It’s been an exceptional year for filmmakers transposing Mrs. Dalloway to modernity. The Tribeca Festival played host to The Last Day by Rachel Rose, a loose, impressionistic echo of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 classic. Meanwhile, Cannes and Toronto saw brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri expand on the story in a contemporary Nigerian setting with Clarissa, an invigorating film containing some of the year’s finest cinematic sleight of hand, and its most captivating performances.

Novelistic and abstruse, Clarissa—named for Woolf’s nostalgic middle-aged socialite, Clarissa Dalloway—unfolds with the very same stream-of-consciousness telling as the original text, a cinematic feat that is, by its nature, opaque. It yields, however, a cinematic vitality. Tracing the who’s who (and who’s when) of the flashback structure requires attention to details like casting and costumes, since the fleeting, casual dialogue mentions characters’ names only in passing, and the visual language is rarely aimed at creating connections between the timelines. The result, courtesy of Chuko Esiri’s immensely thoughtful scripting, is a lean-forward experience of unraveling knotty curiosities, which the movie’s ensemble brings to life in apparent vignettes slowly woven together—not just by the film’s own editing, but by our own synaptic connections, formed to fit the story into a familiar shape.

Like the novel, Clarissa follows its eponymous fifty-something (played by Sophie Okonedo) preparing for a party over the course of a day, amid memories and chance encounters. Only the setting here is modern Lagos instead of 1920s London, a tilt-shift that requires little alteration beyond a few last names and some Nigerian Pidgin. Although the movie bides its time, a central scene nearly an hour in—following younger versions of each character gathered for a fancy luncheon—quickly crystallizes its themes of class and postcolonial identity, turning the very act of adapting an interwar English classic into a thorny perusal of the country’s complicated cultural inheritance, on par with Chinua Achebe’s great Nigerian novel Things Fall Apart.

The shadow of colonial Britain looms large over the movie’s telling, between its characters’ posh accents (which they note as a remnant of the crown) and the rigid hierarchies maintained and transformed to suit the status quo of power. However, these prickly hegemonies disguise character dynamics at turns passionate and conversational. In the present, Okonedo’s high-strung Clarissa alternates between genial and severe when instructing her staff, while several decades in the past (where she’s played by India Amarteifio), she comes off as a more thoughtful, bright-eyed character still on the precipice of hardening toward issues of class.

Her entanglement with a youthful intellectual, Peter (Toheeb Jimoh in flashbacks), has the lively, lived-in quality of a late-summer vacation, courtesy of Jonathan Bloom’s vibrant cinematography. This paves the path for a similarly tricky wistfulness when the older Peter (David Oyelowo), now married and living in the country’s north, happens to be in Lagos to wrap up his late father’s affairs when Clarissa learns of his visit and invites him to the party, albeit from afar. By delaying this reunion, the directors build anticipation through the aforementioned flashbacks—a tale of youthful naïveté on the verge of adulthood, and a more complicated world—eventually pulling the trigger on a moment of breathtaking silence, which Okonedo and Oyelowo sell like piercing arrows to the heart.

The Esiri brothers also re-fashion the book’s subplot about a shellshocked soldier into one of the modern Nigerian military tackling Boko Haram. Their version of Septimus (Fortune Nwafor), who ends up loosely connected to Clarissa by several degrees, becomes a flashpoint for contemporary cultural undercurrents surrounding militarism and masculinity. Although this analysis seems disconnected from larger musings on class and religion (Clarissa is also a tale of Muslims and Christians, and the spaces they occupy in Lagos), the saga of Septimus wraps back around in devastating ways. Its emotional ricochets ride up the political ladder we’re gradually introduced to, by way of Clarissa’s politician husband Richard (Jude Akuwudike in the present, Ogranya in the past), a fascinatingly aloof character.

Equally important centerpieces of this split timeline, and its split consciousness, are Clarissa’s reliable, jovial buddy Ugo (Danny Sapani/Kehinde Cardoso), and her estranged friend Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird/Ayo Edebiri), whose first meeting with Clarissa becomes the emotional fulcrum of the flashback scenes. In addition to unearthing and clarifying the novel’s queer themes, the movie also queers the form these moments take, transforming memories of Clarissa and Sally into haunting echoes of unrequited longing that fan outward, into enveloping sensations of regret.

In Clarissa, words and ideas are withheld, but keeping them close to the chest has the gradual effect of nudging them out of every orifice, and from between every cut. This yields a film of arch and deliberate construction, where emotional rhythms slide gradually into place, until silent exchanges are all you need to understand both the internal and external worlds these characters occupy. 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.

