It is almost impossible, however, to watch Other Side Of The Wind without taking its history into account. That makes the final product uniquely captivating.

You might not understand what the hell is happening in Let The Corpses Tan, but you’ll certainly never be bored.

This time the irony is of the tragic kind, and the stinging, wicked wit is tinctured with wholly new notes of tenderness.

This is personal filmmaking taken to such an extremely minute level that at times it can almost feel prurient, like we’re accidentally eavesdropping on things too private for our ears, like we’ve intercepted an embrace sent back through time and not really meant for us at all.

Steering an astonishingly accomplished path between the small steps and the giant leaps of the Apollo 11 mission, reigning Best Director Damien Chazelle opens the 75th Venice Film Festival with First Man, an immersive, immaculately crafted, often spectacular and satisfyingly old-fashioned epic that may well become the definitive moon-landing movie.

Like life itself, Hale County This Morning, This Evening doesn’t lend itself to immediate comprehension. It’s to Ross’ credit that his work remains so thoroughly accessible and engrossing regardless.

The potential of this movie’s premise might have been squandered by cliches, but McBride and DeWitt keep it watchable.

A rare film with a heart of gold and a fresh perspective on the lives of marginalized people, Support the Girls effortlessly but sincerely sways sympathies for the lives of those one would otherwise never consider.

The Oslo Diaries is at its most gripping – and its most devastating – in its coverage of how close to peace the two sides came but have still yet to reach.

By bringing in a strong screenwriter, hungry filmmakers with a vision, and a cast and crew who care deeply for the work... you get the recipe for a delightful and deranged modern-day exploitation film that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but somehow, asks you to take it more seriously than you might have otherwise.

Crime + Punishment isn’t without hope, but it anchors that hope to the unflattering realities of American policing.

A laughably bad film.

There’s emotional complexity, making it work for more than just its key demo.

The Ranger is a few degrees off of being great; its villain is way too confused and ill-plotted for the film to be anything other than periodically fun.

The world of the film is bracingly immediate and constantly overflowing—dubious sound design or a shift in image quality, while glaring, can’t puncture the holistic nightmare of Matti’s vision.

Aside from its phenomenal script and performances, Night Comes On delights with stunning visuals.

Anarchic and daring, Never Goin’ Back is a tale of adolescent female friendship that is somehow ballsier than your standard dude-driven buddy comedy. Frizzell’s film is as fearless as her heroines, and it refuses to judge them for their bad behavior.

Our House, doesn’t set its ambitions much higher than the VOD market, and its haunting is passable if not all that spooky.

Pulling off an ambitious mash-up of genres like Good Manners is no easy feat — that Dutra and Rojas pull it off so successfully suggests we’ll be hearing a lot more from them down the road.

Hot Summer Nights is unconventionally amusing, spits in the face of its own flaws and somehow manages to impress by atmospherically rendering the emotions tied to the trappings of young adulthood. At it’s best, Hot Summer Nights is an admirable attempt at summertime antics void of a happy ending.

Age of Rage doesn’t ever chart any new ground. It settles with serving as yet another incendiary portrait of hate in this time of division.

Blisteringly caustic as ever, John Lydon nevertheless reveals himself as an occasionally sentimental sort in Tabbert Fiiller’s fitfully revelatory and charming documentary.

Unfortunately, the tendency of Voyeur to tilt towards comedy undermines the weight of its story.

The Third Murder functions well as a topical genre detour for the acclaimed director, but a degree of incongruity between the demands of the procedural formula and Kore-eda’s usual languid pacing keep the film from reaching the upper echelons of his greatest work.

Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is one of the biggest surprises at the movies this summer. In fact, it’s downright super.

By the time Jarecki is done with Elvis, the lanky, and projects-raised, rockabilly kid just one generation removed from sharecroppers has been cast as everything from an opportunist and grasping capitalist to addled addict to just plain sucker. If he ever was the King, the movie suggests, it’s long past time to retire the crown.

Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town is a well-made showcase for its talented star. And while it doesn’t quite establish Papierniak’s directorial vision, it does hint at what that might be. It’s a fun hour-and-a-half, inessential but entertaining nonetheless.

Director Tim Wardle’s film is full of surprises, the least of which is its own dramatic shift in tone from wildly entertaining to absolutely disturbing.

This Is Congo has a point to prove and a righteous fury with which to prove it. But it’s focused and precise, which makes the sheer breadth of context required to understand it much easier to digest.

