David Katz

It’s an immensely enjoyable, idiosyncratic entertainment.

Reeder boldly conceives of the patriarchy as an extractive force, not just harming female solidarity and individuality, but using it as a resource to grotesquely mine from.

It’s a fairly flattering picture as one of the world’s oldest, most powerful institutions attempts some crisis PR in front of the contemporary world’s gaze.

It’s also perhaps the first leading role of his glittering career to date where Franz Rogowski is miscast, feeling inappropriate or perhaps too worldly for the naive military grunt at the center; either way, the film’s debuting director Giacomo Abbruzzese attempts drawing out a performance that hits predictable notes of machismo, despair, and anguish.

Miller spreads herself too thin here by relying upon an even more sprawling ensemble of prestigious actors, among whom Brian d’Arcy James and especially Hathaway are the most awkwardly miscast.

With a work like Scarlet, so gossamer-airy and enchanting that it could almost be family-adjacent viewing like Petite Maman, we are witnessing Marcello in a mercurial, mid-career stage, watching his sensibility truly take shape.

Criticism can be poetry, but in Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power it is definitely prose, reserving the expressiveness for her own oeuvre.

The director’s bravery and ingenuity—by continuing to create new work, advocate for himself, and also entertain us—remains an utterly inspiring thing.

It’s important to note how successfully and stylishly Poitras and [her editing team] cross-cut between exposition and narration on Goldin’s long, fascinating biography and present-day passages where more information on her various campaigning efforts against the Sacklers comes through.

Ana de Armas’ portrayal of Norma is powerful, her performance suggesting layers and levels Dominik just isn’t interested in probing, perhaps because it would disrupt the headlong intensity of his thesis, and of course, the often brilliant cinematic language through which he creates a woozy sucker-punch impact on the audience––though there’s no question the rush of momentum he harnesses also manifests in a sadism towards her.

It feels condescending to brand Baumbach’s White Noise a “nice try,” considering how much the director has accomplished in the past, but it’s sadly quite accurate—if also more nuanced than calling it a failure or something that shouldn’t have been pursued.

Tori and Lokita initially feels like something special as it breathlessly moves through the story, drawing you in utmost empathy towards the characters who are so bravely trying to claw themselves to dignity. But there’s this residue you can’t escape, of just how written and jerry-rigged it all seems: how the filmmaking has sacrificed that vital sense of plausibility just to keep the plates of story spinning, and the catharsis on the verge of spiking.

Embracing Close will depend on how willing you are to forgive the filmmaker for overriding some nuances he’s established, compared to the insightful things he’s able to say when not aiming to emotionally provoke us.

Her latest work is not one that feels fully achieved and realized, suggesting an absolutely confident mastery of her primary source material, but it’s still deeply watchable, laden with sex and intimacy in a way that doesn’t apologize for itself, and provides an alternate gloss on her key themes of power, bodies, and postcolonial afterlives.

Overall it seems Abbasi got caught between the social righteousness dictates of the “message movie” and pure amorality of what, disturbingly so, often makes for great genre cinema.

Skolimowski uses cinema to create a non-headset-required virtual-reality experience of another creature’s life—an empathy machine, if you will.

Brother and Sister holds the line of his recent strong, if under-distributed work, but still doesn’t get within inches of his dazzling 90s-00s run. Yet it also gains credence and relevance as an epilogue (or mature re-consideration) of his past themes, a reminder of how few filmmakers contain his sensitivity, originality, and literary gifts.

Armageddon Time is a quietly seething work, funnier and lighter than anything Gray has made to date, but undergirded with mournful tragedy.

Meet Me in the Bathroom’s depth is so cursory it can’t quite re-convince us how significant this all seemed at the time.

Ozon wants to show us how committed a student of Fassbinder he is whilst successfully aping his dramaturgy and tone. But Fassbinder answered to no one.

To twist the common literary-critical saying, Nobody’s Hero is indeed three characters in search of a story, but not an author, whose conviction in his ideas and unique method of shaping a film still marks him as un vrai original.

Bonello looks at the Zoomer state of mind, as he does for much else of importance, and has cutting, perceptive and troubling things to say.

This is red light district cinema in its language and humor; as it reaches its second half, people who lament that film has lost its love of sex and horniness will have their heads turned.

Utama is a slow-motion look at how communities can falter, how rich heritage can be lost—to indifference from governments as well as a climate crisis that will decimate their way of life. If only it weren’t so gentle in its reminder.

Through its slippery cinematic language and elusive point-of-view, Kapadia depicts a moment happening urgently in the film’s present-day strand––a wave of anti-government student protests and their resulting crackdown––and treats it like memory, which we know operates as anything but a direct mental recording device.

This is a midnight movie/B-movie-type work that knows exactly what it is––there’s no pretensions of “elevated horror” here. Mona Lisa is smart, politically aware, and reaffirms a bit of faith in Amirpour’s talent.

[Gyllenhaal’s] chief successes are in making her adaptation of The Lost Daughter as intellectually engaging as the novel, whilst bringing the characters to life with performances beautifully appropriate for cinema––one thing an author doesn’t have in his or her arsenal, is summoning a camera “close-up,” with an actor creating that particular emotional transparency in tandem.

This is a film that will potentially delight, challenge, and force its wide target audience to take seriously on its own terms. A dream ballet of a dying star.