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A World War II movie whose violence is quiet and intimate, May el-Toukhy’s Kvinde ukendt, or Woman Unknown (which was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival), unfolds after Denmark’s liberation from Nazism, positioning it as a unique period drama about a delayed fanatical fuse. In it, a woman’s body becomes the battlefield, owing to suspicions of her past involvement with a Nazi officer. This yields a tale of survival during, and after, wartime, with a focus on winding historical detours that tend towards labels of collaboration, but reveal something much more complex.

The only film by a woman director in this year’s Venice competition, it shoulders the burden of representing a feminine point of view—whether it wants to or not—and it does so in thorny, confrontational ways. Its lush period detail and flowing Danish flags hide an invisible despondency, all focused around protagonist Marie (Venice Best Actress winner Mathilde Arcel), who works as a maid and nanny in an affluent household, but is engaged to marry its owner.

Marie’s betrothed, the much-older Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund), runs a successful glove factory and is none the wiser about her past, which she keeps closely guarded. She cares deeply for Christian’s pre-adolescent daughter, whose late mother she wrestles with replacing—but she’s also still a maid. She still diligently puts on her robes and performs her chores, but when she retires for the evening, she sleeps next to her fiancé. Which is to say: even before Marie is threatened by a past resurgent, she occupies two worlds at once, and exists in the strange and liminal space, as a woman (a poor woman, in particular) doing what she can to survive.

Christian is a stern and distant presence through much of the film, preventing us from ever truly discerning whether Marie loves him (and vice versa) or whether it’s a marriage of convenience. This obfuscation is purposeful; it imbues the film with doubt. Before any determinations can be made about her love life, an old friend from Marie’s hometown, Karl (Thorbjørn Hedegaard), recognizes her, and threatens to expose her transgressions.

As the Danes rightfully celebrate their liberation in the streets, this revelry often veers into the tried and true ritual of humiliating local women suspected of being turncoats, or “Nazi whores,” by chopping off their hair, stripping them naked and painting blood-red swastikas on their skin. Marie witnesses this cruelty firsthand, carried out by men whose bloodlust against their occupiers has now turned towards vulnerable members of their own society. So, when it comes time for Marie to either reckon with her guilt, or pass it off by deflecting the blame, she knows exactly what’s at stake.

This dilemma takes concrete form when the rumors of her past reach Christian’s doorstep, quite literally, in the form of that very same blood-red graffiti, scrawled on the front door of his apartment building, albeit without explanation. This provides Marie with a sliver of plausible deniability, but it leaves her in the precarious position of having to once again survive while potentially bringing harm to someone else.

The stain, although affixed in time and place, symbolically follows her wherever she goes. Although her past entanglements are in her rearview, she’s once more in the position of having to debase herself in order to keep the peace, resulting in some skin-crawling scenes of corrupted intimacy and sexual assault.

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. Their rigid formalism—born of careful blocking and static framing, often through mirrors—holds secrets at bay, in tandem with Arcel’s withdrawn, calculated self-preservation. However, impressionistic moments occasionally take hold—dissolves, and tilts, and unnervingly quick movements—forcing both the lead performance and the movie’s aesthetic texture to take on a singed quality, as though they’d been silently burned, and need to get away from themselves.

Few films in this year’s Venice competition have had so much to say about how we view history using so few words. What ought to be a moral binary, concerning some of history’s greatest villains, becomes surprisingly nuanced; in fact, you never even see a Nazi on screen, and are forced to reckon with the film’s morality entirely on its own terms.

Even in casual moments, Marie is pushed between men telling her what to do, where to sit, how to look and what to wear (if anything at all), from her husband, to doctors, to men trying to take advantage of her. However, this roster of grievances is tied to the larger context of survival within patriarchal structures, ensuring that Marie’s everyday, material reality comes into constant conflict with the world around her—and thus, with itself—leading to a desperation collecting behind Arcel’s eyes. She delivers a performance of quietly enormous impact, which is especially fitting, for a film that builds slowly and confidently to piercing emotional highs, of the most unexpected kind.

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A war film with a flimsy dramatic foundation, Halkawt Mustafa’s No Paradise If You Are Killed By a Woman is nonetheless evocative of real desolation. Following a Kurdish female sniper battling ISIS in Mosul—based on a real woman Mustafa met in 2014—the Venice Film Festival title (and Iraqi Oscar entry) boasts remarkable visual detail, in part because it was filmed on location in Mosul.

However, this realistic backdrop is forced to contend with a lack of narrative inquiry into its heroine’s life and moral fiber. She seems to face ethical dilemmas at every turn, yet they’re seldom dramatized as such, resulting in a work that inadvertently skips past its most interesting ideas.

It opens with a slow and absorbing warzone sequence set in 2016. Vyan (Avan Jamal), a woman feared and mythologized as “the Kurdish sniper,” sneaks into a makeshift ISIS stronghold and rescues a child bride being held prisoner by a militant—who she readily kills with a single, clean headshot. It rings out triumphantly amid the ruins. Before she bids the girl farewell, Vyan holds up a picture of her younger sister, who’s being similarly held captive, and whose trail she’s been chasing for some time.

