William Repass

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 film’s naïve utopianism is infectious, demanding that we live as though life were worth it in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

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

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.

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

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.

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