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.

The film has little to add on the subject of the interplay of politics and infectious disease, then or now.

Crossing is never less than nobly intent on showing trans people as worthy of dignity, safety, and love.

Other than a sort of wistful quirkiness, it’s not clear what Mother, Couch gains by skewing away from a more straightforward, streamlined family drama.

If the edge of Kerr’s scalpel is blunted somewhat by the sheer number of other films that show the “dark underbelly of suburbia,” Family Portrait stands out for its profound mistrust, not just of images but of the sense of sight altogether.

The film captures the putrefaction of colonial rule with a morbid sense of humor.

The patchwork structure of Omen is suited to the complexity a setting where characters switch between French, Swahili, and English depending on who they want to keep in the dark. Yet it’s difficult to shake that there are too many threads for a film of this length to do them justice.

The cinematography solidifies the film’s status as a noir grappling with corruption and probing moral grey areas, while at the same time echoing visually the stark divisions between white and Indigenous people in Australian society.

Decadent, hermetic, and gleefully hostile to realism, Bertrand Mandico’s film is the cinematic equivalent of a French Symbolist poem.

Though as fresh and conceptually far-reaching as a David Cronenberg film, it traffics in body ambivalence more than body horror, striking an eerie, wistful tone.

Unlike, say, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, which takes advantage of rotoscoping to lend a unique style to the animation depending on who’s talking and about what, They Shot the Piano Player aims for more stylistic continuity than one would expect, given the free-wheeling soundtrack.

The story’s attempt at an excoriation of spectacle and empty pleasure comes off as little more than a reluctant swipe.

The film proposes that, in the search for viable alternatives to techno-fascism and climate apocalypse, we might look to the margins of our world, to unfulfilled experiments (including those of cinema) and cultures supposedly left behind by history.

A Bolañesque waking nightmare, the film insists that we come to terms with it rather than straightforwardly enjoy it.

Even when the film becomes something like a spy thriller, it never loses sight of its political themes.

The film goes to show that humanism and absurdism are often two expressions of the same face.

The film is as much about the beastliness of outmoded machismo as it is about the perseverance and fortitude of women in opposition to it.

Carolina Cavalli’s film consecrates a ferocity as refreshing as it is infectious.

Whereas films like Halloween and Blue Velvet expose the violence and perversion that underlies the manicured artifice of so many suburban environs, Happer’s Comet, by means of a simple temporal displacement, gestures above all at their arbitrariness.

Offering visceral immediacy over meticulous construction, Padre Pio bristles with arresting images.

The film is an object lesson in what can result when a work of art subordinates itself to a message.

Smoking Causes Coughing isn’t just an anti-superhero superhero film, but, thanks to Tristram Shandy-like levels of discursivity, something akin to an anti-film.

If Gods of Mexico harkens back to certain traditions of visual representation, Helmut Donsantos’s counterintuitive recombination of what would seem to be mutually exclusive inspirations, each with its own temporal framework, allows him to offer for our contemplation a vision uniquely his own.

The film takes advantage of the leeway for speculation afforded by its subject’s reclusive nature.

Full Time doesn’t have much to say about organized labor, or labor in general, other than that work can be really stressful.

Philipp Stölzl craftily melds the genres of period drama and psychological thriller, not for the purposes of reheated nostalgia, but to shed a cold light on the recursions of historical trauma.

However faithfully the film transposes the plot and themes of the source material, it struggles to capture the spirit, ironing out D.H. Lawrence’s modernity-skeptical modernism and losing sight of his poetic vision.

The film’s sheer fun and invention counterbalance its main characters’ abject failure in their search for meaning and success.

The film’s unapologetic level of artifice is at once the source of its pleasures and limitations.

Kirill Serebrennikov’s blackly comedic fantasia paints a none-too-rosy picture of Russia, or its Soviet past festering just beneath the surface.

That The African Desperate is a send-up of art school is beyond doubt, but what’s less clear is just how far the satire goes.

For all its lush cinematography, capturing regional custom and dramatic panoramas alike, this is a film about repression, an inhibition that no amount of tequila can take away.

Cleansed of all risk and personality, Spin Me Round subsides, as though with a sigh, into the reheated sauce of mediocrity.

Writer-director Kiro Rosso’s sociological, pseudo-documentary film suggests a mosaic resolving out of innumerable shards.