As motivations go, Vyan’s is simple and clear cut, though it takes a while for us to return to this pressing plot. Back at the Kurdish Peshmerga base, Vyan is revered for her marksmanship by men and women alike—she’s even a sentimental favorite of her elderly commander (Kader Jalal) and she stands out for her outgoing poise and long, flowing hair. Her distinctions from the other, numerous women fighters eventually are explained when we learn more about her background. But in the meantime, as she protects her comrades from oncoming attacks, the movie takes on a breakneck pace, allowing us to delight in Vyan’s clockwork proficiency. She lays down her enormous rifle, takes careful aim through its scope, stoically pulls the trigger and hits her target.

Aim. Fire. Hit. Repeat. It’s a captivating rhythm of violence, one we’re allowed to luxuriate in with the knowledge of her targets’ crimes. However, this is soon cut short by a plot detour which forces her to return home to Norway, where she’s lived since the age of 12 (hence the apparent cultural divide). The legal complications of fighting in a foreign army, while being made a target of ISIS—thus endangering other Norwegians—takes up a good chunk of the second act, as Vyan is counseled and questioned by a social worker adept at dealing with war trauma (Thorbjørn Harr).

These scenes are broken up by flashbacks which detail how she and her sister were kidnapped while visiting Iraqi Kurdistan, where their parents were also executed. This left Vyan with a single-minded mission. Once she finally returns to Mosul, the movie gradually resumes its strategic unspooling, as its angel of vengeance draws closer to a mysterious Swedish ISIS sniper holding her sister hostage. This buildup is in turn peppered with Vyan reading poetry about the strength of women and the weakness of her male enemies. This brings the evocative title into focus, turning the film into a pop-feminist rebellion, tilt shifted from its arguably outdated fist-pumping, girl-bossing Western modes to suit a wildly different, thoroughly urgent cultural context.

That the whole thing is skin deep, like an upbeat fight song gesturing at complexity, is both a feature and a bug. While the chess game between the two marksmen plays out on an enormous scale—they scope each other out from buildings miles apart, with civilians in between—the subsequent ethical quandaries are brushed over. The movie’s chilling sound design ensures each bullet fired by Vyan’s ISIS rivals feels like a death knell, and as she gets closer to her targets, vulnerable civilians hang in the balance. However, Vyan’s focus on her mission (with her commander in her ear, guiding her from afar) is framed in a limiting way.

There’s almost never a moment where she hesitates, or pauses to consider the weight of each life lost, each time she delays pulling the trigger—often to get a better shot herself, or to observe more clues about where the Swedish sniper is hiding. Numerous people die on her watch, and it doesn’t seem to affect her. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong from this side of the screen, but given how Jamal plays with subdued ferocity in other moments, this misstep is likely not her fault, and feels more like a product of mismatched reaction shots which don’t unearth any lingering uncertainty.

Before long, No Paradise If You Are Killed By a Woman develops into a sprawling series of trolley problems that have little interest in engaging with the dilemma at hand—that is, if the film is even aware of these implications to begin with. Much of its emotional weight is geared towards verbal repetitions about Vyan’s trauma, but this ends up confronted largely in the abstract. It’s an idea for the film to work towards as its heroine desperately crawls through muck and debris, towards a man she hopes to righteously kill. But the closer she gets to her goal, the more she ends up leaving this emotional undercurrent behind, kneecapping even the broad sentimentality in which Mustafa seems to trade.

That the director dedicates this tale of resilience to his daughters is a commendable gesture, especially as the story is fashioned after his own, as an Iraqi Kurd who fled to Norway. However, the movie’s personal impetus doesn’t make up for its shortcomings, or its failures to express the rigors of its moral dilemmas. It’s one of the most immaculately designed war films you’re likely to see this year, with an enveloping use of environment and atmosphere. But when it comes to filling that space with dynamic drama, sadly, it misses its mark.

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A film of unassuming vigor, Nicolas Pariser’s Venice competition entry Un peu avant minuit (One Minute to Midnight) finds 49-year-old former writer Léo (Melvil Poupaud) on the precipice of personal and social change. The French drama is, for all intents and purposes, a post-#MeToo scholarly address that’s almost entirely about a man—not to mention, written and directed by one—but its self-reflexivity reveals a riveting feminist tome about the winds of cultural change, and the difficulty of de-centering yourself from your own story.

