Steve Macfarlane

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

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

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.

The imprint of Star Wars on everyday American life now feels so despotic that it's too much to ask a film like Solo to be moving or thrilling as a piece of cinema.

By diagramming a vastly complicated metropolis like Cairo from an unabashedly first-person perspective, In the Last Days of the City interrogates middle-class privilege in a time of crisis as a series of either-ors: leaving for Europe or staying in Cairo, hiding at home or protesting in the streets, filming blindly or seeking retrenchment in broad certainty.

Corneliu Porumboiu resists spelling anything out but the bare essentials, instead continuing his project of inviting viewers to closely parse the acerbic day-to-day banalities of post-Ceausescu Romania.

The conflation of historical complexities makes for cheap pathos throughout, complete with weeping mothers and the seemingly endless dredging up of the terrorists' obvious moral equivalence.

Even Unsane's most ridiculous moments coast on the sheer energy of Steven Soderbergh's aesthetic gamesmanship.

The film is disarming for its sincerity, unalloyed in its positive thinking but unafraid of showing the gruesome details of alcoholism and denial to back up its bromides.

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.

Todd Haynes's Wonderstruck is a coming-of-age tale as curiosity cabinet, a flowchart of narrative fragments that steadily build to a high-concept finale as ludicrous as it is emotionally audacious.

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

The difference between the film and its equally expensive contemporaries is Luc Besson's playful, childlike naïveté.

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.

The tension between verisimilitude and economy of storytelling dictates everything in All Eyez on Me.

When the film's whirligig plotline goes off-rail in the heady final act, Oscar and Gloria's origin story bends over backward to justify a magical-realist conceit that was more fun without explanation.

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

The film buzzes with hand-drawn creativity that's precious in both the pop-cultural and material senses.

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.

Never content to suffice as a mediocre thriller, Les Cowboys is a wellspring of embarrassment for all parties involved.

What intrigues, if in a lurid sort of way, is the film's fudging of projected viewer desires with its characters'.

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

Like Jay Roach's Game Change and Recount, the film's patina of relative apoliticism masks (or enables) its blandness of inquiry.

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

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.

The film dares its viewers to consider that--for a couple of hours, at least--even when a thing seems too good to be true, it might not be.

It's most towering accomplishment are its set pieces, which manage to be brash, exhilarating, and even occasionally moving.

Woody Allen and Joaquin Phoenix's collaboration on Irrational Man's antihero is the closest the film gets to a saving grace.

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

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.

Jurassic World can't tell whether it wants to be junk food or not, lovingly poking fun at some Hollywood tropes while shamelessly indulging others.

This is the kind of filmmaking that gets touted as "workmanlike" when it's really straight-laced to the point of tepidness.

It's the sustained, full-bodied mania of Melissa McCarthy's performance that anchors the film's many winning blind-alley gags.

The film feels utterly infatuated by the cop/crook dividing line long-since drawn, if not flogged, by Michael Mann.

As characters endlessly digress on the differences between rom-coms and real life, the film evinces a schizophrenic relationship with its own inside-baseball cynicism.

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.

The film lays bare that the franchise's most radical asset is also its most conservative: an overriding emphasis on, above all else, the on-screen family.

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

Johanna Hamilton's 1971 represents a mind-blowing scoop disguised as a fairly garden-variety issue doc.

Philip Roth's original ending is cranked up to 11, flattening the more interesting contours of Al Pacino's performance into a martyr's desperate plea for an audience's love.

The filmmakers delve into a fantasyland of luxe coastal casinos and neon-lit bathhouses--as shrug-worthy a stab at picturing the contemporary black market as could be requested.

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.

The film is no tearjerker, but it makes the stage play's hidebound, soul-baring pleasures mesmerizing on screen, and without copping to reductivism.

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.

It shrugs off the bigger questions about Iranian politics its first half appears to raise, falling back instead on a gestalt of the eternal, Kafkaesque regime, wherever the viewer may find it.

