William Repass

Igor Bezinović plays up the farcical side of history in Fiume o Morte!, his innovative docudrama retelling of Italian fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio’s short-lived occupation of Rijeka, Croatia, in 1920.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

By depicting revolutionary fiascos in a critical yet sympathetic light, Glauber Rocha calls on us to imagine what we’d want a revolution to look like, rather than having it spoon-fed to us by those claiming to represent a power beyond ourselves.

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.

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.

Mariusz Wilczyński’s animation style strikes an unlikely balance between the childlike and the proficient.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Consisting largely of long takes sans music or commentary, the film uncovers the paradox that trash, so apparently devoid of meaning or use-value, needs little commentary.