Thorny and casual in equal measure, the film finds Léo (a resident of Nancy, in eastern France) back in Paris for a week en route to Italy, where he’s scheduled to meet with a lawyer about an inheritance from his recently deceased father, a man he never knew. Separated from his current partner, and trying to get to know his estranged Parisian daughter—19-year-old Emma (Clara Pacini), a fiery activist—the former arts critic ends up on an ostensible tour of his past, reconnecting with old friends and colleagues, whose own retrospectives force him to see the world through brand-new eyes.

The movie’s many walk-and-talks extend for lengthy periods and in single takes. During these carefully crafted tracking shots, Poupaud creates a withheld mystery regarding the kind of man Léo truly is—a question other characters find themselves asking of him too, as he reflects on his life thus far. However, when strolling with several supporting players (especially the women who enter and re-enter his life), Léo finds himself on the receiving end of diatribes about how the world used to work, stemming from contemporary reckonings with patriarchal structures and expectations. Some decry the actions of other men. Others hold Léo to account for slights seemingly invisible to him, more minor violations that might once have lived in gray areas, but which are now better illuminated.

However, these cutting monologues—courtesy of his daughter, his former intern-turned-politician Armelle (Anaïs Demoustier), and the distant wife of an old friend, Éléonore (Léonie Simaga), with whom he shares romantic tension—are just as revealing about him as they are about each woman, and the changing state of things. That these characters feel comfortable enough to express themselves and partially dress Léo down (without him really biting back) speaks to a relatively evolved man willing to understand. However, One Minute to Midnight is about much more than listening quietly and receiving a pat on the back.

The aforementioned chats tend to revolve around how love and relationships used to work when the characters were younger, and about the shifting boundaries of not just acceptability, but accountability. Was there, for instance, a power imbalance when Léo engaged his former intern in an affair? How does this decades-old relationship sit with her today? And would it be fair for him to impose this question onto her—even with the best, most apologetic intentions? As the rules of romantic and sexual engagement are rewritten and clarified, there exists no guidebook for how to confront regret, or deal with metamorphosis.

The film is by no means a love story, but it’s about numerous love stories situated in the past—including that of Léo’s mother and his biological father—whose effects still linger, leaving those involved to ruminate on whether the world has truly changed, or whether their feelings were illusory. Once Léo tracks down various women, in a successive chain of amends and inquiry, the movie’s conversational complexity comes to light. Refrains along the lines of “those were just the standards back then” now quietly suggest a corollary: “Whose standards, exactly?”

As social revolution brews in the background, the death of Léo’s father leads to a reflection on mortality (not to mention, on being cut off from an entire culture and heritage). The collective pressure on Léo’s sense of self builds gradually, causing fissures to form across Poupaud’s careful façade. These are exacerbated further when Léo convenes with and learns about his old male colleagues—one of whom, he’s told, is an accused rapist, an early revelation that catalyzes his need to revisit the past.

Another friend is notably a TV writer producing a show about their younger days as critics, in which Léo’s fictitious stand-in is a major character. When Léo visits the set, his weeklong retrospective on his uneasy past—as seen through other people’s prisms—becomes hilariously literal. Are there things Léo missed about his friends, and about himself? Perhaps, though there’s no major mystery to be solved, other than what to do with the weight of this knowledge going forward.

As he searches for one last piece to the puzzle of youth—a woman he once loved, his former coworker Tina (Golshifteh Farahani)—the multitudinous input from women in his life reorients not just his sense of self, but his sense of objective. It’s a wonderfully impactful subversion of catharsis as a cinematic end goal, given the widespread context of female characters burdened with being outlets for men’s dreams and realizations.

All the while, Pariser maintains a keen balance between form and fluidity. He presents a dramatic narrative that plays out with robust confidence, but threatens to derail Léo’s already-shaky peace of mind. Scenes of people simply chatting, when imbued with motion, become wildly exciting here, as the characters’ intellectual gears start to rotate and enormous change foments in the movie’s backdrop, forcing us to question whether Léo might be missing the forest for the trees.

And yet, Léo’s own journey is no less important or affecting, as a man in flux, searching for a way to ground himself when everyone else seems to stand firm on what they believe, and how they see the world. The only question is what shape the next phase of his life will take, and who will end up a vital part of the rest of his journey—willingly, or otherwise.

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Disguised by straightforward drama, Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s Yak Mai (The Burning Giants) reveals staggering abstractions, which lure you deeper into its political labyrinth. The Thai filmmaker draws on myth and cultural identity to spin a languid tale of mountainous smoke causing mysterious burns, and the ethnic minority subsequently made a scapegoat. Its echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic are overt, but Aroonpheng’s aim reaches wider and deeper, yielding audiovisual poetry that speaks to contemporary national moods, and to the repetitions of history.

