Observer

For one thing, The Beloved traces its central dynamic through an entire production. For another, it trades less in frigid restraint and more in suffocating closeups, which capture nuanced performances that prove deeply affecting, even if the movie around them doesn’t fully cohere.

Eisenberg is an actor and playwright, so he writes what he knows, but The Debut is also one of the most self-assuredly cinematic comedies to come out of Hollywood in quite some time.

It’s as rich, observant and absorbing as any great book about identity, imbued with a lush cinematic splendor that makes every moment last a lifetime.

Woman Unknown is a harrowing film in which morality and physicality become uncannily entwined, a dynamic el-Toukhy and cinematographer Jasper Spanning gradually explore through visual transformations.

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?