William Repass

For all its empathy, Late Shift upholds the dubious virtue of self-sacrifice that underpins the Protestant work ethic.

By forcing us to identify with its largely comatose protagonist, By Design arouses resentment in order to shake us out of torpor.

This finely shaded character study of a recalcitrant social pariah feels more than anything else like an existential parable.

Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s defense of historical memory couldn’t be more timely.

The film fascinatingly shows how Catholic moral strictures and an underlying paganism where desire is holy are two sides of the same coin.

While The Currents can certainly be read as a portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams, it also offers a more expansive view of mental illness as a sensitivity not wholly pathological, but rather capable of reframing and refreshing the world.

Harris Dickinson imbues the film with a singular style, as well as a self-awareness that’s introspective without stooping to outright self-flagellation.

The film's chronological rigor imparts an "on-rails" historical linearity, a sensation of inexorable progress and doom.

It’s when the film plays in the gaps between sound and image that it’s most disturbing.

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass becomes a film about its own condition of being an outsider to its own time, lost as it is in the aesthetics of another time that it views with a kind of nostalgic disquiet.

The film reveals—and urges on—a historical shift in how we relate to other living beings.

Kill the Jockey’s originality consists not just in taking the clichéd metaphor of rebirth literally, but in casually ratcheting that literalness to ever more fantastical degrees.

In the absence of any overt commentary, the film’s more open-ended choices in editing and music take on added significance.

This film essay grapples with the ethical and political considerations raised in the effort to retrieve Césaire from oblivion.

The film is so welded to its main character’s perspective that it, too, shies away from understanding, tragic and frustrating in equal measure.

Courtney Stephens’s film blends fiction and autobiography to fascinating implications.

We sorely need documentaries like Direct Action that can show not only the real leverage that militant mass movements can exert, but how that power can be redirected from protest to the building of autonomous communities and back again.

The Assessment works its way through intriguing conundrums about the motivations and qualifications of parenthood, as well as the power dynamics at play between parents and children.

Matías Piñeiro’s film is an intimate, impressionistic meditation on love and desire, death and memory, silence and expression.

Notable as it is for evoking a kind of cosmic banality, writer-director Bruno Dumont’s anti-space opera The Empire runs into same the pitfall as many parodies of its kind.

Bring Them Down uncovers an organic affinity between the genre mainstay of vengeance taking on a life of its own and the force exerted by paternal tradition.

With the film, Tommaso Santambrogio puts neorealism in the service of dream.

Dream Team’s absurdist brand flirts with an art-for-art’s-sake disengagement: the meaningless void as light entertainment, yet another opportunity for burying our heads in the sand.

La Cocina goes further than recasting the American dream as a nightmare and the much sought-after visa as a ticket to infinite exploitation.

Quentin Dupieux melts the frames that separate dream, film, and reality until they become one plate of tangled spaghetti.

Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides attests to the fact that making art under the most adverse conditions can prove to be serendipitous.

The overbearing plot of the film sadly obscures the humanity of its characters.

Mountains interprets leisure not so much as the opposite of work or struggle, but a stance that can and should suffuse each moment of life, not discounting those we sell to make a living.