Through a prologue presented out of time, an empty theatre space collects a nebulous mist, which it sends spiraling upward through its vents, and into Thailand’s western forests outside Bangkok. While the film eventually returns to this imagined site, in its closing salvo, it gives way to a tale of tyrannical oppression, as a villager with discolored cheeks (Awat Ratanapintha) is chased down by armed and masked Thai police in the mountains. They strip him of his shirt to reveal what looks like vitiligo, but which they refer to as “burns”—an apparent sign of a recent infection spreading through the area—so they take him into custody, though not before torching his home.

Along the way, the KN95 of their chief, Sompong (Teerawat Mulvilai), comes loose, exposing him to the nearby smoke and gradually covering his torso in actual burn marks. Over several days, these scars release magical flames—a kind of searing in reverse—until the unnamed disease proves fatal. Whether caused by the mist or some unseen germ, whatever harm lurks in the forest appears to be real, though its effects also clarify that the unnamed villager isn’t really at fault, obfuscating the real reasons for his arrest.

The subsequent narrative is fractured in purposeful ways, a chain that connects one character to the next without fully detailing the wider picture just yet. The police have been instructed to clear the mountain forests. One of them, the conscientious Lak (Pakapol Srirongmuang), wrestles with his convictions as he oversees the imprisoned villager, who languishes in handcuffs while being told he’s under medical observation. Lak, who makes his way to a local market to spend time with his girlfriend Aepoh (Phunthida Phairuangkij), reveals to her the presence of one of the “mountain people” who refused to evacuate, which she relays to her sister Aeva (Waywiree Ittianunkul), a nanny in Bangkok.

Aeva, it turns out, left one of these mountain villages as well, along with her adolescent daughter, but left her husband Muso behind—who she now suspects is the man in custody. Slowly, and through focused interpersonal drama, the pieces on this chessboard re-align so that Aeva can make her way to the incarcerated villager, in the hopes that he’s her lost love. However, the powers of the state have other plans, which play out by dead of night, but which the police boast about openly and maliciously, leaving little room for justice or catharsis.

The movie’s careful unspooling involves characters like Lak being deputized to burn villages and kidnap dissenters—or worse. For his story, Aroonpheng appears to draw from real forest clearings to make way for national parks, and the forced disappearance of activists like Porlajee “Billy” Rakchongcharoen, belonging to the Karen ethnic minority. With this sordid reality at the back of his mind, the director behind Manta Ray (a haunting film about a Rohingya migrant) trains his lens on the mountain’s atmosphere, as a living space that seems to make a choice about who to harm or protect.

More than its abstract locations, Aroonpheng uses his actors to unveil both mood and morality in unexpected ways. As with Manta Ray, the sound design of The Burning Giants goes a long way to creating a hypnotic atmosphere—not just by way of music, or enigmatic rumbles, but a guttural suffering, as the villager languishes in captivity, writhing and contorting in ways that appear to resemble a classical dance (a specific one that becomes relevant later on).

However, while these visceral flourishes help detail the story at hand—one which crescendos quietly, through a rumination on the lives left behind in a mountainous village—Aroonpheng deepens the movie’s political exploration in jaw-dropping ways, in the final act. Although the movie’s denouement seems disconnected from the rest of its plot, by way of a pivot toward a seemingly unconnected stage performance of the Ramakien (a re-enactment of the Hindu epic the Ramayana), this coda serves to illuminate the national mythologies justifying fascistic violence in the first place.

Like the Ramayana—often fodder for Hindu nationalism in India—the Ramakien fuels Thai identity through its tale of the benevolent prince Rama rescuing his wife Sita from the clutches of the demon Ravana (the plot of the missing husband seems inspired by this too). In both countries’ tellings, a key chapter involves the burning of Ravana’s kingdom of Lanka, which, in The Burning Giants, forms the basis of a harrowing narrative reversal that explores what it means for vengeful flame to exist at the center of national myth—in turn harkening back to the movie’s fascistic forest clearings. The movie’s quietly harrowing closing act takes wildly unexpected turns, but all of these are in service of an extensive dramatic exploration of the ways in which religion, political demonization and economic exploitation become intrinsically linked.

Rather than sermonizing, Aroonpheng dramatizes and aestheticizes, creating winding mysteries in plain sight, en route to a deeply moving final act. The Burning Giants bides its time through its ethereal magnetism, born of careful framing, gradual movements and vivid landscapes awash in shadow, creating a sense of danger at every turn. This danger isn’t just one of armed political overreach, but of entire worlds and systems bent to the will of the powerful. The movie combats this not through hollow victories, but through the loaded fantasia of a woodland realm where everything is heightened, and defeat feels utterly, intimately personal, as the mechanics of authoritarianism are stripped down to their DNA. At the end of it all, it’s a base ingredient we might just recognize in ourselves.

