Steven Scaife

The film is able to suggest great depths by withholding so much, by having characters express what they feel only in abstract terms during a fraught, transitional period of their lives.

Larry Fessenden diagnoses the rot of our era through the shifting personalities and power dynamics of solipsistic men.

The Quiet Girl earns its most emotionally powerful scenes because of the way that it so gracefully convinces us that it wasn’t even building toward them in the first place.

The film’s animation leans into its most jerky, artificial qualities, all the better to enhance the atmosphere of bizarre unreality.

Violation impressively pushes against the typically straightforward trajectory of the rape-revenge film.

The film is an insightful look at modern discontent and the pandemonium that it breeds.

To get to the primal thrill of racing, Iwaisawa Kenji uses just about every technique at his disposal.

Rather than a simplistic, straightforward parable of greed, Bad Education depicts its true events with a surprising amount of depth and ambiguity.

In the film’s world, there can be no real resistance, as the suburbs have already won.

Despite the affinity the Adams clan has displayed for spooky, goopy imagery in the past, Mother of Flies finds them reluctant to fully exercise those talents for fear of tipping their hand.

It focuses equally on moments of shared connection and incidental loss until the two feel indistinguishable.

Julian Glander powerfully channeling the ennui of his characters with images of everything from vacant parking lots to empty swimming pools.

Through its exploration of Selah’s complexities, as well as the bravado and posturing that comes with being a credible drug dealer, Selah and the Spades locates a larger truth about the presentation of self and maintaining one’s image.

As in his prior work, the far-reaching curiosity and fascinatingly conflicted nature of Fessenden’s perspective is still his greatest strength.

Sergio Pablos’s film is essentially a metaphor for its own unique and refreshing mode of expression.

The film is a thoughtful examination of the human desire for it and the accompanying hope that it may exorcise the emptiness we feel.

His Three Daughters sneaks up on you, for as chatty, monologue-forward as Jacobs’s screenplay may be, it conveys so much through absence and suggestion.

Even when it’s painting its story in broad strokes, the film plays expertly to audience emotion.

By keeping some of its cards close to its chest, Heel respects our intelligence, which helps it to earn its sneakily moving ending.

Demián Rugna’s harrowing film spares no one from the cruelty of its world.

Gints Zilbalodis’s animated feature is movingly attuned to its characters’ primal instincts.

Adam Elliot, whose work is no stranger to despondency, never allows the film to fully succumb to despair.

The film is strikingly fixated on exploring loss and pain on an intimate and personal scale.

The film is held together by the intensity of its haunted-looking cast and the dour atmosphere.

Flying Lotus and his collaborators give Ash enough visual flair to occasionally transcend such limitations as forgettable characters with fuzzy motivations.

Thanks to its expert staging, the film doesn’t lose much in the way of immediacy.

Promare often feels like a maximalist season finale trimmed of any build-up, a climax that’s outstanding to watch yet empty beyond its pure spectacle.

The film has an exciting, lived-in quality that elevates what are otherwise some markedly unsteady attempts at horror.