Sam C. Mac

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

The Old Town Girls never seems to have a strong enough sense of the kind of film it wants to be to pull together its more interesting elements into a coherent whole.

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

Song Fang’s latest moves glacially along in a largely unchanging emotional register, always keeping us at a distance.

Walt Disney’s Mulan remake perfunctorily recycles the worst aspects of the 1998 animated version and roundly fails to convincingly execute the few deviations that it does attempt.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Bruno Dumont seems perpetually aware of the trap of familiarity, which may be why he indulges in some of his most inscrutable filmmaking.

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

In Jim Jarmusch’s film, what starts as a subtle undercurrent of knowing humor curdles into overt self-referentiality.

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.

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

Creed II is absent of both the topically political atmosphere of Rocky IV and the bravura action of Ryan Coogler's Creed.

It reveals itself as neither committed New Wave subversion nor skillful homage, but rather a weak and uninspired imitation.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Asghar Farhadi falls back on the expository dialogue and dubious perspectival shifts that he frequently resorts to as a means of wrapping up knotty narratives.

Michel Hazanavicius co-opts Jean-Luc Godard's personal life for cheap prestige-picture sentiment.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The film leaves the lasting impression of a story that takes place in its own elitist and hermetically sealed world.

Sleight never shows much interest in exploring how blackness can inform its genre's tropes.

The film is neatly organized around not only the changing of the seasons, but a Disney-branded "circle of life" ethos.

It isn't until its final moments that Lady Macbeth turns into the kind of meaningless, mean-spirited, and proudly irredeemable non-character study that likens it to, say, last year's emptily foreboding Childhood of a Leader.

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

Rogue One is less the fetish object that The Force Awakens is because it at least has the ambitions to create its own character dynamics and plot routes rather than coast on existing ones.

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

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

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

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

What tends to right Moonlight, even when Barry Jenkins's filmmaking drifts into indulgence, is the strength of its actors.

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

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.

Stark Trek Beyond emphasizes the inter-personal dynamics of the USS Enterprise, and functions best as an extended team-building exercise.

Brady Corbet reaches for a dreary self-importance akin to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.

The simmering insinuations of Nicolas Winding Refn's film eventually flower into full-on exploitation.

The issue with X-Men: Apocalypse is that Bryan Singer suggests so many possible directions to go in and still chooses the least interesting one.

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.

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

Donnie Yen's performance is so good that it's a shame Wilson Yip's films have never strived to be more than briskly entertaining hagiography.

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

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