No Bears spends less time finding aesthetic articulations of its themes than building out a convoluted plot to support them.
These shorts capture everything from how fear of the unknown can rewire relationships to how the natural world exerts its pull on us all.
Hopefully the arguments against Capernaum from the more discerning jury members will be strong enough to keep Nadine Labaki’s film from taking the Palme d’Or.
It’s clear that the film was conceived as an expansive homage and eulogy for the late Abbas Kiarostami.
It spotlights the act of filmmaking as an act of resistance as well as a possible source of propaganda and manipulation.
One of Hou’s constant themes (one that recurs in the work of many of the notable Taiwanese directors) is alienation, not just of a personal, but of a national sort.
In keeping with his recent work, Panahi turns the camera on himself and his own government-imposed creative struggles.
The next step in Jafar Panahi’s personal cinema of captivity, a fully fictionalized, wildly bewildering work which imagines a man at war with his own creative impulse.
The Notorious Mr. Bout romanticizes rather than humanizes its rather thorny subject matter.
The bars in both Closed Curtain and Crimson Gold allude to the cognitive imprisonment of its characters.
This Is Not a Film brilliantly marries high-modernist artistry with urgent political provocation. A masterpiece.
Farhadi utilizes living quarters as an area of adversity rather than comfort.
It almost seems like AMPAS is trying to pull one over on us—or, at the very least, sneak one past us while we’re not looking.
American Animal’s poster, like the film, finds common ground between the high- and lowbrow, the artful and the infantile.
This Is Not a Film is a masterpiece aching with expected pain and unexpected laughter.
Aleksandr Mindadze’s Innocent Saturday ultimately adds up to a lot of nasty hysteria.
Like all great cinema, the film is beyond belief.
Alternately funny, sad, and infuriating, the film is a shiv smuggled out of a prison and driven deep into our hearts.
Restless mostly suggests a fuzzy remake of Four Nights of a Dreamer starring the cast of Twilight.
Stylistically, The Kid with a Bike is one of the Dardennes’ most fluid films.