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Autumn Leaves
(1956)
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Melissa Anderson
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[Joan Crawford's] acting is at once immoderate and fiercely controlled; her face, as stylized and exaggerated as a Kabuki mask, still conveys a vast repertoire of intricate moods and responses. Burt’s descent into madness chills.
Posted Jan 23, 2026
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A Private Life
(2025)
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Beatrice Loayza
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...A Private Life has a title suitably generic for the filmmaker’s latest trip through the female psyche. But for a director whose classy realism can often feel like art-house vanilla, the movie unfolds with a much-warranted wink and a nudge.
Posted Jan 16, 2026
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Magellan
(2025)
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Nathan Lee
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If depiction does not equal endorsement, neither does restaging atrocity constitute critique. The fussy formalism of Magellan made me want to jump ship.
Posted Jan 09, 2026
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Marty Supreme
(2025)
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Melissa Anderson
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...Marty Supreme also marks an ignominious first in the Safdie cosmos: a shamelessly sappy ending, with the egomaniac protagonist somehow transformed into a caring, doting, weeping man. The conclusion is no less than a Supreme sacrifice.
Posted Dec 19, 2025
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Resurrection
(2025)
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Ed Halter
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...while Resurrection is emphatically a film of ideas, they are mostly corny ones.
Posted Dec 12, 2025
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The Secret Agent
(2025)
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Melissa Anderson
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...The Secret Agent abounds with corpses and specters. It also teems with charismatic performers and indelible faces—mugs that effortlessly recall those from the decade rendered.
Posted Nov 22, 2025
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Sirāt
(2025)
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Leo Goldsmith
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...Sirāt is...something more grandiose and self-consciously epic, an apocalyptic action spectacle whose back half in particular is structured around an increasingly grim and nerve-wracking sequence of events, catastrophes, and even explosions.
Posted Nov 15, 2025
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Peter Hujar's Day
(2025)
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Melissa Anderson
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Peter Hujar’s Day reminds us of the pleasures of looking and listening intently.
Posted Nov 08, 2025
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Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
(2025)
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Andrew Chan
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Little more than a thinly fleshed-out press release, the movie—written and directed by Scott Cooper—relentlessly hammers home the modesty of the rollout, as if this were an unimpeachable demonstration of Springsteen’s noble intentions.
Posted Nov 06, 2025
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The Mastermind
(2025)
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Melissa Anderson
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Reichardt’s is one of the rare recent films to take place during the era known as the long 1960s in which the epoch’s mood, style, and culture are conveyed potently yet unobtrusively.
Posted Nov 06, 2025
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One Battle After Another
(2025)
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Nick Pinkerton
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One need not cast doubt upon the sincerity of anyone who proclaims this to be vital and sustaining cinema to observe that one person’s masterpiece can be another’s radical treacle.
Posted Nov 06, 2025
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Afire
(2023)
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Melissa Anderson
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Flashes of humanizing vulnerability do little to expand a one-dimensional portrait of indignation and arrogance. Despite the title, nothing ignites in Afire.
Posted Jun 30, 2023
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Neige
(1981)
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Melissa Anderson
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Filmed in the Pigalle and Barbès neighborhoods, this neo-noirish tale provides a glimpse of Paris rarely seen...capturing dynamic street life, [it's] urban verité, a funky city symphony...a loose ACAB platform firmly on the side of the oppressed.
Posted Jun 23, 2023
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Scarlet
(2022)
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Beatrice Loayza
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The film, even in the social-realist mode of its first half, possesses a magical quality...a sustained ambience of naive wonder.
Posted Jun 16, 2023
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Asteroid City
(2023)
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Nick Pinkerton
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For a film doused in declarations of suffering and loss, Asteroid City delivers only a muffled emotional impact....long on lugubrious mournfulness but short on comic piquancy.
Posted Jun 16, 2023
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Will-o'-the-Wisp
(2022)
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Melissa Anderson
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Motored by carnal action as much as by personal crises and emotional disintegration, João Pedro Rodrigues drolly explore the terrain where XXX meets existentialism...No matter how weighty the theme, though, Rodrigues is never one for sanctimony.
Posted May 26, 2023
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The Wounded Man
(1983)
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Melissa Anderson
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Chéreau excelled at modestly scaled portraits of people coming undone by their needs, particularly when they can’t articulate them. That’s especially the case with The Wounded Man....a film of potent, unsanitized eros.
Posted May 19, 2023
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Unrest
(2022)
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Melissa Anderson
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If this film about anarchist fervor has the stately, serene aura of a diorama, its notion of time as inherently subjective—a fantasy as inconsistent and obsolescent as the national borders that the anarchists sought to erase—proves far more stimulating.
