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No Other Choice
(2025)
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Adam Nayman
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Whatever else one can say about No Other Choice, it is a formidable and frequently gobsmacking exercise in craft.
Posted Dec 30, 2025
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Songs of Slow Burning Earth
(2024)
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Chris Cassingham
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The result is less a collective narrative of the ongoing war than a collage of impressions and feelings that guide the viewer across geographical terrain and reveal a country’s citizens processing their trauma in wildly different ways.
Posted Jul 12, 2025
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Windless
(2024)
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Savina Petkova
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But there is more to those deferrals, stand-ins, and metaphors for paternal absence—there is rawness and optimism in the way Windless paints a double portrait: of a son’s past disappointments and of the man he hopes to be.
Posted Mar 19, 2025
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On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
(2024)
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Bedatri D. Choudhury
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On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is a complex film whose layers are so dense that they’d be impenetrable if not for Nyoni’s knack for dark humor, fantastic imagery, and her seething rage at a patriarchy that has co-opted women to be its foot soldiers.
Posted Mar 11, 2025
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Oh Canada
(2024)
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Jourdain Searles
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Oh, Canada, adapted from the novel Foregone by the late Russell Banks, is engrossing and confounding, telling a story that defies simple elucidation.
Posted Dec 13, 2024
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Here
(2024)
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Adam Nayman
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Here, adapted by Zemeckis with Eric Roth from Richard McGuire’s acclaimed 2014 graphic novel, is as flavorless and fungible as a freshly packaged loaf of Wonder Bread.
Posted Nov 21, 2024
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Hard Truths
(2024)
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Matthew Eng
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Through the vitality of Jean-Baptiste’s playing, Pansy’s wrath comes to function as a kind of wayward defiance, a fire-in-the-belly refusal to abide by society’s norms and niceties...
Posted Oct 21, 2024
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The Substance
(2024)
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Jourdain Searles
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Moore is the only element in this film of any substance at all.
Posted Sep 22, 2024
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Trap
(2024)
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Juan Barquin
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Trap repeats itself over and over, introducing new obstacles for Cooper and allowing him to wriggle out of them. It’s a formula that is riveting for the grand majority of the film.
Posted Aug 13, 2024
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Good One
(2024)
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Matthew Eng
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Donaldson might have dwelled longer in her protagonist’s destabilizing uncertainty before delivering her film to its lightly vengeful conclusion, but the force of its final beat is undeniable.
Posted Aug 13, 2024
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Kinds of Kindness
(2024)
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Jourdain Searles
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Much like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Kinds of Kindness frequently registers as a satire of society and the roles we’re each assigned to play.
Posted Jun 30, 2024
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Hedwig and the Angry Inch
(2001)
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Juan Barquin
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In Hedwig, transition is less about gender and more about how these myriad identities are all part of a whole.
Posted Apr 05, 2024
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La Chimera
(2023)
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Adam Nayman
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Just as The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro indulged in pastoral beauty in order to contextualize its fragility in the face of progress, La Chimera regards its molten seaside environs with a mix of reverence and melancholy.
Posted Mar 29, 2024
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Blackout
(2023)
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Adam Nayman
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In the parlance of our times: if Larry Fessenden has no more fans, then I am no longer on this Earth.
Posted Mar 21, 2024
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Sujo
(2024)
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Caitlin Quinlan
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Because Valadez and Rondero have so masterfully sustained tension and dread for the majority of the film’s runtime, this chapter of Sujo’s life in the capital never feels entirely free of threat.
Posted Mar 18, 2024
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Here
(2023)
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Leonardo Goi
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To peg [the director's] work as that of a miniaturist only lays bare the limited language we use to describe a film [...] Devos’s cinema is expansive, and that’s especially true in Here, possibly his biggest and most ambitious to date.
Posted Feb 13, 2024
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Household Saints
(1993)
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Jourdain Searles
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There are no simple answers to these questions, and Savoca forces us to sit with our unease.
