Ted Fendt’s film is a timeless, sobering portrait of how hard it can be to access the realm of adulthood and the confidence and security it promises.
This vision of post-industrial existence never succumbs to the morbid, as flickers of hope shine through the gloom.
The film is a wry, appealingly raggedy look at the impossibility of conjuring up excitement from boredom.
The film punctuates the sisters’ confinement with various episodes united by their contrivance.
It gently and often imperceptibly shifts between past and present, legend and modernity, wakefulness and reverie.
Spotting and processing the countless differences between the film’s two parts offers pleasures on various levels.
Director François Ozon is never willing to fully engage with the ridiculousness of his material, resulting in an uneasy mix of wry distance and unearned emotion.
Aside from the innate understanding of female friendship dynamics, it’s hard to see exactly what else Mélanie Laurent brings to this overly familiar story.
Phoenix never luxuriates in all this film history, but rather channels the artifice and affect it embodies into new insights.
If The Look of Silence still remains a gripping, vital, consequential documentary, it’s in spite of its approach rather than because of it.
It ends up feeling like an unsatisfying cautionary tale on how much detachment is too much detachment.
It’s the unlikely third-part arrival in a widescreen, English-speaking Australia in 2025 that proves to be Jia’s undoing.
In a competition otherwise marked by compromise and caution, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s austere, astounding film feels like it’s been beamed in from another era entirely.
The one saving grace of Sicario is the considerable talent of cinematographer Roger Deakins.
Weerasethakul’s films have always been marked by their tenderness, unobtrusive rigor, and desire to splice the straightforward with the oblique.
To confer a bit of artsy edginess, Trier peppers this slickly shot, scripted-to-death family drama with flashbacks, dream sequences, and what-if scenes.
Carol slots into Haynes’s filmography like a wintry, understated cousin to Far from Heaven.
The first and by no means last example of The Sea of Trees’s egregious literalism appears even before the film has properly begun.
Lanthimos’s films live and die by their concepts—or gimmicks, depending on your outlook.
The most telling revelation in Tale of Tales has little to do with ugly sisters, transmogrified monsters, or angry ogres.