Sam C. Mac

The Old Town Girls never seems to have a strong enough sense of the kind of film it wants to be to pull together its more interesting elements into a coherent whole.

No Bears generally spends less time finding aesthetic articulations of its themes than it does building out an increasingly convoluted plot to support them.

Song Fang’s latest moves glacially along in a largely unchanging emotional register, always keeping us at a distance.

Walt Disney’s Mulan remake perfunctorily recycles the worst aspects of the 1998 animated version and roundly fails to convincingly execute the few deviations that it does attempt.

If Kurosawa is less interested in narrative dynamics, it’s because he’s focused on an acute understanding of societally and sociologically conditioned behavior.

The hegemony of history is rigid, but Lou Ye is still able to disrupt it in the form of its representation.

The film’s masterstroke is that its fugitive antiheroes are framed by an environment that reflects their criminal lives back at them.

The film succeeds as a stingingly personal missive aimed squarely at Brazil’s right-wing president.

The only thing that keeps Parasite just slightly below the tier of Bong’s best work, namely The Host and his underrated and similarly themed 2000 debut film, Barking Dogs Never Bite, is the overstuffed pile-up of incident that occurs toward the end.

The film is Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus—a sweeping statement on an entire generation of American popular culture and an almost expressionistic rendering of the counterculture forming at its margins, gradually growing in influence.

Robert Eggers loosens the noose of veracity that choked his meticulously researched but painfully self-serious debut just enough to allow for so much absurdism to peek through.

Terrence Malick’s film means to seek out souls caught in the tide of history, but which move against its current.

Pedro Almodóvar’s latest only occasionally captures the spry, comedic rhythms and impassioned intensity of his finest work.

Bruno Dumont seems perpetually aware of the trap of familiarity, which may be why he indulges in some of his most inscrutable filmmaking.

Bertrand Bonello’s quixotic, slow-burn genre film is political largely in the abstract.

In Jim Jarmusch’s film, what starts as a subtle undercurrent of knowing humor curdles into overt self-referentiality.

Where The Projectionist ultimately excels ... is as the kind of cultural microcosm that makes Ferrara’s other documentaries feel at once urgent and incredibly rich in their broader implications.

It’s through exercising a certain kind of madness that the film connects even at its most disjointed.

Creed II is absent of both the topically political atmosphere of Rocky IV and the bravura action of Ryan Coogler's Creed.

It reveals itself as neither committed New Wave subversion nor skillful homage, but rather a weak and uninspired imitation.

Ying Liang’s film is righteously and vigorously angry about injustices committed by the Chinese government.

Instead of offering a probing, nuanced view of the burgeoning technologies and sciences involved in this relatively new outgrowth of the OBGYN industry, though, Tamara Jenkins uses her setting as fodder for lame and discomfiting physical comedy.

The anguish expressed and experiences described by the survivors certainly can overlap with each other, and even become repetitive, but it’s ultimately this unification of perspective that gives Dead Souls its authority—and that allows it to become an incisive reappropriation of collectivist solidarity.

It’s a quixotic and profound statement on the spatial and temporal dissonances that inform life in 21st-century China.

Spike Lee styles the film as a popular entertainment, forgoing the theatrical satire typical of his late-period state-of-the-nation joints, like Bamboozled and Chi-Raq, and settling into the accessible rhythms of the contemporary sitcom.

The film becomes an even broader consideration of individual fascinations and follies, of ways of responding to art without the boundaries of morality and reason.

Whenever Panahi's architecturally rigorous study of the self, society, and artistic communion threatens to get too self-conscious or loaded, the filmmaker tends to leaven the tension with humor and gentle irreverence.

The film is most exhilarating as a breathless vessel for mood, one that just so happens to conduct itself within reconstructed period settings that are as obsessively detailed as the reverently curated soundtrack.