Eric Gavel’s Full Time is more of a nail-biter than the thrillers it takes its breakneck pacing from.
Chess Story craftily melds the genres of period drama and psychological thriller.
The film proves, if nothing else, how resistant D.H. Lawrence’s fiction remains to adaptation.
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.
The African Desperate is an internet-savvy film that’s obviously been made for streaming.
The film is about repression, an inhibition that no amount of tequila can take away.
Cleansed of all risk and personality, the film subsides, as though with a sigh, into the reheated sauce of mediocrity.
Writer-director Kiro Rosso’s sociological 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.
Paradise, as Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s film shows, is hell for those without the freedom to leave.
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.
In The Whaler Boy, coming of age is inseparable from disillusionment.