Martin Tsai

Like Mirbeau before him, Jude dissects bourgeois rot through formal mischief and corrosive irony, though he does so for an age of migrant precarity, performative liberalism, and atomized labor. The methods differ, as does the medium, but the instinct remains the same: to reveal a society’s moral decay not through grand revelations, but through the banal rituals by which people justify themselves every day.

Ultimately, Bitter Christmas never reaches the crashing emotional clarity of Pain and Glory, whose self-interrogation cut far deeper. Still, there is something quietly heartening about watching Almodóvar return to familiar territory with renewed playfulness and formal confidence. Even when circling old obsessions — performance, desire, memory, self-mythology — he remains one of the few filmmakers capable of making self-examination feel simultaneously sumptuous and dangerous.

Sheep in the Box gestures toward grief, artificial consciousness, and emotional dependency without ever probing the psychic or societal consequences of any of them.

The secret longings the characters have been carrying for one another are eventually disclosed with almost offhand casualness. By the film’s end, we know them with unusual intimacy. In any case, the revelations feel nearly incidental. Fukada is less interested in what these people have done than in who they are when left alone with themselves.

Basir’s script is ambitious and thoughtful, though flawed. The regrettable characterizations of women aside, some of the dots don’t quite connect.

Even during the fantasy musical numbers, which give cover to stray from the overall aesthetics of the film, Phillips is just incapable of delivering the genre’s requisite razzle dazzle that would surely complement Joker’s persona.

Given Almodóvar’s established penchant for melodrama and that the subject is euthanasia, the film is strangely aloof. It never reduces the proceedings to Lifetime territory or patronizes moviegoers in the process. It does, however, leave you to wonder a bit about the indifference you might ultimately come away with yourself.

Pablo Larraín's Maria is a one-note exploration of another public figure that just makes the same points over and over again.

At a different time, I might have been more inclined to entertain Reijn's proposition seriously. But it's just her luck that the great Catherine Breillat, who has devoted her illustrious career to investigating these taboos, dropped a far superior film on the same subject matter, Last Summer, just a few months prior, beating Reijn to the finish line.

Burton’s vision from 1988 remains fully intact. If anything, he has expanded on world-building. It’s the best possible outcome from the studio’s blatant cash grab as a singular vision is rigorously and thoughtfully preserved in the storytelling.