With suburban normalcy ultimately derailed by a suitably cynical, albeit humorous resolution, the final actions these neighbors take contribute to a far more meaningful message regarding the unsympathetic tendencies of humanity. Moreover, the measures taken by these feuding characters underlie the ruinous ways in which grief, hysteria and mental illness as a whole continue to be approached by society, especially by our own family members and neighbors.

Hill assembles a strong cast, and they are immensely watchable throughout the film, but it’s short on big laughs, never as compelling as it should be and lacking dramatic consistency.

This affectionate portrait avoids the major pitfall of comparable docs like Asif Kapadia‘s “Amy” or Kevin Macdonald‘s recent “Whitney” in that it steadfastly refuses to make Williams’ death the defining aspect of his life.

Fuqua’s movie, unqualified to create anything other than superficial poignancy, is empty, tiresome and uninteresting, satisfied with repeatedly communicating that if you exploit the innocent, harm the oppressed or abandon your code of conscience, Robert McCall will be there to set things right and severely punish you several times over.

This is not a good movie – but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a good time.

There’s nothing particularly special about Siberia, but with a winning Keanu Reeves performance, it maintains enough moment-to-moment suspense that it just might be enough to satisfy moviegoers yearning for a throwback genre film.

In a film lacking in nuance, Mozdah brings needed depth to her performance.

This horror film lacks the freshness of its predecessor, but its bleak view on humanity and technology, as well as some truly unsettling ideas and visuals, still set it apart from most of its fellow studio genre fare.

There’s a delirious joy in watching this much action, this well executed at every level.

Hollywood has been showing people hanging off of things for over 100 years, and if that’s something you enjoy, Skyscraper is the pinnacle of this trope, forcing The Rock to dangle, hang, and swing at insane heights above the street time and time again. This is the MO of the whole movie, taking things that have worked before and pumping them up to The Rock-sized spectacle; it’s not too original but it provides what it promises.

The First Purge— for all that it could have said about race and class in America— is perfectly content to provide the bare minimum and deliver some cheap thrills. And in doing so, the thrills come at the expense of the seemingly sharp points, now blunt, no longer cutting deep and drawing blood like they used to.

This is an assured, confident feature-directing debut for Zagar who shows great promise in his ability to render a confident and brilliant work of art from difficult-to-adapt source material. His film is a complicated coming-of-age tale that not only brings refreshing insights but gives us beautifully rendered images that have the power to haunt you for days.

It’s an inferior, often frustrating film, it’s hard to root for, and its consideration of its people of color is dubious, even as it features them as protagonists. But nonetheless, there’s some value, especially in is visceral qualities and the chilling nihilism of its violence.

Ant-Man & The Wasp somehow manages to organize laughs, action, theme, small MCU connections and even fairly touching ideas about family, responsibility and what it means to be a hero all housed inside of an undersized blockbuster.

Cardona’s brilliance emanates here. His performance is contingent on facial expressions and physical tics rather than words. His alluring face is juxtaposed by painful weariness, sullen eyes and a sense of humanity like no other.

By establishing little stakes and few moments of genuine connection between the main stars, it lacks the warm authenticity and the stranger-than-fiction reality of the real story, which will ultimately be weirder and more enticing than any narrative version of this story could ever be.

Unfortunately, while Set It Up sets up instances of subversion, it ultimately topples into a predictable mess of romantic noxiousness.

Brain On Fire is often effective, and at times positively enraging, but one can’t help but lament the much more disquieting film that might have resulted had the filmmakers been more willing to trust the facts of Cahalan’s case to speak for themselves instead of feeling a need to shove them into uplifting platitudes

It would have been a relief if, 14 years later, Incredibles 2 had simply met expectations. Instead, it exceeds them.

For a movie that preaches the importance of dinosaur freedom, it’s hard to watch something so caged by its terrible plotting and predictability.

If there’s anyone deserving of hagiography, it’s Rogers. This documentary truly captures the depth of his goodness and earnestness, peeling back layers to reveal an even better person than you remembered. “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” doesn’t cast Rogers as perfect, but it’s hard to imagine a more admirable man.

Ocean’s 8 is the self-aware frosé of movies; a summer delight, perfectly airy and refreshing, it’s not here to be your cinematic think piece. Ocean’s 8 knows exactly what it’s doing and what it’s trying to achive– showing the audience hell of a good time – and it succeeds marvelously at it, without leaving the audience feeling duped.

