The film fiercely homes in at the moral perversity of an industry at a particular intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, and digital-age spectacle.
The slipperiness of that word, “reel,” points to cinema’s complicated relationship to the reality of what it shows the audience.
The film confidently oscillates between the playfully on the nose and the existentially profound.
Implicit in its bleak but sympathetic portrait of a disturbed, shunned young man is that sometimes it takes a village to make a monster.
The film’s depiction of an era of rigid class divisions and incalculable loss comes through the hazy, soft-focus goggles of nostalgia.
Human Resources proves that there’s both comedy and poignancy yet to be mined from Big Mouth’s impulse-creature conceit.
After a first hour that may well hit Zoomers and their millennial parents in the feels, Turning Red gradually runs out of steam.
After its brilliantly constructed opening, the film gives the impression only of a giallo doodle.
The film fleshes out perhaps familiar characterizations by tying contemporary wounds to the persistent presence of Europe’s ugly history.
The film heightens the clash between different artists’ egos, and between their conflicting visions of meaningful work, to absurd heights.
The film goes from biting satire to broad farce and back as Alain Guiraudie fills it with both social observation and ludicrous incident.
Coma cultivates gallows humor about the state of things—or rather, the stasis of things.
The studied ambiguity of the film doesn’t keep it from often achieving the suspense of an accomplished erotic thriller.
Visual, embodied forms of communication, including the rhythms of the moving image, dominate this affecting and deceptively modest film.
Despite its inability to weave its threads into a harrowing neorealist knot, Alcarràs crafts a detailed portrait of an endangered lifestyle.
Leonora Addio wrestles with memory and history through a deeply personal, if at times indulgent, lens.
Unrest brandishes its historical-materialist bona fides through this de-emphasis of psychology in favor of social dialectics.
Strawberry Mansion playfully and delightfully draws parallels between the creative agency of dreams and the waking creativity of filmmaking.
The film extends into impactful hyperbole the tensions inherent in being subjects of and subjects to incessant surveillance.
The material realities of being a woman in Chad are expressed with profound sympathy in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s film.