Diego Semerene

The film’s most authentic moments are those that leave its main character breathless, cutting her plans for making up for lost time short.

Joyland is full of extraordinary situations that prevent it from being defined by its topicality or tantamount to a badge of honor.

The sort of gravitas that seems necessary for the most satisfying of French clichés to amount to playful reworkings, not tired repetitions, only makes a few appearances throughout the film.

Femme fascinatingly taps into the radical possibilities of the sartorial as narrative device, exploring the tabooed nuances of queer subjectivity and muddying the lines between gay and trans in the way that lived experience tends to do.

Lack of clarity, it turns out, is what makes Disco Boy so enjoyable, and imbues it with gravitas.

The film is best experienced by simply wallowing in the lushness of its fabrics, sartorial and symbolic alike, refusing the temptation to unspool its poetic parallels.

The film reminds us that any coming of age is a risky business where finitude and mourning are the only guarantees.

The focus on Ferragamo’s craft, and the very structure of manufacture, is exciting, but the narrative’s tendency to embody the opposite of his innovativeness feels lazy and contradictory.

Aly Muritiba’s film is always telling the viewer that death-ness and trans-ness bear the intimacy of Siamese sisters.

Léonor Serraille’s Mother and Son is a lovely film about feminine strength that also refuses to glorify motherhood.

The Magician might have worked better if it could have sustained for its first several sequences a sense of genre confusion.

Throughout Andrea Arnold’s film, a kind of affective connection is formed between animal and the cinematic apparatus.

In Great Freedom, the question of love is refreshingly never too far from bodily intimacy, irrespective of what kind of love that is.

Marry Me plays out as the logical culmination of a multi-hyphenate icon’s indiscriminate commercial voracity.

The film makes no attempt to embody the themes that form the core of Annie Ernaux’s story in its aesthetics.

For a while, Olivia Colman’s expressive performance carries the film, with little narrative distraction or stylistic conspicuousness.

For too much of its running time, Panah Panahi’s film is untethered from any kind of captivating narrative purpose.

The film’s initial aimlessness is pleasurable for the way that it allows the viewer to stare at life being processed on the stunned, confused, and ecstatic face of a teenager.

Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher’s documentary rather faithfully captures the spirit of our times.

Unclenching the Fists is a tale of how the desolation of a nation inhabits and engraves a woman’s body.

Unlike the novel, the film ultimately trades its main character’s account of her own suffering for her therapist’s pathologizing assessment.

Though uneven, the film is clever about avoiding age-old conundrums regarding the disavowal of the language of horror.

At its most accomplished, the film unfolds with a voluptuous slowness and a sense that narrative endpoints are irrelevant.

Against the Current’s style imposes a generic visual language onto a subject who’s anything but generic.

François Ozon’s paean to nostalgia wraps tragedy and obsession in a whimsical bow.

The film’s tendency to over-explain, over-intellectualize, and over-script events leaves little room for spontaneity and doubt.

While Ulrike Ottinger accesses the most consequential of decades through nostalgia, she does so with humility.

The documentary exists within the very restricted pantheon of films that successfully reap the cinematic potential of pedagogy.