William Repass

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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