Vikram Murthi

One of the great performances of the 20th century.

Mikhanovsky and Austen even allow for genuine budding romance to filter through the struggle, with love operating as a balm for beleaguered souls.

It’s First Cow’s buddy relationship that instills the film with a reserved, yet palpable emotional core.

The original "Shirkers" might be a product of a bygone era of pop culture, but its new nonfiction form scans as a second attempt to reach those fellow weirdos who are desperate to make something real, established structures be damned.

Spider-Verse feels fresh precisely because it breathes new life into an old story without abandoning the basics.

Remake, like all of McElwee’s personal cinema, embody the passage of time itself. In other words, it’s the stuff of life.

The Irishman’s ending illustrates that even the toughest men, or the most celebrated filmmakers, still crave a sliver of light to guide them through the encroaching darkness.

Truthfully, Marty Supreme is so entertaining, so visually bountiful, that it doesn’t require pronounced thematic coating to lend import; it would probably suffer if Safdie and Bronstein insisted upon such.

Collective sports a procedural-like pace that keeps the information legible and the action linear.

Haynes simply uses the tools at his disposal to get the job done. Ultimately, he captures the inspiring spirit of The Velvet Underground, a band built on the principle that marching to the beat of your own drum is a righteous, rebellious artistic act.

The organic community portrait ebbs and flows to a beat of its own making.

It’s a film comprised of snapshots, glimpses from a hazy evening. But the Ross Brothers understand that these are the moments that paint people in their best, most unguarded light.

A general menace permeates the film in the form of paranoid intrigue and clandestine government forces, but it’s always offset with plenty of offhand irony and snarky one-liners.

It’s a portrait of obsession that doesn’t caricaturize nor ridicule, an empathetic account of desire and its inherent limitations, as well as an opaque psychological study that falls in line with life’s myriad mysteries.

It generates a sense of personal immediacy that elevates Minding The Gap above the confines of mere portraiture; his presence facilitates (and sometimes hinders) honest admissions from his subjects.

As much as the film repeatedly pays tribute to their relationship— its unaffected honesty, their political influence, the beautiful and often alienating art they created — it can’t compete with the view of their cozy apartment. “All I want is the truth,” Lennon once sang; he knew that it’s much simpler than you could ever imagine.

The footage astounds, but the competing contextualizations breathe new life into the experiment, especially when Lindeen allows the surviving members free reign to confront past emotions.

The across-the-board stellar performances always invigorate every scene, but Mangrove frustrates whenever McQueen defaults to less rigorous visual strategies.

After 29 narrative features, Soderbergh has developed a proficient sense of staging that feels simultaneously relaxed and invigorating. Much of the ineffable fun of watching No Sudden Move comes from being in the hands of someone who knows how to achieve what they want without trying unduly hard to impress.

To his credit, Lorentzen never guides the audience’s moral response, allowing us to make up our minds about the Ochoas on a scene-by-scene basis. He also provides ample rationale for their actions by depicting their hand-to-mouth lifestyle alongside the on-the-job drudgery.

What saves Late Fame at almost every turn is Jones’ direction, which infuses even simple dialogue scenes with breezy maturity and palpable longing.

The simplicity of McQueen and Siddons’ screenplay is a feature, not a bug. More than any other film in Small Axe, Education resembles a kitchen sink drama in the vein of films from Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, where the political messaging remains crystal clear but is still filtered through personal narratives.

If you’re already a fan of Kilmer’s work, there’s clear value in watching him pal around as a young man on the brink of stardom or rehearse as Jim Morrison for The Doors. But for everyone else, Val can sometimes feel like an uncomplicated victory lap.

Maybe it’s a copout to argue that a film’s makeup is deliberately frustrating and disordered because it reflects a frustrating, disordered reality; maybe it’s a filmmaker’s job to force some coherence onto the chaos. But when you’re dealing with evil that has no easily discernible justification, it’s probably best to accept that the mystery will never satisfy.

The Last Black Man plays like a poetic portrait, part tender ode and part cartography of lived experience, bringing a nuanced and hard-earned perspective to the screen.

Every object, many of them clearly worn by use, feels hand chosen; every shade of color feels handpicked; every piece of furniture or fabric feels specific to that room. Asili’s controlled design doesn’t render The Inheritance sterile. Instead, it swells with free-wheeling creativity and Black pride.

On Chesil Beach is a minor story by design, one that uses a lovers’ quarrel to interrogate evolving social values, but sometimes it’s the most minor stories that contain some of the most overlooked ideas.

Although Spettacolo is thoughtful and charming throughout, it’s mildly disappointing that the film doesn’t further engage with the self-reflexivity of the annual event itself.