Observer

Fatherland may find refinement through restraint, but its static frames contain the weight and movement of history, making it feel, in its strongest moments, monumental and poetic.

Through its exploration of spaces rarely put to film, the movie urges a more thoughtful meditation on our fraught link to nature and to the world at large, collapsing past and present into a single point on screen.

The film is one of homespun naturalism, but Atlan also exhibits immense formal control.

La Bola Negra re-imagines and builds on art from the margins (including a play about Lorca by co-screenwriter Alberto Conejero), but transforms it into the kind of lavish, expensive movie production that would, in years past, have never been afforded to queer drama.

Building on the discomforting courtroom unfurling of RMN—[Mungiu's] previous film, about the mechanics of mounting anti-immigrant sentiment—Fjord traces the most delicate, most pliable dynamics of modern democracy, in a tale designed as much to infuriate as to engender difficult introspection.

Gosh, is it ever a letdown to have a filmmaker all but pop up on screen to remind us what his movie is not-so-secretly about, before failing to live up to not only his own political objectives, but some of the most basic visual tenets of narrative filmmaking. Down with the bourgeoisie? Absolutely. But must the revolution be so sloppy?

Dao, named for the Taoist belief in an unceasing motion that flows through and unites all things, is a film of anthropological self-reflection, but it is also a surprising exploration of cinematic process.

Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, an exceptional historical fiction, doesn’t so much transport you to the past as it brings you to the edge of the translucent curtain that often obfuscates history from view.

I Want Your Sex may not ultimately have much to say, but its livewire comic scenarios yield the kind of raucous, sexually charged entertainment seldom seen in Hollywood of late.

The latest entry in the overcrowded genre is a sobering, well-made drama that is well worth seeing, titled Truth & Treason, about the youngest person ever executed by the Third Reich for his dedication to criticizing Adolf Hitler.