Sam C. Mac

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.

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.

No Bears generally spends less time finding aesthetic articulations of its themes than it does building out an increasingly convoluted plot to support them.

The latest entrant in this now-Disney-owned franchise is largely content to further the themes and narrative strategies of J.J. Abrams's predecessor.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

It manifests a mounting sense of disillusionment, suggesting that the rodeo lifestyle many characters so unreservedly romanticize often leads to physical and psychological ruin.

The film is Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus—a sweeping statement on an entire generation of American popular culture and an almost expressionistic rendering of the counterculture forming at its margins, gradually growing in influence.

An empty exercise in imitative long-take aestheticism, A Ghost Story fills its distractingly round-cornered frame with endless repetitions on a visual gag.

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

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.

Instead of offering a probing, nuanced view of the burgeoning technologies and sciences involved in this relatively new outgrowth of the OBGYN industry, though, Tamara Jenkins uses her setting as fodder for lame and discomfiting physical comedy.

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.

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

The film's searching images counterpoint the hyper-articulate methodology of its characters' sense of imbalance and uncertainty.

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

It exists less as a meaningful extension of its world than as a fan-service deployment device.

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

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.

It's pock-marked by the conservative dramatic conventions and broad political gestures that have marred much of Ken Loach's recent output.

Beach Rats is most compelling when it puts a self-aware focus on Harris Dickinson’s sculpted male figure.

Jon Favreau draws heavily on his film's animated predecessor for plot, characterizations, and more, but doesn't know how to fit these familiar elements into his own coherent vision.