Steve Macfarlane

Somehow, Bi Gan’s film is self-aware and fluid as its own viewing experience, yet inextricable from its loud-and-clear influences.

Level Five pictorializes the cruel moment when curiosity encounters tragedy, and the all-too-human abandonment of interest that can follows.

For American viewers who don't know, the doc will be a worthy footnote to a long bout of deliberate cultural amnesia, but it's too telling that the Vietnamese remain in the background.

The Treasure is no thriller, but there are moments here that inculcate the stakes with prisoner's-dilemma paranoia.

Costa's storytelling is illusory at best, but Horse Money's self-contradictions are communicated not via plot half as much as in scenography, even in the costuming.

Given its played-out subject matter and hoary coming-to-terms narrative arc, one's ability to enjoy the film hangs on a tolerance for the ever-popular on-screen man-child.

Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women incurs sorrow at the prospect of saying goodbye to its characters.

What first feels like a neurotic avoidance of Sol LeWitt the man instead becomes a kind of mirage of his life, as though he managed to evaporate into his body of work.

The series is both a testimonial to the vagaries of chance and an endlessly cyclical study into the implications of being studied.

Christian Petzold’s lean, rigorous filmmaking proves essential as the story begins to run, deliberately, in circles.

The screenwriter's signature verbal-diarrhetic dialogue allows for a nonstop blaring of actorly chops that, like the movie at large, is nothing if not committed.

Ciro Guerra's excesses in arthouse symmetry tend to arrive in the service of a just and angry correctivism.

Anderson is clearly a massive talent working, again, in his prime. However uncomfortable, it's crucial to ask what gives him the right to romp around in all these signifiers in service of bespoke whimsy—but then the word for it isn't “right,” but rather privilege.

Every substrata of music geekdom deserves a period piece as intimate as Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve's swan song for the golden era of French house music.

As with Selma, filmmaker Ava DuVernay has fashioned a work of pummeling and clear-eyed intelligence.

This is a patchwork dystopia of white poverty whose facets are both difficult to deny and to prove exist precisely as depicted.

Noah Baumbach has made a cunning and frequently hilarious film about exhuming the past and finding no diamond in the rough.

Private Property abounds in inventive low-budget filmmaking while stress-testing a pulpy, dime-store premise.

The film's visual construction is spare, drawing power from its locations and quietly matted miniatures, though ultimately it succumbs to powering a series of cheap thrills.

What will make the film essential for future generations isn't mere flashpoint topicality, but the way it aligns an old struggle with a current one.

This is a summer blockbuster contingent on grand bargains, tactical retreats, and a ferocious, inevitable shock-and-awe campaign.

A film for those who, whether here or in Israel, believe the law is the beginning, and not the end, of rights discourse.

The filmmakers spend vastly more time chronicling bigoted remarks from Romanians about gypsy life than they do actual gypsy life, so a minor crisis of perspective hangs over Our School.

The film is more interested in performance and symbolism than in the meaning of its characters' words or their substitutive gestures.

The film asks down-and-dirty questions about what really resides beneath thousands of years of human progress, a savage and haunting antidote to the high-minded idealism of movies like Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and Ridley Scott's The Martian.

A barbed inquiry into this particular notion of "self-defense," enabled by the quotidian racism state and perpetuated de jure by the state.

The Beguiled serves as proof that what goes for naturalism in Sofia Coppola’s dominion still verges on being decorative to the point of self-parody.

By putting so much weight on his characters' speech, Alex Ross Perry's is an approach with honestly few contemporaries in American independent film.