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Part period piece, part political premonition, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland rounds out the Polish director’s loose trilogy set in the detritus of World War II. Following fellow black-and-white dramas Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), the filmmaker’s latest—which won him the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, tied with La Bola Negra—is simple on the surface, and unfolds with an often academic frankness. However, it disguises, within its scant 82-minute runtime, greater ruminations about the state of the world.

Set in 1949, the story follows a pair of state visits by famed German novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) on either side of the Inner German Border, a few years before the erection of the Berlin Wall. However, amid a personal tragedy, his tense relationships with his children, and the looming specter of authoritarianism, Thomas’s long-awaited return from American exile becomes complicated, in a tale that examines the nature of freedom and artistic and personal repression.

The movie belongs to a remarkable trio of performers, between Zischler’s staunch reserve as the Nobel laureate—who tries to keep a lid on his most passionate political opinions, until he can no longer contain them—and the actors playing his renowned adult children. Sandra Hüller (this year’s Best Actress winner at Berlin) plays his daughter, chaperone and translator Erika, a shadow of her father, who similarly revisits a broken Germany after years escaping the Nazis. They’re similar in most respects, except for Thomas’s rejection of his “junkie” son, Klaus (August Diehl), whose morose phone call with Erika the film initially opens on.

We first meet Klaus as he sits at the foot of his bed in a cramped Cannes apartment, as his male lover is still asleep, and he regales his sister with his bitter opinions on Germany’s attempts at post-Nazi reconstruction. Klaus’s fractured identity as a German man is one he likens to the fissures in his family life, though not merely as a distant allegory. The two ideas are intrinsically linked, as he labels German “a language invented to lie in,” before discussing the ways in which Thomas is exceedingly proficient at this particular function.

Klaus doesn’t interact with Thomas on screen, and he rarely shares scenes with Erika either—at most, the movie cuts between them, linking them across space in ghostly ways—ensuring that the movie’s editing helps establish the trio’s strained dynamics early on. This domestic tumult soon colors the political visits undertaken by the father-daughter pair, first to the U.S.-controlled Frankfurt, where Thomas receives the Goethe prize under the watchful eye of the C.I.A., and then to Weimar in the Eastern Soviet Bloc, to celebrate the 200th birthday of the prize’s namesake, the writer and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

During these twin visits, Thomas flirts with (or rather, passively accepts) the possibility that his words might eventually be twisted and his works turned into propaganda. Whether or not he’ll push back—and to what degree—is a matter of some question, but the ongoing schism of the “first” and “second” worlds is on every character’s mind. Klaus, for instance, deems this precipice a choice between “Stalin and Mickey Mouse,” a dichotomy reflected in the visits themselves, as the respective overt and subliminal overreach of each faction worms its way into every conversation.

Despite being a revered guest on either side of the border, there’s a sense that Thomas is trapped by invisible forces at every turn. For instance, he’s framed between two grandsons of Richard Wagner at a social gathering—who insist on a consequence-free separation of his work from its Nazi appropriation—and in more private moments, Thomas can seldom express his grief to his daughter Erika when relaying the news of a death in the family. The characters’ tri-pronged ideological choices leave them between a rock, a hard place and a frying pan, as though Fatherland were an echo of the numerous tipping points society is faced with today, between the iron grip of far-right fascism and the choice between free-market and socialist ideologies—not to mention, the ways in which artistry can be absorbed and misused by anyone with an agenda. As the world teeters on the brink of inevitable transformation, what will any of us be willing or unwilling to do?

The film may not display its own staunch commitments in a contemporary political context (beyond a rejection of soft de-Nazification by way of quiet reintegration), but its locus is a political moment so enormous as to be emotionally petrifying. Perhaps the story ought to have been more detailed, in its exploration of its characters’ outlooks—that Erika and even Thomas himself may also have been queer is broached only subtextually, making the latter’s rejection of Klaus all the more complicated—but in the process, Pawlikowski transforms Fatherland into an austere conduit for intimate themes and ideas he’s been toying with for over a decade.

Like both his previous films, about Polish characters revisiting recent history, Fatherland is a tale of a family whose return “home” to a divided Germany is distinctly alien—a sensation that in turn defines their relationships to one another. And like Cold War, it’s equally about the compromise between artistry as soulful expression and political propaganda, something Thomas is faced with as a mere fact of his existence in this new and unfamiliar world. Pawlikowski himself has long had to reckon with encroaching far-right sentiments across Europe, and given his own past as a Polish Cold War exile—who settled for a time in West Germany, no less—his own perspective feels defined by having grown up ping-ponging between disparate allegiances. (That’s sure to do a number on one’s sense of self.)