She Will can’t decide if its horror or comedy, nor does it strike the balance that would harmoniously hybridize them.

With so much screen time devoted to portraying its main character’s complexities, the other characters remain half-developed, and to the detriment of the film’s themes.

Official Competition is another film about filmmaking, but it escapes hermeticism by homing in on actors and acting.

Lost Illusions leans heavily on voiceover narration that, for better or worse, draws attention to its novelistic mode of its storytelling.

Georgis Grigorakis’s film may not revolutionize the western genre by transposing it to an unlikely setting, but it doesn’t dilute it either.

If the film-within-the-film is a vapid fetishization of women’s martyrdom, Lux Æterna is a willful exercise in repulsing its own audience.

Throughout, Barbarians oscillates between smugness and apprehensiveness about the film that it’s trying to be.

Brian Pestos’s flair for go-for-broke zaniness transmutes what might otherwise have been a lump of self-indulgent clichés into gold.

The film unfolds at a pace that is unhurried yet self-assured, submerged in the rhythms that govern its characters’ lives.

The film is a vivid rumination on the fuzzy border between fantasy and reality.

Renata Pinheiro’s film boasts the pleasures of shlock while sacrificing none of its philosophical rigor.

The push and pull between gradual buildup and apocalyptic rupture allows the film to infiltrate the mind and recalibrate our sensitivity to time.

Throughout Paolo Sorrentino’s film, the line between miracle and cosmic prank, even tragedy, is rendered indistinguishable.

The Feast makes a stab at drawing out modern, very real anxieties around wealth disparity and ecological devastation without falling back on genre tropes, asking us to consider how the land itself may come to feast on the rich.

The film metatextually insists that we not be taken in by new, more sophisticated methods of obfuscation.

A layer of ambivalence facilitates our identification with Fahrije but also makes her a distinct character and not just an archetype.

Manic, maximalist, and bristling with postmodern bells and whistles, Labyrinth of Cinema is exactly what its title suggests.

Alex Camilleri’s most significant departures from his influences take place on the level of content, but, thankfully, they strain the integrity of the neorealist framework just enough to keep Luzzu fresh, if not revolutionary.

More than effective in visualizing its protagonist’s disorientated state of mind, the camerawork may leave viewers feeling like they just stepped off of a merry-go-round.

The film’s disarming romcom sensibilities are an unlikely yet fitting vehicle for timely ruminations on AI.

Memory House, much like Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Donnelles’s recent Bacarau, makes no secret of its disgust for neocolonialism, capitalism, or fascism, though it’s more skeptical of violent resistance even when exercised in self-defense.

The film raises pertinent questions about Mexico’s mixed cultural heritage and the contested representation of reality.

It’s thanks to a kind of tug of war between background and foreground that Beckett succeeds as a piece of entertainment.

With Never Gonna Snow Again, Malgorzata Szumowska presents a charm against apocalyptic despair but also willful ignorance, insisting that, with sufficient imagination, we can face a climate crisis of our own making.

Settlers allows for weighty themes to play out inside a cramped domestic setting, wary of easy answers or moral platitudes.

Throughout the film, Agnieszka Holland makes clear that she isn’t interested in easily digestible pop-psychology nuggets.

Narration, as the film reminds us, isn’t only a diversion but a form of authority, of power, and when authority is least conspicuous, it’s often at its most insidious.

Jonathan Cuartas’s film vividly diagnose a sickness of insularity endemic to middle-class America.

The film accomplishes a restoration of sorts, allowing us to see how historical objects can confer meaning on a new context.

The film’s aesthetic, understandably fused with its protagonist’s dogged can-do attitude, is both the source and limitation of its power.

Christopher Smith’s film applies the haunted house trope in unfamiliar ways.

Oliver Hermanus’s film is a rumination on the consequences of apartheid on those who benefit from it most.

The film offers a glimpse of a world where screens are pores in the boundary between dreams and waking life.

Beneath its perfectly entertaining surface, the film is a mess of contradictions that fails to live up to its own potential.

What distinguishes the film from ordinary journalism, and what constitutes its intervention in reality, is a difference in timescale.

The film strikingly punctuates the detachment of realist drama with the expressionism of psychological horror.

It’s at the juncture between horror and philosophical surrealism that Kourosh Ahari’s film is at its most provocative.