With capable performances and a smart, character-focused script, this film balances its formal conventions with narrative nerve, ultimately making for a satisfying – if not show-stopping – watch.

Unique, unforgettable and cathartic, Border is an oddball, but poignant cult classic in the making. Abbasi’s sincerity wisely avoids caricature and mocking his marginalized characters and in doing so he crafts a surprisingly humanist and artful story of love for the diminished and dismissed outsiders of the world.

Less a narrative than an explorative essay, as artificial as it is self-involved, lacking any discernible sense of humor, occasionally a bit silly in execution yet deeply, rigidly earnest in intent, and laboring under that aggravatingly prim, Victorian title: It really does everything it can to make you hate it.

Haywood brilliantly subverts her audience’s expectations at every step of the way. She introduces characters as tropes and steers them into the opposite direction.

Adrift avoids the perils of most survival stories, thanks not only to its strong cast and well-structured script but to Kormákur who manages to succeed at capturing the tone of both the intimate moments and the ones where a building-sized wave looms over Tami and Richard.

You might start this film expecting a riotous night with some of the most underrated women in comedy, but you’ll soon find yourself invested in a mesmerizing story of partnership and personal growth.

Stripping the “I Will Always Love You,” singer away from sensationalist tabloid dirt that marred her life, MacDonald’s thoughtfulness is arguably its standout element. The finesse with which he crafts his doc makes for, quite simply, an absorbing and moving portrayal of an unforgettable heartrending figure.

A hyper-realistic urban tragedy Dogman is ferocious and in its own way, much more frightening than “Gomorrah.”

Capharnaüm is not without its issues. The director over-relies on the courtroom scenes and the movie’s message is heavy-handed at times. Yet, the sheer force of the filmmaking and its artful delivery overpowers sappy overreaching.

It’s a beautiful, moving finale but it hardly needed all the digressions en route, which basically amount to Ceylan taking the very long (and often scenic) way round to arrive at the simple conclusion that the wild pear does not, after all, fall so very far from the tree.

Trying to pick apart his native country’s struggles between tradition and modernity, legality and crime, Kore-eda takes the time to affectionately dissect the way family functions, before carefully deconstructing it and revealing the contoured complexities that live within.

Guerra and Gallego’s film is no dusty period piece, it is wildly alive, yet it reminds us that no matter how modern we are, there are ancient songs our forebears knew whose melodies still rush in our blood. We are not creatures of one era or another or of one place or another, we are only ever birds of passage between our mythic pasts and our unwritten futures, being tossed around by the wind

More than a documentary, the film is an exposé on the world of global capitalism’s callousness that handily demonstrates their inhumanity.

With no unique viewpoint on the story of its own, it’s perplexing why Papillon went in front of cameras at all.

Simmering with ambiguity, Burning plays its staging, writing, dialogue, acting, music, everything with carefully calibrated minimalism, but in turn it makes some grandiose statements. An unrecognizable murder-mystery Burning torches genre clichés and leaves a lasting, scorching blister.

Sauvage captures the multitude of emotion or lack of, that come with Leo’s tricks. There’s jealousy, pain, excitement, cruelty and even monotonous apathy where you’d least expect it.

While Long Day’s plot seems an afterthought, the experience is all that matters: the audience gathers all the clues, rummage through them to soak up the atmosphere and enter a world unlike any seen before. Make no mistake about it, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a flat-out masterpiece.

It is certainly too long and too messy, too indulgent in some parts and too starved in others to be an unqualified success. But the surprise of it is that there are times, like the inspired first act, when it really does work, when it seems to have a kind of manic energy, a sheer joy at existing, which certainly makes it a far more engaging picture than Gilliam’s last.

Through a few dreamlike, discreet and beautifully placed sequences, Rohrwacher makes us believe that a world of empathy and accord may someday exist again.

With enlivening performances and thoughtful filmmaking, Girl has the power to not just change lives but reinvigorate your belief in cinema.

Despite youngster Aksoy-Etaix’s commendable performance, not only will you not believe, you also won’t care.

With Under the Silver Lake Mitchell saw all the lights on the long highway to success turn green, and in the full flush of all that indulged freedom, put the top down, turned up the radio and roared off into the LA evening, forgetting that he didn’t have anywhere to go.

