Sam C. Mac

If Kurosawa is less interested in narrative dynamics, it’s because he’s focused on an acute understanding of societally and sociologically conditioned behavior.

The film becomes an even broader consideration of individual fascinations and follies, of ways of responding to art without the boundaries of morality and reason.

The hegemony of history is rigid, but Lou Ye is still able to disrupt it in the form of its representation.

The anguish expressed and experiences described by the survivors certainly can overlap with each other, and even become repetitive, but it’s ultimately this unification of perspective that gives Dead Souls its authority—and that allows it to become an incisive reappropriation of collectivist solidarity.

Ying Liang’s film is righteously and vigorously angry about injustices committed by the Chinese government.

The film’s masterstroke is that its fugitive antiheroes are framed by an environment that reflects their criminal lives back at them.

It’s a quixotic and profound statement on the spatial and temporal dissonances that inform life in 21st-century China.

Bertrand Bonello’s quixotic, slow-burn genre film is political largely in the abstract.

Yourself and Yours‘s commitment to its various extreme ambiguities is a crucial facet of the film’s success.

Stephen Loveridge fully understands that even the trifurcated title of his film may not be entirely equipped at capturing the extent of M.I.A.'s many-faceted identity.

It’s through exercising a certain kind of madness that the film connects even at its most disjointed.

It finds a benefit in its genre affiliation, evenly distributing its action in quick bursts of fluidly animated fight choreography.

The film succeeds as a stingingly personal missive aimed squarely at Brazil’s right-wing president.

Whenever Panahi's architecturally rigorous study of the self, society, and artistic communion threatens to get too self-conscious or loaded, the filmmaker tends to leaven the tension with humor and gentle irreverence.

Terrence Malick’s film means to seek out souls caught in the tide of history, but which move against its current.

Robert Eggers loosens the noose of veracity that choked his meticulously researched but painfully self-serious debut just enough to allow for so much absurdism to peek through.

Loving finds little grooves of humanity to explore in its characters, and in its milieu, in between expected plot beats.

The film is most exhilarating as a breathless vessel for mood, one that just so happens to conduct itself within reconstructed period settings that are as obsessively detailed as the reverently curated soundtrack.

Spike Lee styles the film as a popular entertainment, forgoing the theatrical satire typical of his late-period state-of-the-nation joints, like Bamboozled and Chi-Raq, and settling into the accessible rhythms of the contemporary sitcom.

Stonewalling is an attentive, engaged character study, an uncommonly candid (for China) women’s picture, and a film of dense and considered sociopolitical implications.

Call Me by Your Name is a fairly straightforward coming-of-age story that's at its finest in moments when the relationships take on larger meanings than their literal context implies, and Luca Guadagnino finds evocative aesthetic expressions for them.

Cameraperson is certainly a collection of memorable images, but it's more so Johnson's facility with narrative, on a micro and macro level, that impresses.

Yance Ford’s film builds into an emotionally, intellectually, and aesthetically complex work of essay and memoir.

The only thing that keeps Parasite just slightly below the tier of Bong’s best work, namely The Host and his underrated and similarly themed 2000 debut film, Barking Dogs Never Bite, is the overstuffed pile-up of incident that occurs toward the end.

Arnaud Desplechin’s latest simultaneously collapses and expands his entire body of work, reflexively revealing its many layers, like a pop-up book.

Where The Projectionist ultimately excels ... is as the kind of cultural microcosm that makes Ferrara’s other documentaries feel at once urgent and incredibly rich in their broader implications.

Derek Cianfrance's film is a beautifully sustained study in adult themes of emotional crisis.

Pedro Almodóvar’s latest only occasionally captures the spry, comedic rhythms and impassioned intensity of his finest work.