Sam C. Mac

The simmering insinuations of Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon eventually flower into full-on exploitation.

Coming into this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it looked like the programmers had come up with one of their strongest lineups in a long time.

Paul Verhoeven’s maverick Elle insists on realizing its central character through bold eccentricities.

For the Dardennes, this is typical moral-message territory, which they approach too deliberately.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest is a would-be stylish satire that can’t stop getting off on the very sick ideas it looked like it might upend.

Xavier Dolan adapts a talky play into what could have the same emotional effect as a silent film.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s message in Aquarius is for a Brazil to recognize the strength and power of its heritage.

For Olivier Assayas and Pedro Almodóvar, their films represent holding patterns similar to those that their characters can’t escape from.

Maren Ade possesses as fine an instinct for calibrating the emotions of her characters as any working director.

There’s a quietly revelatory virtue to Paterson in its resistance to disturb its subject’s life, to adhere to any typical conventions of film drama.

Jeff Nichols doesn’t bring to Loving the same excitement and urgency he brought to his more genre-driven work.

At maybe half or a quarter of the length, American Honey might’ve gotten by on this surface-level vision.

Its Lust, Caution-worthy NC-17 sex never quite fully escapes the feeling of the very exploitation that it’s supposed to represent a rejection of.

Cruelty here can feel pretty cheap, perhaps a result of Bruno Dumont not knowing how to effectively command comedy yet.

Alain Guiraudie’s latest represents a lot of the same interests that were woven into Stranger by the Lake.

The issue with X-Men: Apocalypse is that Bryan Singer suggests so many possible directions to go in and still chooses the least interesting one.

The video works by representing the body as the most direct visual expression of the self.

There’s something especially telling about the way The Jungle Book liberally borrows not only from its own mythology, but also from The Lion King.

One gets the sense that power and meaning have been accumulated at a pace appropriately representative of Kirsten Johnson’s own experiences.

The documentary is a loud condemnation of what Chinese civilization has wrought, and what it’s irrevocably lost.