By Edo Choi | December 15, 2023

Obeying an ethic of factual authenticity that, for the first time, grounds his often too insistently spare approach, Glazer advances a picture of moral rot that is horribly evocative. It’s telling that this tipping point reveals itself only after one has been released from the film’s spell with the space and distance of reflection.

By Kambole Campbell | December 9, 2023

With its sprawling story and opaque world-building, The Boy and the Heron is hard to summarize. But that diffuseness is part of the charm. That its world is not fully knowable feels in keeping with both the youthful perspective of Mahito and the narcissistic myopia of his Grand Uncle.

By Eileen G'Sell | December 8, 2023

Poor Things is strangely, even shockingly, hopeful, despite being the most overtly political film yet from Lanthimos. It is also arguably his first feminist film, though I suspect many will argue about its efficacy as such.

By Julia Gunnison | December 8, 2023

Kiefer’s paintings, sculptures, and architectural pieces are physically and metaphorically huge and heavy, burdened by their weighty materials and the history they reference.

By Julien Allen | November 23, 2023

This seat at the top table is a privilege afforded to the very few, given that the stripped-back format of Menus-Plaisirs exists completely outside the grammatical norms of the ultra-popular, commoditized tabloid documentaries littering the top ten rubrics of our streaming services.

By Michael Koresky | November 15, 2023
Todd Haynes

Haynes is doing something extraordinarily delicate and difficult in May December, reminding viewers, with the lightest of touches, that we are all implicated and indulgent in the processes of social, cultural, and sexual exploitation that define the modern consciousness.

By Dan Schindel | November 14, 2023

While hardly the sole practitioner of deadpan cinematic whimsy, Kaurismaki can push his methods close to magical realism; his little stories about ordinary people swing tremendous emotional heft.

By Farihah Zaman | November 9, 2023

As the voices interweave and sometimes overlap, the work begins to transcend both the individualistic and the monolithic, and recasts Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography as the story of a community, or what could be the story of humanity.

By Dan Schindel | November 8, 2023

Each year, around 300,000 migrant laborers come to Huzhou, a major textile hub in eastern China, seeking jobs at 18,000 different small workshops. From 2014 to 2019, filmmaker Wang Bing embedded himself in the population there. By his reckoning, he and his crew shot 2,600 hours of footage.

By Julia Gunnison | November 3, 2023

The word poetic is undeniably apt in this case, especially as Raven Jackson is a poet herself. Her written words achieve a hyper-specificity that All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt thrums with. In both forms, she zooms in so far as to leave narrative behind, creating more mysterious, immediate sensations.

By A.G. Sims | November 2, 2023

In a trademark shot for Coppola, Priscilla is captured from outside of a window, visually suggesting the psychological weight of what is essentially captivity and how being in her idol’s orbit only further alienated her from the outside world.

By Caitlin Quinlan | October 27, 2023

Shot between 2014 and 2017, the documentary observes life in four Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Lebanon and in several Indigenous American reservations across the United States, drawing parallels between the spaces and the oppression of the people within them.

By Dan Schindel | October 27, 2023

The Holdovers feels less like a return to form than a retreat to safety. Its initial pretenses of unpleasantness mostly feel like winks at the audience.

By Michael Koresky | October 23, 2023

Scorsese shows how the brutality of American history begins on the smallest scale, that the human capability for deception and self-justification breeds epochal, even genocidal shifts—microcosmic expressions of large-scale historical atrocity.