but it does suggest a confident new voice in independent cinema.

In My Room is not so much about loss, but self-discovery.

Ema is Larraín at his most freeform.

As indebted to the mood and visual language of Game of Thrones as it is to the Bard’s texts, Michôd provides finely worked entertainment with a compelling and significant central performance from Chalamet–who frankly hasn’t had to carry a film in quite this way before.

Jenkin’s script is peppered with comedy, occasionally of a more subtle variety than men dressed as penises—even if that drew the biggest laugh.

The Laundromat is an air-tight, tumultuous info-graph about our rotten to the core financial systems and, in particular, the 2016 Mossack and Fonseca leak, when millions of the Panamanian law firm’s files were anonymously leaked to the press.

For all its merits, however, Joker relies on perhaps a touch too much exposition as it attempts to shape a digestible origin story.

Marriage Story shows Baumbach reaching an entirely new level in his most consummate film to date.

Ad Astra is, for all other intents and purposes, as straight faced as they come, a film that considers the big questions of interplanetary travel and contact but signposts its conclusions too early–and can’t help getting bogged down by them.

Much like his beleaguered lead character, Jude manages to maintain a rousingly lewd sense of humor for the duration of the film’s substantial running time.

It is a swan song but not a melancholy tune, more a joyous celebratory coda to the director’s life and work, a film that feels purpose-built to dispel any notions of solemnity around her passing.

Ferrara has never been so concerned with making people like him–just wait for the audacity of the last 10 minutes. But given the brutal honesty of his latest, one of the most candid movies of its kind, it is difficult to not simply be happy for the man when Tommaso reaches its surreal point of catharsis.

Affleck has always been a wonderfully understated performer and he has taken that minimalist approach with him behind the camera.

For better than worse, Covino directs it to within an inch of its life, presenting the modest narrative as a series of meticulously choreographed vignettes; each shot in what appears to be a single take.

Trobisch’s screenplay hits all of the nightmarish beats you would expect it to ... but they never feel too forced or unearned.

Indeed, this is not just a sporting film but, like Amy or Senna, a film about the volatility of fame and genius and what those two things can do to humans. An interest in the game is probably as essential here as an interest in Formula 1 was for Senna. Which is to say: not a lot.

Huppert is great at this, and of course she is. It’s elsewhere that the film falters.

It’s as if Herzog has made a narrative film based off a documentary film that doesn’t exist, which is obviously an entirely Herzogian thing to do.

They don’t make ’em like they used to, Tarantino’s film seems to say, but nobody makes ’em like this, either.

To its detriment, this has the feel of a film that has been constructed in service of one absurd idea.

Ly makes a concerted effort to go beneath the topsoil of conventional Parisian crime films. Indeed, his script takes the time to show seemingly inconsequential things that go on behind the suburb’s closed doors, moments of rich contextual value if not obvious narrative importance.

Much like The Witch, there is something quite mesmerizing about the meticulousness in the period detail here and how Eggers so seems to revel in it.

The pacing is breakneck but the economy with which Miike establishes his various narrative threads and characters is astonishing.

Were The Plagiarists merely this observation of liberal minds in duress it would have made for a more than enjoyable watch but with credit to Kienitz and Wilkins’ terrific script, it becomes more nuanced and haunting only after that first act.

In spite of it all, the cast members do themselves justice for the most and I couldn’t help but be charmed by Riseborough’s wide-eyed decency as she hosts her frequent “forgiveness” meetings–not to mention be seduced by Nighy’s signature suave detachment.

A deep dive into the complexity and soft trauma of seeing those we idolized as kids through fresh eyes and what exactly to make of that new vantage.

Corbet’s second feature owes a debt or two to filmmakers reveling in provocation, but it is no doubt the work of a daring original.

It’s clever, cold, and devoid of the one thing it assumes to be interested in: humanity.

Wiseman is well known for his objectivity but another of his most enduring traits has been a dedication to showing audiences the hard, under-appreciated work that is constantly being done by small social organizations and local councils.

The director over-simplifies the killer, portraying a perpetrator of some of the most heinous acts imaginable as a basic fool with mommy issues. It’s crass and careless stuff in a crass and careless movie. Avoid at all costs.

Cooked with a broth of a few too many ideas, A Land Imagined is a so-close-to-being-great Singapore neo-noir that does all the right things, but simply does too many of them in its snappy 95-minute running time.

It is difficult to find comparisons on a formal scale, and that the plot relies on a few reliable tropes does not distract from how clearly this is the work of a master.

Leigh translates the defining moment–and those in the immediate lead-up–to the screen with tremendous weight and great clarity, making the sense of tragedy all the more potent.

It’s an immersive poetic-realist dive into the artist’s fractured memories of his parents during the time he spent growing up in Birmingham in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

It is a film of surfaces, admittedly, but one made by perhaps our era’s best director of surfaces.

A great deal of Buster Scruggs might ultimately be a touch undercooked by the mercurial siblings’ standards, but dagnabbit if there isn’s a whole lot to like.

Despite the echoes of Fellini, the result feels almost new in a way and given the immersive nature of Roma it doesn’t seem so radical to consider experiencing its cinematic beauty with a clunky headset on.

As effectively violent and entertaining as Birds may be, there is a real current of bitterness and tragedy running through it. That bitterness speaks not of the physical colonization we saw with the conquistadors and rubber barons of Serpent, but more of a sort of colonization of ideas.

It is a film that will entice the viewer’s senses, if not necessarily their brain activity.

The staggering emotional payoff — a transcendental moment so beautiful in its simplicity that the previous three hours of seriousness appear to melt away — is worth every last minute.

Shot in gorgeous turquoise and cerulean blues by that fine cinematographer, it is often a remarkably beautiful film and, with that suggestion of real experience, an inevitably sad one. Such qualities might not be enough to entirely disregard any feelings of familiarity, but they might just be enough to forgive them.

By drawing our empathy for such morally dubious and potentially damaging characters, Shoplifters remains a real heartbreaker, the kind of which only this director seems capable.

There is something quite reassuring about the fact that — infuriating as it sometimes may be — he has not lost that particular passion nor that roving eye, and that maybe, though he might not admit it, that love of images, too.

You could argue that Lazzaro Felice owes a debt to Pasolini with its fascination for peasants, saints, and faces, or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez with its mix of rural life and magical realism, but that would be to discredit the shear vivacity and boldness of Rohrwacher’s directorial hand, not to mention her incredible warmth as a filmmaker.

This effort to show Lara’s struggle like a coming-of-age story is what sets Girl apart. Dhont fleshes out his story with little growing-up moments everyone can relate to.

Border is only really at its best when focusing on Tina’s rediscovery of her true nature.

If talk is cheap and deceptive — maybe even dangerous at times — in Cold War, music certainly is not.

Burning might not have a huge amount going on below its gorgeous surface, but it drags the viewer along with all the seductive intrigue of a frothy page-turner.

A perfectly decent comedy that will be accessible enough for a wide mainstream audience.

Ash is Purest White is a tremendous, funny, heartbreaking, sprawling vehicle for Zhao, and what a gift it is to see her exploring the furthest reaches of those talents.

In The Realm of Perfection is in essence about that most slippery of topics: the beauty of the game. Sport might tell the truth, but perhaps only cinema can capture it.

What first appeared to be a fun riff on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest soon transforms into something much darker.

One does not necessarily have to be fond of canines in order to love Isle of Dogs, but it helps. It may also help to have a fondness for the meticulous craft of stop-motion animation itself or, even more interestingly perhaps, for Japanese cinema. It is a delightful, exquisitely-detailed production.