Years in Review
Best Musical, Best Supporting Actor, Best New Old Movies, Most Irritating Camera Lens, Best Action Sequence, Best Remake, Trailer of the Year, and more!
A towering figure in the world of French documentary cinema, Claire Simon has been working steadily in the cinema since a mid-1970s internship with Algerian filmmaker Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, and has been directing both narrative and nonfiction films for over 30 years now.
Gagnon makes work that’s legitimately punk as fuck—bleak, scabrous, and resounding with a madman’s cackle.
Toni Geitani’s debut feature focuses on the evanescence of historical and national memory as experienced by the first generation that did not see corpses lying in the streets but grew up surrounded by their ghosts.
The slow escalation throughout the film builds to show quite clearly how the confluence of time, boredom, prejudice, and weaponry create a situation with devastating consequences for all involved.
In fragmented short scenes intertwined by the turn of chance, Possible Faces keenly studies aimless characters whose lives pinball between despair and grasping the last vestiges of hope.
Schmitz whittles a leisurely yarn with only the most threadbare of narrative action. He shot with no formal script or framework in mind, content to merely observe in fixed, distant shots the desultory minutiae of his hapless subjects.
If, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details, then Chris Kennedy’s 36-minute marvel Watching the Detectives finds in that idea a working metaphor for the modern condition.
Ambulante Más Allá is a roving documentary festival launched in 2005 that provides the framework for building a inclusive independent filmmaking infrastructure, reclaiming an often maligned community and helping them curate their own identities on and off screen.
The Pluto Moment by Zhang Ming is a delightful, quietly subversive film that, under the veil of a personal story, smuggles in details about the current cultural moment in China.
Years in Review
Vice, Suspiria, Green Book, Halloween, Ocean’s 8, Bohemian Rhapsody, Tyrel, Peter Rabbit, Chappaquiddick, Solo, A Quiet Place
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The Family confronts us with situations that are perfectly ordinary, without directing our interpretation. It’s only outside knowledge that complicates matters.
Vitaly Mansky’s latest film is a personal document of historical reckoning culled from hundreds of hours of footage collected during his tenure as official videographer for Putin’s election campaign and early presidency.
To process the layers of brutality and often half-hearted deceit that constitute much of contemporary public life in the former Soviet Union is no enviable task, but Loznitsa has taken it up with gusto.
Years in Review
Zama, Let the Sunshine In, If Beale Street Could Talk, Burning, Happy as Lazzaro, First Reformed, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Western, Roma, Hale County This Morning, This Evening