William Repass

If Gods of Mexico harkens back to certain traditions of visual representation, Helmut Donsantos’s counterintuitive recombination of what would seem to be mutually exclusive inspirations, each with its own temporal framework, allows him to offer for our contemplation a vision uniquely his own.

The film takes advantage of the leeway for speculation afforded by its subject’s reclusive nature.

Full Time doesn’t have much to say about organized labor, or labor in general, other than that work can be really stressful.

Philipp Stölzl craftily melds the genres of period drama and psychological thriller, not for the purposes of reheated nostalgia, but to shed a cold light on the recursions of historical trauma.

However faithfully the film transposes the plot and themes of the source material, it struggles to capture the spirit, ironing out D.H. Lawrence’s modernity-skeptical modernism and losing sight of his poetic vision.

The film’s sheer fun and invention counterbalance its main characters’ abject failure in their search for meaning and success.

The film’s unapologetic level of artifice is at once the source of its pleasures and limitations.

Kirill Serebrennikov’s blackly comedic fantasia paints a none-too-rosy picture of Russia, or its Soviet past festering just beneath the surface.

That The African Desperate is a send-up of art school is beyond doubt, but what’s less clear is just how far the satire goes.

For all its lush cinematography, capturing regional custom and dramatic panoramas alike, this is a film about repression, an inhibition that no amount of tequila can take away.

Cleansed of all risk and personality, Spin Me Round subsides, as though with a sigh, into the reheated sauce of mediocrity.

Writer-director Kiro Rosso’s sociological, pseudo-documentary film suggests a mosaic resolving out of innumerable shards.

She Will can’t decide if its horror or comedy, nor does it strike the balance that would harmoniously hybridize them.

With so much screen time devoted to portraying its main character’s complexities, the other characters remain half-developed, and to the detriment of the film’s themes.

Official Competition is another film about filmmaking, but it escapes hermeticism by homing in on actors and acting.

Lost Illusions leans heavily on voiceover narration that, for better or worse, draws attention to its novelistic mode of its storytelling.

Georgis Grigorakis’s film may not revolutionize the western genre by transposing it to an unlikely setting, but it doesn’t dilute it either.

If the film-within-the-film is a vapid fetishization of women’s martyrdom, Lux Æterna is a willful exercise in repulsing its own audience.

Throughout, Barbarians oscillates between smugness and apprehensiveness about the film that it’s trying to be.

Brian Pestos’s flair for go-for-broke zaniness transmutes what might otherwise have been a lump of self-indulgent clichés into gold.

The film unfolds at a pace that is unhurried yet self-assured, submerged in the rhythms that govern its characters’ lives.

The film is a vivid rumination on the fuzzy border between fantasy and reality.

Renata Pinheiro’s film boasts the pleasures of shlock while sacrificing none of its philosophical rigor.

The push and pull between gradual buildup and apocalyptic rupture allows the film to infiltrate the mind and recalibrate our sensitivity to time.

Throughout Paolo Sorrentino’s film, the line between miracle and cosmic prank, even tragedy, is rendered indistinguishable.

The Feast makes a stab at drawing out modern, very real anxieties around wealth disparity and ecological devastation without falling back on genre tropes, asking us to consider how the land itself may come to feast on the rich.

The film metatextually insists that we not be taken in by new, more sophisticated methods of obfuscation.

A layer of ambivalence facilitates our identification with Fahrije but also makes her a distinct character and not just an archetype.