William Repass

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

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

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

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

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.

The film ruminates on how virtuality infiltrates the deepest regions of our subconscious to reprogram the inner workings of the self.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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