Richard Brody

Much of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is a classic two-hander, sharply written with plenty of scope for the two leads to shine. For all the movie’s self-awareness, it’s filled with tenderness and humor.

Few movies prove with such decisive simplicity and clarity the nature of movie aesthetics, offer such proof in action of the defining qualities of the art—not showing and telling but listening, looking, and discovering.

Nolan, energized by the self-restraining power of modern morality, turns an epic poem prosaic.

Even in a film as sombre as “Remake,” one of the joys of McElwee’s method is the freedom with which he constructs his movies.

By keeping the movie brisk, Winocour also turns it superficial, its substance removed from the realm of experience and trivialized into plot points.

Spielberg’s vision in “Disclosure Day” suggests audacity, even recklessness, two qualities that have often been wanting in his movies. There’s a sense of freedom, of a work pulled from deep within, that in some ways seems even more personal than the memoir-like “The Fabelmans.”

As a genre, “The Little Sister” is a psychological thriller, even a film noir: a tale of a double life, which Herzi constructs with a watchmaker’s precision and an analytical clarity that distinguishes Melliti’s starring performance all the more.

Power Ballad is a sentimental tale of family and friends both fostering and thwarting a dream. It finds an unusually strong current of authentic (if narrow) emotion while leaving wilder ideas and feelings trapped beneath its surface.

An exuberantly inventive but overstretched comedy about the redistribution of luxury goods and the chic that goes with them.

The movie fails politically to make clear what democracy is up against, and it fails artistically to imagine the unimaginable and give voice to the unspeakable.