This year brought 18 features and seven shorts, all presented with live musical accompaniment.
It movingly posits acting as a metaphor for the search for connection, through visceral texture rather than platitude.
Ti West’s methodical austerity yields in this film the most powerful passages of his career.
The film introduces canny aesthetic digressions as the story wades into psychological horror.
The film routinely alternates between episodes that contrast exhilaration with exploitation and damnation.
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.
Francisco Márquez and Andrea Testa’s film interrogates what it means to stay on the sidelines during a military government and asks whether such a stance is possible.
Verhoeven’s Elle insists on realizing its central character through bold eccentricities.
For the Dardennes, this is typical moral-message territory, which they approach too deliberately.
Dolan adapts a talky play into something that could feasibly have the same emotional effect as a silent film.
Mendonça Filho’s message in Aquarius is for a Brazil to recognize the strength and power of its heritage.
For Assayas and Almodóvar, their films represent holding patterns like 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.
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.
The sex never escapes the feeling of the very exploitation that it’s supposed to represent a rejection of.
Cruelty here can feel cheap, perhaps a result of Dumont not knowing how to effectively command comedy yet.
Guiraudie’s latest represents a lot of the same interests that were woven into Stranger by the Lake.
Like several of its previous incarnations, year seven of the TCM Classic Film Festival was organized around an overriding theme.
More galling than the film’s litany of melodramatic banalities is its regressive view of race relations.