Eli Friedberg

Delivered from the heights of personal and professional validation, the great prophet of Hollywood’s sermonistic latest is akin to a detached, rambling, and academic exercise that treats cinema and humanity as a great and curious jigsaw puzzle.

This brooding, disaffected character study is a singularly odd, messy, and haunting portrait of detachment.

The film is both a document of a precise historical moment and testament to the continuity of Palestinian memory and struggle.

Arrhythmic, unfocused, and forgetting to breathe, this overstuffed film feels like a circus act, a well-dressed elephant on a unicycle juggling a dozen balls. It’s an impressive feat of dexterity, if not grace.

LifeHack is consistently intriguing for the conflicting emotions with which it looks back on its chosen moment in tech and time, characterized by cutthroat scamming and cynicism, as well as empowerment and camaraderie for the young and quick-witted.

Despite loose ends, it’s one of the most dreamily affectionate (and affectionately critical) portrayals of the natural sciences ever committed to the screen.

On the whole, Blue Film’s raw, skin-crawling interrogations of aberrant sexuality and trauma ring fearless and true.

Fatih Akin’s Amrum is a delicate coming-of-age parable tracking national identity and violence to their most intimate origin points during the waning days of the Third Reich.

The narrative is nonsense, but it’s at least an arch and sweet kind of nonsense as it jumps through its fairy-tale hoops on the way to the next splash of artful color and manically doodled creativity.

The film has, figuratively and literally, somehow even less gravity than its source material and predecessor. The visual language is divorced from reality and referent to the games; even Looney Tunes action is grounded in the real world—the better to subvert it.