Rory O'Connor

Two Seasons is the rare film that begins with mundane clarity (remember, “scene 1, summer, seaside”) and works its way back, leaving you with the knottier stuff of life. Along the way, Li remembers what it’s like to have fun; the movie dutifully follows her lead.

Needless to say, Hüller is magnificent in a role that relies heavily on her abilities as a physical performer. Schleinzer is, naturally, not in the business of cheap sentiment, but when something vaguely resembling happiness presents itself in the story, the restraint with which Hüller allows Rose’s heart to thaw is still remarkable.

Dazzled and conflicted are some of the best things a documentary like this can be, and that clear passion for the subject, as well as Bezinović’s cinematic flair, makes for infectious, often-hilarious viewing.

Jan Komasa’s Anniversary should be in the running for least-subtle movie of the year. It should also be in the running for most terrifying. This ruthlessly effective thriller rarely beats around the bush with what it’s trying to say, nor does it ask its famous actors to rein in their performances––despite occasionally needing to––but it certainly hits its mark with unnerving accuracy.

Van Sant imagines this tale in a way that echoes Dog Day Afternoon: an unhinged and stranger-than-fiction fable about good intentions gone wrong. It’s kind of a hoot.

For all its grandeur and dazzling tableaux, I left the theater a touch agnostic. Unwavering fanatics, no matter their rationale, do not always great protagonists make; even with Seyfried’s remarkable voice, presence, and energy, the music starts to skip.

A House of Dynamite is a ruthlessly effective thriller, nothing if not timely, and has the potential to be seen by a gazillion eyeballs. These are all good things.

This is a movie that exists for the sake of existing, art for the sake of art: the kind of thing that doesn’t need your attention and isn’t particularly eager to offer a huge amount in return.

The movie never achieves a real sense of urgency, but the fault is not Johnson’s to bear. The actor is relentlessly watchable, disappearing into the role while managing to locate Kerr’s towering vulnerability even as he’s felling doors with a single swing of his fist.

Credit to both Weinberg’s no-nonsense performance and the director’s surrealist instincts. There is a late sequence in this film, wherein Tereza visits a floating casino, that contains some of the most vividly beautiful images I’ve seen so far this year.

The film is still recommended viewing; they still know how to draw a good performance and nail an emotional beat. All four of their young stars are given the opportunity here and duly rise to the occasion. In each sequence is the audience is left to consider questions with no easy answers; all it ultimately asks for is a little empathy.

It’s difficult to think of another debut that combines such crowd-pleasing sensibilities, political resonance, and cinematic sweep.

With The Mastermind, Reichardt has made a unique film, even amongst similarly cryptic genre exercises. . . I left the cinema gripped and unusually rattled.

Romería‘s exploration of closure and self-discovery makes for an absorbing watch.

In Urchin, Dickinson blends issue-driven social realism (a British staple) with the trendier look of a Safdie film: all medium shots, real streets, non-professionals, and the occasional trip down a colorful drain. These might not always blend smoothly (this is an uneven film at the best of times) but it is an interesting combination that even expresses a clear political perspective.

The result is a rich and gradually rewarding bildungsroman, a film that can be cold to the touch but leaves much to unpack.

The only thing that beats the lightning bolt of discovery is seeing a filmmaker build on it with each passing work, stretching out to explore the further reaches of their talents.

I would say it’s this director’s weakest film, but when you’ve never made a bad one that probably doesn’t say a lot. Whatever the case, Die My Love remains worthwhile.

The character’s thinly sketched beliefs combined with Phoenix’s uncharacteristically vague performance keep him constantly at arm’s reach. We never really get into his head, which makes his eventual downfall (or Falling Down) feel both nihilistic and dramatically undercharged.

It is often a beautiful film, not least when Carneiro pulls back and allows the landscape to take over. It’s in those moments that Savanna really makes its point, watching from above as locals navigate their way through the same narrow pathways their families have walked for generations––the gradualness of that process a stark antithesis to the bluntness of what may come.

Bestiari, Erbari, Lapidari offers an incredible study of our place on this planet, our fascination with it, and our duty to record and remember.