Posted Feb 05, 2024
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Tótem
(2023)
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Matthew Eng
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It is this balance of pragmatism and fellow feeling that emblematizes the bonds between Avilés’s characters and makes her film such a graceful, luminous, and malleable portrait of love’s work amid mortal descent.
Posted Jan 26, 2024
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The Boy and the Heron
(2023)
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Kambole Campbell
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It's one of [Miyazaki's] strangest and most ambitious films. It’s reassuring that the filmmaker can still surprise like this.
Posted Dec 13, 2023
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Last Summer
(2023)
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Matthew Eng
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This is a master class in emotional precision, one grounded in the knowledge that even the most durable of moral compasses can shatter in the face of a monstrous and deranging need.
Posted Oct 13, 2023
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Foe
(2023)
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Matthew Eng
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[A] cumbersome film, whose feints at fun and friskiness are unnervingly forced.
Posted Oct 06, 2023
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Anatomy of a Fall
(2023)
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Adam Nayman
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Triet [is] a very good filmmaker whose control over her material belies a certain indecisiveness, resulting in a movie that, for all its deft touches, doesn't leave you with much to hold on to.
Posted Oct 05, 2023
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Remembering Every Night
(2022)
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Caitlin Quinlan
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It draws in the sense of quiet these characters feel in their lives and reveals it as a shared experience between them, and perhaps us too, whispering that things will work themselves out, just as they always do.
Posted Sep 15, 2023
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Passages
(2023)
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Matthew Eng
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As edited by Sophie Reine, Sachs’s latest advances with a violent precision, the better to cut to the core of these characters and their furtive connections. If Sachs’s previous films were slow burns, then Passages is a wildfire.
Posted Aug 04, 2023
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Asteroid City
(2023)
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Vikram Murthi
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Asteroid City visually astounds, serving as a reminder that Anderson’s singular aesthetic has zero contemporaries.
Posted Jun 16, 2023
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Past Lives
(2023)
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Matthew Eng
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Past Lives [is] the calm, clear-eyed filmmaking debut of the New York-based, Korean-American playwright Celine Song.
Posted Jun 02, 2023
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Tommy Guns
(2022)
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Vikram Murthi
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The director’s stylistic convolutions never seem incoherent per se, but while they aesthetically impress, they also give off a sense of clumsy desperation and can’t quite carry the weight of the film’s thematic ambitions...
Posted Apr 18, 2023
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Showing Up
(2022)
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Matthew Eng
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A film that is far from a tract yet unmistakably holds artistic labor as dear as the fruits it produces.
Posted Apr 13, 2023
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Tori and Lokita
(2022)
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Matthew Eng
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[The Dardennes's] film still quakes with an incensed and undeniable power, personified in the forms of two spiritual siblings who represent each other’s only refuge.
Posted Mar 24, 2023
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Love Life
(2022)
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Bedatri D. Choudhury
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The characters all seem to live in the glow of this ephemeral light, and they continue chasing it when it gets too dark.
Posted Mar 23, 2023
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Art Talent Show
(2022)
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Vikram Murthi
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Art Talent Show mercifully rejects the punching up/down binary that pervades so much comedy discourse and simply accepts that you can empathize with people while also teasing them.
Posted Mar 23, 2023
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Fremont
(2023)
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Matthew Eng
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There is an impressive mystique contained in the boxy frames of Fremont’s crisp, casually elegant black-and-white images, shot digitally by Laura Valladao.
Posted Mar 15, 2023
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The Outwaters
(2022)
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Adam Nayman
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If it seems like I'm talking around what actually happens in The Outwaters, it's only partially for fear of spoilers: some of Banfitch's images are so potent (and horrifying) that they'd probably hit just as hard even if you saw them coming.
Posted Feb 10, 2023
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Full Time
(2021)
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Susannah Gruder
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While it’s certainly a thrill to watch a car chase under an elevated subway line or the careful choreography of a heist operation, the everyday adrenaline rushes on display in Full Time provoke even more anxiety than the average action movie.
