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.
Renata Pinheiro’s film boasts the pleasures of shlock while sacrificing none of its philosophical rigor.
The push and pull between gradual buildup and apocalyptic rupture allows the film to infiltrate the mind and recalibrate our sensitivity to time.
Throughout Paolo Sorrentino’s film, the line between miracle and cosmic prank, even tragedy, is rendered indistinguishable.
The film’s violent set pieces are imaginative, but as symbolic comeuppances for the victims’ sins they can feel forced, even moralizing.
Uppercase Print metatextually insists that we not be taken in by new, more sophisticated methods of obfuscation.
Understandably fixated on empowerment, Blerta Basholli glosses over stickier issues which might complicate her main character’s heroism.
Manic, maximalist, and bristling with postmodern bells and whistles, Labyrinth of Cinema is exactly what its title suggests.
Luzzu retains the structure of a neorealist film, as well as its themes of class and desperation.
Surge’s camerawork may leave viewers feeling like they just stepped off of a merry-go-round.
Memory House makes no secret of its disgust for neocolonialism, capitalism, or fascism.
The film’s disarming romcom sensibilities are an unlikely yet fitting vehicle for timely ruminations on AI.
The film raises pertinent questions about Mexico’s mixed cultural heritage and the contested representation of reality.
It’s thanks to a kind of tug of war between background and foreground that Beckett succeeds as a piece of entertainment.