However, that Fatherland can be so intricately mapped onto its creator’s personal life isn’t a virtue in and of itself, even though it might unlock some of its meaning. The film’s emotional potency—while delayed by design, as Zischler peels back Thomas’s layers with Erika’s help—is defined by its aesthetic approach, which sees Pawlikowski and ace cinematographer Łukasz Żal crafting confined yet eye-catching 4:3 frames that constantly isolate the Manns from the people and ideas around them. Only a handful of uneasy allies are allowed to fully enter their orbit.

Holding on to one’s convictions can be a lonely road, especially when balancing self-preservation. This path is made all the more winding by unspoken blockades between generations, but these quiet ruptures are no mere metaphor for the wider world. Rather, they’re a central facet of political life, serving as bridges between distinct eras and political epochs. 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.

More in Film Festivals

• Michael Gallagher’s ‘The Leader’

• Lukas Dhont’s ‘Coward’

• Marine Atlan’s ‘La Gradiva’

• Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Bitter Christmas’

• Cristian Mungiu’s ‘Fjord’

• Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’

There’s an immense confidence to Rachel Rose’s understated drama The Last Day, the kind of deftness often born of cross-disciplinary artistry. The movie marks her feature debut, but it shares its title with one of Rose’s many video installations—specifically, one that captures Earth’s epochs through photographs of objects around her daughter’s bedroom. On the surface, this exhibit shares little with its feature-length namesake, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, and loosely adapts the structure of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. However, Rose’s assuredness, in unraveling a tale of two suburban mothers who feel dislodged from themselves, ends up—like much of her museum work—a powerful rumination on modernity.

An impressionistic prelude lures us from a forest to civilization, as gentle sunrays kiss the fur of a beautiful fawn who, once it stumbles upon a stark, cold roadside, finds its mother’s corpse. The rotting deer carcass foregrounds a pristine home in Westchester, New York, where author Julia (Alicia Vikander) plans a Fourth of July party while wrangling her pre-teen daughter Eve (Eva Jade Hatford) for a scheduled playdate.

Before we learn much about Julia—who we also see attending a support group, given her father’s recent passing—Rose’s images establish an unforgiving connection between death and stifling modernity. Through warped reflections of her characters in glass and metal surfaces, the filmmaker extracts the jarring internal moods they seek to bury around other people.

A chance encounter at a coffee shop sees Julia picking up the lost wallet of a young nurse, Taylor (Victoria Pedretti), but the former’s busy day delays her trip to return it. In the meantime, Rose also focuses on Taylor’s life as a mother of three, whose youngest—a newborn—has left her in a state of repressed chaos and prescribed medication. Although the two women seldom interact on screen, Taylor’s postpartum depression (PPD) feels like a reflection of Julia’s own frustrations with motherhood (which have in turn left her unable to write), as though the two women were fated to meet. However, there’s no grand plan in place for them to help each other—the film, as its title suggests, has a nihilistic streak—and yet, the possibility of their encounter results in potent thematic cross-pollination.

They are, in essence, sides to a coin, in the manner in which their affluent lifestyles and vapid surroundings contribute to their respective malaise. Julia’s husband is frequently away, leaving her to clear out her late father’s belongings in Manhattan mostly by herself, while her adolescent daughter is none the wiser about her mother’s mood, allowing Vikander to build unspoken resentment. Taylor, meanwhile, lives in a perfect portrait of domestic contentment as seen from afar—the house, the car, a kind husband, three kids—but she’s always seconds away from unraveling, affording Pedretti the kind of ferocious unpredictability for which she’s known.

In The Last Day, volatility bubbles just beneath the surface of polite conversations, which each supporting actor carries out with affable naturalism. The only exception to this stuffy etiquette is an ex that Julia runs into in the city, Peter (Wagner Moura in a brief but memorable role), with whom she catches up before old wounds start to open, sending her running once more.

There’s little catharsis to be found throughout the film, whose story Rose positions as one of silent, festering feelings which, at best, give way to fleeting moments of clarity (even if that). It’s a mood piece first and foremost, one whose plotless meandering feels tonally focused, thanks in part to the measured cinematography of Eric Yue, who departs from his overt formal flourishes (in films like I Saw the TV Glow and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma) and ensures that each plain, reflective surface around Rose’s characters both illuminates them while verging on blinding them. The world around Julia and Taylor is just too much for them, and they seldom have an escape route.

The story takes expectedly morose turns, in keeping with both Mrs. Dalloway and its filmmaker’s own battle with PPD. However, that the movie mines such macabre territory, with such dramatic precision, also makes it artistically purifying, as though Rose were purging herself of the very anguish she portrays. In mining her most intimate anxieties, as a mother and a creator, she arrives with one of the year’s most striking debuts, which builds quietly but assertively to an archly edited climax of poignant reflection. There will be few films as emotionally affecting this year.

