Yet despite a lo-fi, handheld-camera cragginess, it still has something of the lyricism that marks so much of her work, going back to the Oscar-winning short Wasp.

Folman is best in the family-entertainment mode when he’s breathing visual life into Anne’s flights of imagination.

It is a boiling-hot provocation: funny, revolting, spicy as hell, and with a striking subtext of gender fluidity and sexual identity.

At 145 minutes, few locations, and very little dialogue, this unflinching look at the fate that awaits us is anything but expeditious—yet it demands to be seen, a radical film with as much capacity to shock as it does to burden the tear ducts. It is amongst his very best.

Certainly there have been worse screen portrayals of bipolar than The Restless, which is largely inoffensive despite its reliance on stereotypes. Instead it feels like a frustrating missed opportunity, consistently opting for melodramatics whenever it needs to seriously explore its subject matter.

Playing out at breakneck speed, it is awash with flights of fancy: outbursts of sex and violence; aliens and murder; sepia-dripped nostalgia; jarring temporal and spatial uncertainty; homoeroticism; etc. That sense of dizziness is only further confounded by Vlad Ogai’s shifting sets and richly detailed production design, and cinematographer Vladislav Opelyants’ long roving takes. Its cast has the sense of a troupe. The frame is always packed.

With director Michael Sarnoski subverting expectations from the start, the experience is ultimately a rewarding one.

[Baker] carefully straddles over the does-depiction-equal-endorsement question. But for something so embedded with ideas and volatile associations, maybe Mikey and Strawberry’s story deserves less of a fairy tale hue.

The Works and Days is by no means an easy thing to endure, but doing so brings you closer to understanding what it might mean to finally be at peace.

Hansen-Løve’s cinema has reached higher ceilings than this, but it is a restorative sojourn just the same.

No Ordinary Man is ultimately a melancholy look at how far things have or have not come for trans people since Billy Tipton’s death.

Kuosmanen has crafted a drama within a clearly defined moment in recent history, only to refuse to be tied to it. This approach to period storytelling proves far more intriguing than the romantic drama within this setting.

Your enjoyment is thus hinged on your ability to not care. Can you let the wild insanity be enough? I generally can and did for a large portion of Die in a Gunfight, but that still doesn’t make it more than a shallow lark to forget the minute you leave the theater.

A New Legacy fails to deliver on Who Framed Roger Rabbit-type spectacle, despite its exciting formal conceit of being able to weave between live-action and flat or CG animation. What felt like the twentieth sighting of Pennywise and the Penguin as extras cheering court-side during the climactic game exemplifies this film’s lack of imagination in visualizing basketball, or rather its digital universe.

There’s often a lack of narrative purpose, and refreshingly so. It follows whatever catches its eye. It, much like Bourdain, is zealous in collecting the excess of surrounding information.

The acting is good (Jakubenko and Bowden’s relationship feels especially real), the effects are great (moving above and below the waterline to show shark and lifeboat is a nice cinematic touch), and the suspense effectively earned my investment. This film might just surprise you too.

Textually, problems emerge from the myriad supporting characters, virtually all of whom play like narrative props. The script seems uninterested in its conflict; the filmmaking lacks the style to glue its pieces together.

It’s a graceful, aching film that sculpts and stretches Murakami’s story into an enchanting three-hour epic (my, do the minutes fly by) about trauma and mourning, shared solitude, and the possibility of moving on. The narrative also doubles as a lovely ode to the car itself, and the strange ways that people open up when cocooned inside them.

When Papushado’s film finds the right tonal balance, meshing noir bleakness with pops of art deco color, there are fireworks to behold.

There’s a way to let this new supernatural thriller co-exist with River’s emotional turmoil from start to finish as parallel interpretations of the same journey. Skye’s decision to segment them into two halves unfortunately prevents that marriage, leaving us to wonder if we’ve been led into a completely different movie as ambitions and motivations are turned on their head with zero regards towards where they originated.

It’s a real giddy rush of a film, perhaps not as fundamentally moving or sensitive at his top-drawer work, but taking his micromanagement-heavy film craft to noir-ish new peaks.

A piece of would-be American classicism, this is a hackneyed, unevenly written hybrid between a con-man antihero drama and an emotive, heart-bruised coming-of-age film. Like his last, disastrous effort The Last Face, the good intentions are palpable but chased with a real streak of vanity and self-regard.

A blistering work of meta filmmaking.

Though ambitious in reach, its tone is one-note, stilted, and saccharine sweet; its ideas as disjointed as they are ultimately unsatisfying.

Verhoeven, as always, is more interested in playing games and is always at his best when needling an audience’s ideas of good taste.

A daring work of meta-filmmaking in which Hogg loops backwards to re-reexamine her own past.

With a more patient script that’s richer in character detail, Scales could have been breathtaking. As it stands, it’s a slight visual feast.

After 29 narrative features, Soderbergh has developed a proficient sense of staging that feels simultaneously relaxed and invigorating. Much of the ineffable fun of watching No Sudden Move comes from being in the hands of someone who knows how to achieve what they want without trying unduly hard to impress.