By Simran Hans | March 23, 2018

The meticulously detailed wasteland that Anderson has created is rendered with his typical craft and care . . . Yet in ethnically delineating its humans, the film sets up a curious, racially coded divide between dogs and the Japanese.

By Nick Pinkerton | March 16, 2018

Depardon is not out to expose naked cruelty, neglect, and dereliction of duty, as Wiseman and Wang do in their films, but something much more subtly invidious: the revolving-door efficiency of the state apparatus, mechanized service behind a blandly humane smile.

By Fanta Sylla | March 15, 2018

Black Panther is an unsettling experience. A sexy and entertaining blockbuster, the third feature by Coogler following Creed and Fruitvale Station is also a sad and perverse object. Its provocative ambiguity reveals itself only gradually.

By Kelley Dong | March 10, 2018

Adapting the convoluted yet scant language of the text is in itself a catch-22: total fidelity to the novel risks attracting the same denunciations that flagged the author for decades; but disloyalty jeopardizes the respect of a dedicated fanbase.

By Daniel Witkin | March 9, 2018

The film thrives on translation, communication, and perception. Like the screwball comedies of yore, it revolves around a romantic conflict that its protagonist does not fully comprehend, though here this situation is reduced from the fanciful to the quotidian.

Berlin 2018: Loznitsa is an assiduous practitioner of observational cinema. One may even argue that his nonfiction filmmaking is to the study of spaces charged with political memory what Frederick Wiseman is to the exploration of institutions.

By Mark Asch | February 22, 2018

The distance between the banality of life and the sublime of cinema seems practically unbridgeable. This sense that transcendence is elusive to us mere mortals is the explicit subject of the film.

By Daniel Witkin | February 16, 2018

The first thing you should know is that Western is not really a western. Valeska Grisebach draws upon genre iconography and mythos, but to take the comparison further requires wishful, willful thinking, an act of projection that the filmmaker cannily encourages and exploits.

By Bedatri D. Choudhury | February 16, 2018

This portrayal of an ugly divorce functions as a commentary on the dysfunctional post-Soviet, post-Communist Russia, where nothing holds value other than money and the desire to earn more of it.

By Greg Cwik | February 8, 2018

In his five films, Perry has exclusively written irredeemably selfish characters, who opt to remain in their own comfort zones, yet he sustains a consistent empathy, never dismissing or torturing them. There is a Sisyphean desperation to their yearnings.

By Justin Stewart | February 2, 2018

There is a formal adventurousness here typical of Kurosawa, who has seesawed between genres both throughout his career (horror, sci-fi, and dramas like Tokyo Sonata) and within individual films (Doppelganger transitions from a loss-of-identity thriller to a sort of satirical romance). The constant element is a sure-footed aesthetic precision.

By Keith Uhlich | February 1, 2018

In 24 Frames, the boundary that separates still photograph from motion picture proves to be beside the point, much as it is immaterial to the impact of the heady Kiarostami romance Certified Copy whether the central couple are long-term partners or total strangers.

By Emma Piper-Burket | January 12, 2018

Avoiding the sweeping grandiosity and visual tidiness of so many period pieces, Thomas brings a deeply tactile approach to her first solo feature, which is set in the mountains of 19th-century Brazil.

By Eric Hynes | January 5, 2018

Tasked with the pivot film in a trilogy, Johnson chose the right time to reinvigorate the narrative with irreconcilable forces, doubts, and conflicts. Suspension is the best asset of a a middle chapter. And best in that it is truest.