The film places its characters in a reflexive historical continuum that dooms them to be mere demonstrative types from start to finish.

It's hard to tell if the film is hampered or helped by the performances of its three stars, because it's so amateurishly written and directed that their participation beggars belief.

To Keira Knightley's credit, she's all too willing to undercut her pretty-girl reputation by looking and acting a fool for Lynn Shelton's camera.

Peter Sattler's film feels quintessentially Sundance: an expensively mounted treatise on important issues that's terrified to dig in obsessively, yet so ramrod-stiff with indignation that it never comes anywhere near compelling entertainment.

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

Left Behind is one of those films so deeply, fundamentally terrible that it feels unwittingly high-concept.

While the trivia value may feel tremendous, only One9's interviews with Nas, his father, Olu Dara, and his brother, Jungle, manage to make the doc legitimately moving--a history lesson in popular culture.

Opting for scenes that tend to be fragmented, flawed snippets from a much bigger story, the film exudes a bizarre confidence in not trying to encapsulate the singer's whole life in 120 minutes.

Cinema is a vernacular of domination, and quaking with revelations both formal and personal, the film attests that Godard has spent his career apologizing for it.

It culminates in a weepy climax that verifies its status as a proud hunk of propaganda from America's massive self-help industry.

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.

Down to its too-crisp rubber Nixon masks, Daniel Schechter's film revels in obnoxiously self-aware period detail.

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

Without a frame of footage nor a single interview presented from outside the camp, the documentary shows a capitalist nightmare that accords its victims zero wiggle room.

The script is perspicacious in making Henrik's bad choices understandable enough emotionally, but also nudges the audience toward wishing the man would wise up.

Between their wildly different bodies of work, a shared appeal emerges: to stop, look, listen, and consider not just what's in front of you, but also where it came from and where it might be going.

The film is like an episode of Gossip Girl that's mistaken itself for one of the great satires by Evelyn Waugh.

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

If the glue holding Crash's arcs together was Paul Haggis's belief in the power of racism, this time it's love.

Robert Pattinson's stare is almost thousand-yard enough to make the film's sense of tragedy feel downright Greek.

The film is too standard-issue in its making to probe beyond the rough outlines of a success story.

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 cruelly obvious third act congeals the film as a wet-eyed monument to the Kevin Costner character's particular brand of American manliness, one that values gut instinct, it's implied, over cold and ruthless calculations.

Viewers' tolerance for Errol Morris's apparent sheepishness will hinge on their prior appreciation of the filmmaker's investigative acumen.

Not unlike Michael Peña's prior supporting roles, Chavez is marked by an explosive anger kept under a cherubic, sweet-natured mask, providing the surprise lacking in the story's text.

Whatever your foreknowledge of low-budget Brooklyn dramedies, it's impossible that Gillian Robespierre's film won't lob you at least a few curveballs.

The film's clearest winner is Pat Healy, whose depiction of a man willing to corrode his entire life to provide for his wife and kid feels true despite the script's silliest moments.

Noam Murro gives the film nothing so much as a hit-refresh on the same glistening, impossibly golden and gray flecks of pixel-barf that have invaded the frames of every tent-pole studio release since the Bush administration.

Kevin Hart turns an essentially crude wingman into the conscience of the film's torturous, nettled discourse on romance.

The film is knowingly sarcastic in its self-awareness without falling back on the gawky meta-squealing of its American rom-com counterparts.

The perverse thrill of seeing less-than-popular considerations of Nazism on screen fades hurriedly to the old ache of seeing any kind of questions about Nazism answered noxiously.

The movie adds up to little more than an interminable bildungsroman, sunk early and often by the desperately miscast Spencer Lofranco.

It will come as a surprise to none that Grudge Match is so wantonly clichéd that to watch it is to explore the outer perimeters of one's own tolerance for a specific type of feel-good sports film.

