Rory O'Connor

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.

It’s amongst the smartest, funniest, and saddest films in the studio’s history.

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

It’s a twinkling surface examination of how humans try to coordinate their dreams with their reality (a very Hollywood conundrum), but also a celebration of just how wonderful old filmmaking techniques and emotions look and feel on modern L.A. streets.

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.

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

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.

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.

The most remarkable thing about Dominik’s film is that we are not only humble witnesses to such personal grief, but that we are seeing it actively articulated by such a fascinating mind.

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.

Baker indulges just a little too much time shooting his young hyperactive actors in off-key locations and perhaps not enough on their character development or narrative arcs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anytime it feels that Before We Vanish is getting too caught up in its thought process, the director is always ready with a flash of ultra violence, slapstick humor, or a pithy line.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

McDonagh’s latest work is simply exceptional; a film so rich with narrative fluidity, profane laughs, standout performances and complex character studies that its tremendous emotional hits–often arriving when you least expect them–might just leave you agog.

David McKenzie’s Hell or High Water is a gritty, darkly humorous, and fiendishly violent neo-western.

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.

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.

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