Moghaddam and Sanaeeha obviously have things to say about the state of their country, but at heart this is a romantic, even nostalgic film.

Best of all, Lojkine’s film comes with a refreshing generosity of spirit.

It’s a wonderfully gentle piece of filmmaking––something of a low-key triumph that offers a novel perspective on a topic that had become, if not entirely worn out, at least clichéd.

It’s a wonderfully inquisitive film, as searching as it is sincere.

It’s succinct, light on its feet, totally earnest, and––in spite of some indulgent conversations on art and writing––never feels like it’s trying too hard.

The Brutalist is less-than-perfect (for all his charms, Guy Pearce is no Philip Seymour Hoffman or Daniel Day-Lewis) but it offers an all-too-rare reminder of how it feels when this artform is at its very best, and that has less to do with the scale of its ambitions than how effectively it combines movement, emotion, and sound.

A cold thriller with a dark, satirical edge that shows the master filmmaker at his leanest and meanest.

Larraín keeps much of the film quiet, and as a result Maria can feel a little empty: a conceptual touch, perhaps, but one that leaves Knight’s script and Jolie’s performance (presence to burn, a bit limited for interiority) with a lot of heavy-lifting.

Though Wang never directly addresses the wider forces driving this manic industry––mass consumption, globalization, fast fashion, capitalism––they seem to linger just outside the frame. On the ground level, however, the director isn’t pulling any punches regarding the people responsible for all this struggle and strife.

All in, this is a brave piece of filmmaking that builds to a frightening climax: Nash’at creates an image of nervous ineptitude before pummeling you with the harshest of realities.

Like much of the director’s work, it’s the kind of thing you could have seen late night on television when you were much too young. It would have also left a mark.

It all comes together beautifully, a film to stimulate curious corners of the mind and adventurous parts of the spirit.

Everything from the film’s humanist energies, down to the timbre of the dialogue, rings like an endearing, never-labored homage to Persian cinema.

This is a film that knows what it’s doing and does it very well

Taormina achieves a singular tone.

Having returned to form with Crimes of the Future, it’s surprising that so much of The Shrouds falls flat: the awkward sex scenes, the general incoherence, the uncharacteristically unimaginative tech (though I did like the gothic vibe of the blanket of cameras used to cloak the corpses). That said, for a meditation on death, grief, cancer, and libido, The Shrouds is funnier than expected.

There were times in Tides when I began wondering just how often one can go back to the well.

Costner hasn’t forgotten where to point a camera, and outside all the table-setting, Horizon has moments designed to astonish.

Even by the director’s meditative standards, this one cuts close to the bone.

The director has gestured toward magical realism in her work before (think of the white horse in Fish Tank or the elemental yearning of her Wuthering Heights) but this first foray into anthropomorphism feels strangely surface-level and does more to break the film’s spell than enhance it.

The concerns that met the trailer––suggesting Miller had traded in his predecessor’s practical effects for CGI––are, I’m sorry to say, not entirely unfounded. But Furiosa can still boast moments to take the breath away. Did we need it? Probably not. Are the chase scenes still phenomenal? Absolutely.

It can feel a touch contrived, even on-the-nose, but there is more than enough quiet confidence and seasoned quality in performances and filmmaking to stick the landing.

Like the film’s many predecessors, Spaceman is a story of how far a person might go to escape their traumas––a journey outward that leads to one within––yet even if Renck is out to give us his Solaris, the director knows better than to take this conceit too seriously.

Dumont’s space oddity might not always land on the right side of its jokes and provocations, but every now and then it takes the breath away.

A Traveller’s Needs is just the tonic: a film that passes through you like a breath of fresh air.

It is a story about power and it needs to be told.

As Cuckoo moves to its final third the fragments of its ideas never quite form a convincing whole. Luckily, Schafer is there to guide us through.

That the plot points are familiar and conventional is less the issue than a nagging unevenness along the way.

Ruizpalacios’ film has style to burn but little interest in subtlety, and even the most high-grade hammers can lose their sheen after 139 minutes of hammering.

Assayas, who has dotted his ever-surprising career with brisk, self-aware, sophisticate-centered comedies, has rarely played things quite so close to home.

