Rory O'Connor

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.