William Repass

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The film is an object lesson in what can result when a work of art subordinates itself to a message.

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.

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

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

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.

However faithfully the film transposes the plot and themes of the source material, it struggles to capture the spirit, ironing out D.H. Lawrence’s modernity-skeptical modernism and losing sight of his poetic vision.

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

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

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

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.