With notable patience, Mielants (who directed Murphy in six episodes of Peaky Blinders) allows the darkness to gradually seep in.

Where the film succeeds in drawing you into all that life, however, it does so in a patchwork of moments that never quite suggest a whole.

Al Rasheed’s film has traveled the festival circuit from Mumbai to Toronto, the kind of whistle-stop global tour a politically oriented festival title occasionally enjoys when its message is as clear as this and, better yet, when it doesn’t forget to entertain.

Moral quandaries aside, Evolution‘s beginning (which, significantly, is almost dialogue-free) is a well-executed nail-biter; yet the project soon buckles under its own self-importance, and I found it difficult to stomach the queasy neatness of Mondruzco and Wéber’s parable.

Devos’ films can feel overly studied, slick to the point of being contrived, yet with each passing work––each reduction to the most potent flavors––he edges closer to something truly great. Here is his finest yet, an almost-perfect little film.

Menu Plaisirs is not amongst his masterpieces but it’s a fine late addition to the Wiseman canon––even in a media landscape so saturated with food shows and celebrity chefs, the director’s made a film that feels both fresh and artistically stimulating, unmistakably his own.

The director of Astrakan is David Depesseville (frankly just a touch too close to Depressville for comfort). Astrakhan is his first film and suggests something of a stylistic calling card, not least at film’s close: a late flurry of exposition and offcuts that are less in service of plot or character or even mood and more an artist showing what else they can do. It’s not entirely a turn-off.

A quiet, funny, confounding mystery.

Shot entirely in infrared and using augmented reality effects and AI imaging tools, Aggro Dr1ft appears like the fever dream of a day spent drinking lean, watching music videos, and playing God of War and Grand Theft Auto. At times it’s funny, dazzling, almost beautiful; at others ugly, misogynistic, numbingly dull.

With The Killer, David Fincher returns to form in a film that plays to his directorial strengths and artistry.

Cinema rarely looks towards solitary old age with such a sense of pleasurable relief. That Blackbird does so feels revelatory; thus I couldn’t help feeling a touch shortchanged to see the film lose its nerve at the very last, giving in to easier laughs and less-satisfying sentiment––even if Naveriani ends things less on a full stop than a question mark.

The most interesting thing about Lola is what Legge achieves with such economy—it feels kind of big at times.

No director of her genius would ever really make a bad film––if such a thing even exists––but we can be wary of a change in sensibilities here. Lazzaro‘s transcendental moments felt earned because his world was coarser to the touch. With Le Pupille and La Chimera, Rohrwacher is moving towards a cinema of fewer rough edges, and a poorer one for it.

The movie tries a great deal and ends up stretching itself thin.

It’s a cool film and never less than interesting, even as it meanders a bit too sleepily toward its final denouement.

Club Zero is less a cautionary tale about eating disorders than a satire on environmental anxieties, extreme activism, and the sometimes-competitive nature of those who get swept up in it. That’s a tasty premise, but Hausner’s take is frankly a cynical one and, much like the plate of vomit that dominated headlines after the film’s premiere last week in Cannes, it leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth.

As a film, Fallen Leaves could hardly be simpler––two people living separate, lonesome lives meet and maybe fall in love––but there is beauty in that simplicity and, as ever, Kaurismäki’s characters live far richer inner lives.

Railing against conventions has the potential to become conventional after a while, and the film eventually suffers from a case of diminishing returns, but there’s more than enough to warrant such lulls. And of course Williams ends it with a lot of swagger.

It’s a wonderfully distinctive debut by Arnow, who lays it all out in both her script and performance.

It’s a shocking piece of audio-visual art that only further cements Glazer as one of the 21st century’s most original and influential filmmakers.

It often fizzes as much as it lulls, but in Mikkelsen’s Dr. Schmidt the film can at least boast a worthy antagonist, and one with enough personality to cover some of those cracks.

Unrest leaves the mind purring. How did we, you begin wondering, get ourselves into all this? Humans, the film argues, have only ourselves to blame for constructing a system that would eventually imprison us, yet Unrest is not short on levity, and not least in its beautiful closing image or in the energizing sensation it leaves in the nervous system. If a quieter work of agitprop exists, you might struggle to hear it.