The minute-to-minute detail is absolutely stunning, from the period costumes to the on-set locations, there’s a searing authenticity to the time period that is undeniably absorbing. However, the almost too tightening restraint he gives his film forces us to quickly witness its events rather than be enveloped or moved by them.

The simplicity of the film is commendable, but it’s only in the last act where things finally come together and any kind of visceral thrills arrive far too late. Even Mikkelson’s on-screen talents can’t save an admirable yet stagnant film in dire need of a heartbeat.

Sollers Point is an intimate and wise character study, not only of an unformed young man but also of a neighborhood struggling to preserve itself in the face of economic decline.

Perhaps The House That Jack Built is the kind of film you make when you fervently want someone to stop you, to save you from yourself and the demons of your worst nature. Perhaps, this time, we should oblige.

BlacKkKlansman has many virtues, but it is also a strange kind of messy, in which the performances from both Washington and Driver are so laid back as to feel curiously low-energy at times.

Ash is Purest White borrows heavily from “Mountains May Depart” — the narrative construct, the same actress, the musical gimmicks, even the flawed ending — and yet we are nevertheless absorbed by the finesse and grace in a film by this venerable artist.

Ron Howard arguably captures it in his enjoyable, escapist ‘Solo’ movie, but the burden of keeping fans happy means if you’re looking for surprises, you may have come to the wrong place.

Deadpool 2, while extremely thin on plot, is gleefully impish, entertaining and often laugh-out-loud funny. Almost everything that felt forced, crass and hamfisted in the original film now feels organic and effortless; a constant breezy stream of gags, quips and expertly choreographed action. Deadpool 2 is filthier, funnier and ferociously manic.

This is exhaustingly exhibitionist cinema, that wants to be looked at for the sake of being looked at — for the crispness of its moves, not the complexity of its concepts, and that can get wearying after a while.

Tupac’s legacy deserved a better story, and hopefully, one day he will be rewarded with one.

There are wit and wisdom and a kind of “Before Sunrise” wistfulness in this slight little film, and it’s shot through with an unobtrusively lyrical affection for being young and aimless in even the less obviously lovely quarters of lovely Lisbon.

The House of Tomorrow is a charmer that will incite a smile from ear-to-ear with each and every scene brimming with hope in the face of downtrodden situations and a world that tells you no.

Maybe if the film had dwelled on its more off-color scenes instead of falling back on typical comedy fodder, it would be truly magnetic. Unfortunately, it’s more like a sloppy friend who, despite starting the night off full of joie de vivre, you now have to help stumble home.

Farhadi’s genius is to be able to take the most ordinary of situations (say, a separation) and turn it into the stuff of gripping sociological drama. But largely, this time out, he’s rather done the reverse: given a gripping premise and a game cast he has engineered perhaps his most ordinary film.

It’s beautiful, if not brilliant, and (aside from a final act that drags on way too long) fun to watch. In the alternate universe where I don’t care about misogyny and I decided to watch this movie on mute, it’s probably one of the best things I’ve seen all year.

With a far more complex exploration of the internal world of a child, Seno validates her standing as a unique and rising voice within the film industry, as Nervous Translation galvanizes her ability to devise an innocent scope of complete awe in an attempt to come to terms with the crumbling yet beautiful world around us.

Moussaoui’s underwhelming use of fractured storytelling technique not only dilutes any organic narrative development, but he completely jeopardizes the impactful nature of the film’s potentially poignant message: how we as humans are in one way or another connected to each other.

While Our House occasionally loses sight of itself and could stand to take more risks, it offers a wholly original perspective on female friendship bolstered by precocious directorial acumen and a self-assured visuals.

Reis and Guerra bring to life the beauty, people, textures, and (stunningly shot) landscapes of Cape Verde as well as the difficulty of finding home.

Cocote is an entirely different beast—a challenging watch that swings from the avant-garde to an ethnographic model of filmmaking.

This is one of the most thoughtful films about the female experience to debut in recent years, and should be mandatory viewing for anyone eager to engage with confidently-made, skillful art cinema.

Modest though her debut is, Metelius has achieved a fine, beguiling balance. The tone is kept light and bittersweet, so she’s hardly making any claim to great importance or originality in her narrative. But nor does she apologize for the story’s slightness, displaying a sincere and persuasive confidence that makes it worth telling nonetheless.