Posted Feb 03, 2023
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Women Talking
(2022)
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Caitlin Quinlan
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These interests in language and interpretation, the challenge to form ideas without a common, social framework, make for some of the film’s most compelling aspects.
Posted Dec 21, 2022
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The Whale
(2022)
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Juan Barquin
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It is a work that positions itself as about meaning and connection, of finding the beauty in the minutiae of life (like an essay written by a child that offers comfort), but it has no interest in the humans it features.
Posted Dec 08, 2022
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Decision to Leave
(2022)
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Juan Barquin
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[Seo-rae and Hae-jun's] collision, their romance, and the tragedy that surrounds them no matter how much they try to escape it, makes for the kind of enrapturing storytelling worth obsessing over.
Posted Oct 28, 2022
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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
(2022)
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Matthew Eng
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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed retains the impassioned clarity of Poitras’s style while enlisting its primary subject as its co-author. Goldin provides illuminating, clarifying, and always candid commentary on the many chapters of her life.
Posted Oct 20, 2022
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EO
(2022)
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Keith Uhlich
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This is Balthazar as EDM remix. A punkish act of both resurrection and necromancy, EO captures the very alienating and restless pace of life at this moment in time.
Posted Oct 11, 2022
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Enys Men
(2022)
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Adam Nayman
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Its respect for a certain enigmatic filmic tradition -- expressed more plangently by its bygone, tactile fetishism than any prosaic ideas on history, identity, or mortality -- makes for a solid enough foundation.
Posted Oct 07, 2022
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Alcarràs
(2022)
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Susannah Gruder
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It’s an overly studied exercise in the hands-off school of naturalism that lacks the verve of forebears like Lucrecia Martel and Dominga Sotomayor Castillo.
Posted Oct 06, 2022
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Stars at Noon
(2022)
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Adam Nayman
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Stars at Noon is a movie consumed by sensations of burnout; that its stray embers still glow like they do speaks to a spark of artistry that isn’t going out anytime soon.
Posted Oct 06, 2022
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Three Thousand Years of Longing
(2022)
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Juan Barquin
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Miller’s film may dodge some of the thornier subjects it evokes, but his storytelling abilities make it easy for us to give ourselves over to his escapist fantasy.
Posted Sep 01, 2022
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Riotsville, USA
(2022)
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Matthew Eng
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We are still living with and within the consequences of the ’60s, but, as this remarkable film reminds us, we are also living and reckoning with its manifold possibilities.
Posted Jul 27, 2022
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A House Made of Splinters
(2022)
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Matthew Eng
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What ultimately sets A House Made of Splinters apart is that its makers treat compassion not as something deserved or earned, but as a given in life and on screen.
Posted Jul 27, 2022
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Dos Estaciones
(2022)
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Matthew Eng
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The tensions in Dos estaciones roil beneath the calm, contemplative stillness of González’s prosaic visuals, with its penchant for unfussy long takes, and Sánchez’s tightly coiled and disciplined performance...
Posted Jul 27, 2022
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A Love Song
(2022)
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Matthew Eng
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Dickey’s internalized performance is a silent plea for connection, a warm hand stretching out to a fellow recluse, inviting him to grab on to it before time makes memories of them both.
Posted Jul 27, 2022
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Cha Cha Real Smooth
(2022)
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Matthew Eng
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Encounter the banal images, wan color palettes, coming-of-age chestnuts, earnest monologues, budget-stretching needle-drops, half-hearted attempts at thematic import and amorphous montages that act like pressure-cookers of instant character development...
Posted Jul 27, 2022
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Nanny
(2022)
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Matthew Eng
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The drama that plays out between Aisha and her employers, her lover, and her faraway son evinces an emotional richness that is sustained at all points by Diop, delivering one of the most elegant and self-possessed breakout performances in recent memory.
Posted Jul 27, 2022
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Fire of Love
(2022)
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Matthew Eng
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A singular and sublime new documentary about the couple that risks the sentimental in order to realize the truly romantic.
Posted Jul 07, 2022
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