There are things to cherish: busily moving between sterile offices and boxy, lived-in apartments, the film keeps you guessing about the practicalities and implications of its central conceit to such an extent that its moments of real poignancy can catch you off guard. A lot of this comes down to Baisho’s heartbreaking central performance.

Narratively it’s nothing if not succinct, and whatever In Water lacks for plot it more than makes up for in mood and ideas, as well as a kind of raw artistic honesty.

The subcultures in Manodrome are ostensibly a work of fiction but, exaggerated as they may be, are no less plausible or rife with intrigue.

This film lives off the warmth between its actors but boasts a throwback charm that appears in keeping with recent resurgences of other seemingly past-it directors.

It’s a wonderfully busy piece of work, fraught with messy emotions but in too much of a rush for overt sentimentality; though it does allow for one or two softer moments.

Petzold’s latest, Afire, unfurls with all the page-turning seduction of a gripping novella.

It’s coarse to the touch but The Adults is a tender film. That those moments come in flashes only makes them all the more profound.

Satter’s fascinating film moves away from the rhythms of political thriller and into the eerie realm of the uncanny.

Baruchel and Johnson, bouncing off each other in a classic straight man/loudmouth two-hander, are a fine double act. As their would-be foil, Howerton is even better, and I loved the contrast between the actor’s soft mouth and the foul-mouthed stuff spewing out of it. Michael Ironside and Rich Sommer are given welcome cameos.

Perhaps the most impressive thing is Miyake’s refusal to succumb to the material’s mawkish pull—like its protagonist, Small, Slow But Steady is occasionally salty and only sparingly sweet.

Alcarràs appears simple, even slight at first, but is deceptively far-reaching; enough at least to have impressed a Berlinale jury led by M. Night Shyamalan (and including no less than Ryusuke Hamaguchi), who collectively awarded Simón the Golden Bear.

The worlds of contemporary geopolitics and narrative independent filmmaking collide in You Resemble Me, a movie that shape-shifts from a first act coming-of-age tale into something searing and provocative, and ripped straight from the headlines.

Master Gardener is another of the old Calvanist’s prayers of absolution—honest and personal to a fault, and a satisfying close to one of the great contemporary trilogies.

Amongst the stars, Love Life (named for an Akiko Yano song of the same name) is jarringly everyday in color palette and setting, but has just the right amount of scope, filmmaking nous, and unusual choices to hold its own and even stand out.

Dead for a Dollar is derivative by nature, but not in unpleasing ways.

The Whale is Aronofsky at his most trimmed down.

I couldn’t bear another minute of A Couple, but I’m perfectly happy it exists.

Gavras, for better and worse, is a creature of spectacle; not apolitical, per se, but more concerned with triggers and semiotics than manifestos.

TÁR is an effort of tremendous skill and restraint, beginning with a confidence bordering on arrogance and building to a brilliant crescendo—only after that first act do the best things begin to surface, the compelling energy of ruthless ambition and the unmistakable, delicious hum of dread.

Aftersun is a beautiful film, albeit one with too many endings, brimming with inner life and creativity, and worthy of comparison to Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and other debuts of that ilk.

Reichardt takes a jab or two at some of the hippy-dippy practices of Lizzie’s art school, but Showing Up is compassionate toward the efforts of teachers, artists, and students. Whether or not it goes anywhere, Lizzie’s pursuit has been a personal one. You sense Reichardt’s has too.

Making every moment grim is to risk over-saturation, but Davis and Holmer’s deft direction keeps things compelling here, skilfully leaving plenty of things unsaid and with the confidence to allow key events to happen offscreen or in the margins.

Pacifiction draws you in with its sense of mystery and surrealism and leaves you ultimately agog.

Shot in gorgeous natural light by Denis Lenoir (the cinematographer on all but one of her films since Eden), and backed by a soundtrack of typically esoteric needle-drops, the director delivers her finest in years by doing what she’s always done best: a humanistic story of when to love and when to let go.

It’s dazzling and uneven, seductive and flawed, and only [Cronenberg] could have made it. There’s no beating the genuine article.