William Repass

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s feature-length Madre contemplates how memories of loss linger and distort the present.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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