Posted Apr 28, 2023
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Beau Is Afraid
(2023)
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Leo Goldsmith
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Even Beau Is Afraid’s character portraits—usually a strength in Aster’s work—seem, despite the tumescent running time, strangely underdeveloped, even caricatural...it’s a surprisingly uninspired effort.
Posted Apr 21, 2023
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Trenque Lauquen: Part II
(2022)
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Melissa Anderson
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In the town named after a round lake, pointed romantic triangles proliferate. Of one of her darlings, Laura says, “I lost the fear of getting lost, of dying.” It is an exceptionally romantic line in a movie that is one of the greatest romances I’ve seen.
Posted Apr 14, 2023
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Trenque Lauquen: Part I
(2022)
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Melissa Anderson
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I find myself reluctant to give even a perfunctory synopsis of Trenque Lauquen, since many of the film’s delights emerge from the deliriously original plots and subplots that Citarella and Paredes have concocted.
Posted Apr 14, 2023
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Showing Up
(2022)
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Michelle Orange
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Shades of Portlandia infuse the world of Showing Up, which is not just Reichardt’s funniest film but also game in a way that rescues its players from caricature, risking silliness to propose the serious imperatives of any dedicated pursuit.
Posted Apr 14, 2023
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Drylongso
(1998)
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Melissa Anderson
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Low-key yet capacious, Drylongso is an affectionate art-school razz; a study of female friendship; a reflection on gender, race, & violence; a murder mystery; and a portrait of Oakland. Among its many pleasures, it reveals the unexpected in the everyday.
Posted Mar 17, 2023
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Magic Mike's Last Dance
(2023)
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Andrew Chan
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To the trilogy’s detriment, Last Dance chooses to regard Mike's booing-up as the ultimate, inevitable pursuit. His male apprentices never become anything more than ciphers; his burgeoning partnership with them is an untapped source of drama and pathos.
Posted Feb 17, 2023
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Pacifiction
(2022)
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Melissa Anderson
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A hallucinatory, disquieting, languid epic, Pacifiction willfully disorients. Prosaic plot specifics are ancillary to creating unfading images; it's concerned more with sensation than sense. What tethers us to the film is Magimel’s superb performance.
Posted Feb 10, 2023
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Saint Omer
(2022)
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Melissa Anderson
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This immensely intelligent film ... exposes a host of limits—of empathy, self-knowledge, language, cultural understanding—while it expands into infinite possibilities regarding the timeworn genres of the courtroom thriller and the immigrant tale.
Posted Jan 13, 2023
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The Super 8 Years
(2022)
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Melissa Anderson
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As much as the film acts as a complement to Ernaux’s previously published work, it also affords a unique pleasure: moving-image evidence of the woman in that transitional moment just before and after her first three books were released.
Posted Dec 16, 2022
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Women Talking
(2022)
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Johanna Fateman
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The excitingly unnaturalistic performances are emotionally and rhetorically persuasive; as a feminist thought experiment, the film basically succeeds. In its abstracted qualities, there's an implicit understanding that in reality things are never so neat.
Posted Dec 02, 2022
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EO
(2022)
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Ania Szremski
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It’s as if Skolimowski, in a fit of rage, is flinging one final rebuke to the entire, unfeeling world. It is painfully successful as such: to me, this is the most feeling film he has ever made. It is surely the one burned most indelibly into my memory.
Posted Nov 11, 2022
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Armageddon Time
(2022)
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Melissa Anderson
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Clotted with stumbling attempts to expiate guilt via easy ironies and stock moments of indignation, Gray's film is defined by flaccid political outrage, by a tidy didacticism about what the malevolent practices of four decades ago have wrought today.
Posted Oct 28, 2022
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Aftersun
(2022)
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Michelle Orange
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In a mood-forward film, the prevailing sense is one of girlhood taking its last untroubled breath. Among other things this means agreeing, for a little longer, to overlook all the things about your dad he would prefer that you not see.
Posted Oct 21, 2022
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Tár
(2022)
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Melissa Anderson
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That Tár, for the most part, engages intelligently with highly charged sociopolitical issues that have fueled innumerable idiotic think pieces is just one of its many pleasing surprises.
Posted Oct 14, 2022
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Bros
(2022)
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Ed Halter
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Tonally clumsy, narratively awkward; fails to satisfy as rom or com. Unable to decide if it's an earnest love story or a series of SNL-style parodies, it's far too invested in its own purported novelty and in shaming other attempts at gay representation.
Posted Oct 07, 2022
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Blonde
(2022)
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Melissa Anderson
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Blonde is ghoulishly obsessed with Monroe’s pregnancies and reproductive organs. Shots of floating fetuses fill the screen so often that I wondered whether Operation Rescue had invested in the film.
