Our demanding critics choose the best films (along with some disappointments) of the year.
Ezra Haber Glenn
Film Review: “Encounter” — A Solid Genre-Spanner
This “father and sons on the lam” film adeptly blends genres (in this case: sci-fi plus thriller). It is well assembled, emotionally compelling, and beautifully shot.
Film Review: “Belfast’ — Black and White and Rosy All Over
Belfast is overly sentimental and drenched if not drowned in nostalgia, but it’s also very sweet, uplifting, well-paced, beautifully shot, and competently assembled.
Film Review: “Terra Femme” — Only Connect…
Collectively, Terra Femme’s footage provides a window — or really, a suite of windows — that allows us to view a bygone world through the eyes of silent female gazers.
Film Review: “Blue Bayou” — “I’m Going Back Someday…”
Blue Bayou’s story deserves to be told and heard. But rather than focus slowly and intently on its central crisis, the script kneads in a dizzying array of additional threads and sidelines.
Film Review: Interrogating Guilt — Paul Schrader’s “The Card Counter”
The Card Counter collapses under the weight of director Paul Schrader’s guilt complex.
Arts Reconsideration: The 1971 Project — Celebrating a Great Year in Film (Part Two)
1971 gave us bursts of magnificent cinematic iconoclasm that had no future — culturally or politically.
Film Review: “Lapsis” — A Satirical Sci-Fi Send-Up of the Gig Economy
This new satirical sci-fi fable is perfect for home streaming to channel (or perhaps exacerbate) your gnawing anxieties at a world slipping into anti-human automation and free-market desperation.
Film Review: Being and Time in “Truth or Consequences”
This is a thoughtful, surprisingly moving, and extremely ambitious film, one that employs an innovative style and some unconventional pacing to explore an unusually complex philosophical and emotional landscape.
Film Review: Wither the People of Magnitogorsk — “Kombinat”
Without ignoring the terrible-beautiful magnetism of the industrial imagery we love to hate and hate to love, the camera is gradually, gently, drawn across the river and away from the workday, to spend time with these very real humans who serve the machines.