William Repass

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

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

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.

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

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

Georgis Grigorakis’s film may not revolutionize the western genre by transposing it to an unlikely setting, but it doesn’t dilute it either.

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.

Throughout, Barbarians oscillates between smugness and apprehensiveness about the film that it’s trying to be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Feast makes a stab at drawing out modern, very real anxieties around wealth disparity and ecological devastation without falling back on genre tropes, asking us to consider how the land itself may come to feast on the rich.

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

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

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.

More than effective in visualizing its protagonist’s disorientated state of mind, the camerawork may leave viewers feeling like they just stepped off of a merry-go-round.

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

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.

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

It’s thanks to a kind of tug of war between background and foreground that Beckett succeeds as a piece of entertainment.

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.

Settlers allows for weighty themes to play out inside a cramped domestic setting, wary of easy answers or moral platitudes.

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

Narration, as the film reminds us, isn’t only a diversion but a form of authority, of power, and when authority is least conspicuous, it’s often at its most insidious.