Like his prior "The Kingdom," Peter Berg's film pretends to dabble in a frothy moral ambiguity, swiftly betraying its true aims with trigger-happy jingoism.

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.

A magnificently quizzical diagram of two ceaselessly inquiring minds in perfect tandem, like a raw X-ray of atomized creativity.

The research that went into the film seems a largesse, but it's compromised at every turn by filmmaker Amei Wallach's sloppy, pedantic delivery.

Costa-Gavras's new film is more a funhouse-mirror panegyric (albeit on an exhausted topic) than the staid thriller promised by its press materials.

Even if the film never transcends its subject matter, Jonathan Demme's light touch adds up to a charming portrait, only rarely fumbling into hagiography.

The film can boast of an exotic locale and rare potential, but in Mike Magidson's hands the filmmaking is disappointingly shopworn.

Dorothy Vogel is less the soft-spoken housewife from the first film than a businesswoman both shrewd and mousy, and her trajectory affords the film its closest semblance to a story.

An outsized A&E Biography episode coursing with the strident urgency typical to anyone convinced they have something new to say on a long since played-out topic.

Robert Luketic's supposedly down-and-dirty corporate espionage thriller undercuts itself at nearly every turn by shunning any potential relevancy.

Uwe Boll's insistence on plugging genre tropes into his imagined idea of populism returns us to the same cynical place as Postal, except with none of the sizzle.

The film ultimately succeeds thanks to small details, from its deep-fried lingo and the swampy texture of its location photography to its uniformly expert cast.

Despite the intensity of its scope and research, American Meat is a decidedly soft-hitting display of an overweening good faith that, frankly, just can't jibe with the times.

It foists its own retelling of Angela Davis's story over any contemplation of her politics, effectively neutering their power as it could apply to today in the hands of a proper film essayist.

A long string of picnics, portrait sessions, elaborate dinners, and countryside rituals, filtered through a svelte aesthetic pleasantness that ultimately corrodes its larger interests.

With My Brother the Devil, writer-director Sally El Hosaini tells a story both operatic in its implications and quotidian in its sensory, day-to-day details.

Generally, these shorts do little to advance their own arguments, but then again, they don't need to; if the short film is the arena of students, amateurs, and small-timers, then these are overdogs from frame one, coming off every bit as expensive and banal as their makers allow them to be.

It adds up to a methodically bland, intellectually sluggish exercise in guilt-tripping that's nonetheless still more interested in its rich and sexy characters than the supposed unfortunates.

A shrill Indiewood torture porn that, despite promised shocks and revulsions, doesn't even have the conviction to hold its camera on the story's most appalling twists.

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

Hollywood celebrities romping around in a candy-colored Alexa-shot criminal underworld, pretty much as a means of passing time.

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

The chop-socky wire-fu scenes are beautifully choreographed, but pretty crudely edited; despite its gourmet neo-grindhouse trappings, the film won't bring the heat like you've never seen before.

It's a pretty tired proposition to complain about movies being manipulative, but Café de Flore sets the bar especially low.

Essentially a live-action anime, it sweats rivulets of Tarantino-era digital anxiety from all pores--every kick, punch, pan, and zoom exaggerated for maximum impact.

A dazzling heist film that can't help but come off as duly influenced by Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's trilogy, South Korea's number one box-office champ of all time is never less than clever.

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

It's well established by now that the mythic Old West was always a trope written and controlled by men, and that there's really no bottom to which men won't stoop when women are a scarce quantity. In its mad rush toward performative allyship, the film exhausts every possible means of conveying those bombshells.

As a magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in America falls just a few point tragically shy of greatness.

It's as unsparing a sketch of twentysomething life in New York City as American independent cinema has yet offered.

A much more antic, exploitative experience than the Frankenstein/Wolfman/Mummy/Dracula pictures it stands alongside, Creature from the Black Lagoon perfectly typifies the transition from older, more European horror styles into bloodthirsty schlock and ever-cheaper thrills.