Posted Sep 30, 2022
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Moonage Daydream
(2022)
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Melissa Anderson
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Morgen too often indulges his aggravating instinct to cut away from his captivating subject to bombard us with enervating frippery. Desperately, manically trying to draw us in, his ill-conceived Bowie bauble succeeds only in pushing us out.
Posted Sep 16, 2022
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Hold Me Tight
(2021)
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Beatrice Loayza
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In Mathieu Amalric’s Hold Me Tight, grief transforms. Like tears seeping into a printed image, the details warp and the colors swell and bleed into one another. The text grows fuzzy; it becomes something else.
Posted Sep 09, 2022
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Both Sides of the Blade
(2021)
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Blair McClendon
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A peculiar film to place in Denis’s oeuvre, suffused with regret and yearning, while also trying to push toward something new...Denis and her collaborators [are] partisans of a cinema, lately menaced, stubbornly searching for new means of expression.
Posted Jun 24, 2022
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We
(2021)
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Melissa Anderson
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With a light, deft approach, Diop lays bare France’s gruesome, maddening postcolonial history simply by being a patient observer...Motored by Diop's curiosity and compassion...her film is clear-eyed but not cynical, hopeful but not mawkish.
Posted Jun 17, 2022
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Top Gun: Maverick
(2022)
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Ed Halter
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A testosterone-heavy entertainment payload...the film succeeds by sticking closely to the formula of its 1986 predecessor, bringing viewers a product that is beautifully polished in its design and blissfully unsophisticated in its worldview.
Posted Jun 03, 2022
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Happening
(2021)
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Beatrice Loayza
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More thoughtful and visually sophisticated than what Hollywood tends to produce, Diwan’s film nevertheless has few ideas of its own—a disappointment, considering the conceptual experimentation (and knotty objectives) of the source novel.
Posted May 13, 2022
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The Tsugua Diaries
(2021)
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Melissa Anderson
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A work of quarantine ingenuity, The Tsugua Diaries is a late-summer idyll that both acknowledges the grim circumstances that shaped its making and incorporates discord without ever faltering from its low-key ebullience.
Posted May 13, 2022
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Diva
(1981)
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Melissa Anderson
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Beineixs film delights, if not overwhelms, the eye. (And in its obsession with the beauty and power of the human voice, Diva might also be thought of as an illustration of the cinéma du listen). Its bewitchery hasnt dimmed more than forty years later.
Posted Apr 29, 2022
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Petite Maman
(2021)
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Michelle Orange
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The film builds a riddle into its fable of grieving, loss, and return: If a mother and daughter could meet at the same age, how would they relate? The magic is the ease with which it depicts their convergence, its solace a feat of willing imagination.
Posted Apr 22, 2022
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Aline
(2021)
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Melissa Anderson
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A tender portrait of a superstar...in its very peculiarity, it emphasizes the freakishness of outsize talent and fame, and calls attention to the folly, the ludicrousness of the biopic itselfof trying to make coherent a life that is far from ordinary.
Posted Apr 15, 2022
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Cow
(2021)
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Sukhdev Sandhu
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Cow is no Au hasard Balthazar. Still, the end, when it comes, is short, sharp, upsetting.
Posted Apr 01, 2022
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Ahed's Knee
(2021)
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Leo Goldsmith
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It conveys the simplistic sense that the largest issues of the dayof institutionalized violence, oppression, and social stratificationare mere personal pathologies. Isnt the point not to free your mind, but to free Palestine?
Posted Mar 25, 2022
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Deep Water
(2022)
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Melissa Anderson
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A feeble, witless adaptation...Lyne and his screenwriters never stray from familiar tableaux... The actors portraying the emotionally sadomasochistic couple cant evince the merest spark of shambolic erotic energy between them.
Posted Mar 25, 2022
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Great Freedom
(2021)
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Melissa Anderson
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Hans is conceptualized as not much more than a set of presenting symptoms, a man driven by the compulsion to repeat...The film queasily suggests that its not the barbaric system criminalizing Hans that is pathological, but Hans himself.
Posted Feb 25, 2022
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Privilege
(1967)
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Melissa Anderson
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Fiery, impassioned, imperfect, iPrivilege/i may occasionally exasperate, but it never postures.
Posted Feb 11, 2022
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The Worst Person in the World
(2021)
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Michelle Orange
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That Reinsve must make Julies blurriness particular is a task impeded by Triers tendency toward the broadJulies mess is strictly meta, a matter of poor existential hygieneand never less than pleasing to the eye.
Posted Feb 04, 2022
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