More in Film Festivals

• Michael Gallagher’s ‘The Leader’

• Lukas Dhont’s ‘Coward’

• Marine Atlan’s ‘La Gradiva’

• Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Bitter Christmas’

• Cristian Mungiu’s ‘Fjord’

• Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’

The Leader, Michael Gallagher’s tale of the Heaven’s Gate UFO cult, is too erratic to be absorbing. The true-to-life drama traces the decades-long buildup to the group’s 1997 mass suicide, which the story employs as its opening framing device. However, its haphazard assembly renders this narrative structure a hindrance to real investment, as the movie seldom grows beyond rote observation, despite trying to humanize its subjects.

The film is led by a more-than-capable cast, but they often find themselves restricted by Gallagher’s filmmaking—a product of rigid composition and unstable focus. Tim Blake Nelson plays “Do,” a.k.a. Marshall Applewhite, the group’s founder, whose instructional home videos in his old age are eerie in isolation, but are inserted into the proceedings almost at random, robbing the film of all momentum. This temporal hopscotch is also applied to co-founder “Ti,” or Bonnie Nettles, a matriarch whom actress Vera Farmiga imbues with an icy chill, but whose lone audio interview is similarly scattered throughout the runtime.

The movie feels, in alternating moments, like it was either cobbled together from too little footage or shaved down from far too much, as though it ought to be either a punchy short film or a more detailed miniseries. It’s especially hard to shake the specter of the latter each time it resets and introduces a brand-new protagonist—a different, vulnerable follower—albeit for short periods. These characters (Warren, Michelle and David) are played by Jim Parsons, Grace Caroline Currey and Simon Rex, who are all undoubtedly committed to their roles as lost souls in search of meaning. But every time the movie switches focus to one of them, each of their characters’ stories seems to play out on fast forward—or at least, far more quickly than the one preceding it, as though this three-decade saga were somehow running out of time.

Although Gallagher grew up mere miles from the site of the tragedy, his persistent curiosity about the case seldom translates to curious artistry. He presents his cult leaders and followers as characters trapped in amber, each frozen by defining characteristics that offer little dramatic possibility. An entire universe exists between the goalposts of doubt and pure fanaticism, but aside from the occasional switch between extremes, the film’s emotional needle remains still, resulting in some painfully awkward moments where the tragedy is subsumed by farce. Sometimes its comedy is intentional (other times, who’s to say), but either way, it comes at the cost of real investment in the characters’ pain.

The Leader is, on its surface, a film about closetedness and repression, between the cult’s ascetic teachings and Applewhite’s apparent queerness, which he rejects, alongside all other forms of sexuality, while unintentionally repurposing traditional family structures and forms of abuse. Along the way, Parsons’s Warren becomes the only character to receive adequate tonal care, as a figure of both mockery and pathos, though this is perhaps owed to the Big Bang Theory actor’s precision at layering empathy with caricatured debasement.

As the group awaits their alleged ascension to outer space—you’d be surprised how little attention is afforded the psychological impact of their Christ-meets-sci-fi beliefs—dramatic scenes appear to be cut short for the sake of a purely utilitarian unfurling. It’s a bizarrely facts-first movie for one that seems to want to get close to its damaged subjects. But in most cases, the edit seldom holds on their closeups long enough to capture what they’re thinking or feeling before tumbling toward the next scene. Consecutive moments can be separated by years or decades, but there’s rarely any resonance between them, or any apparent rhyme or reason for this non-linear telling. Whatever the considerations, the result is shockingly dull, for a tale of people so impassioned that they were willing to kill themselves based on misguided beliefs about the world and about themselves.

What is perhaps most telling about The Leader is that its concluding couple of minutes do, in fact, feature thoughtful artistry steeped in abstraction. And while the rest of the movie needn’t follow this mode (as a biopic, it can be as literal or expressionist as required), its genuinely alluring climax proves that getting inside its characters’ heads, or within their moods, was always a possibility. Unfortunately, by the time this actually happens, it’s too little and too late.

While you might leave The Leader knowing more facts about Heaven’s Gate, by the time the credits roll, you’ll end up with little emotional or even speculative insight into who they were, or why they were, and the despair that led them down this path. It’s a tragedy of facts and details first, rather than one of catharsis or gaping wounds. It’s all bullet points and no sinew, yielding an experience where no amount of expressive performances can come to the rescue.

More in Film Festivals

• Lukas Dhont’s ‘Coward’

• Marine Atlan’s ‘La Gradiva’

• Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Bitter Christmas’

• Cristian Mungiu’s ‘Fjord’

• Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’

The trenches of World War I set the stage for queer yearning in Lukas Dhont’s Coward, the Cannes competition entry that—despite its numerous pitfalls—won both its lead actors the Prix d’interprétation masculine, or the award for Best Actor. The trophy was well-deserved, not only despite Dhont’s malformed drama, but perhaps even because of it, forcing standout stars Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne to conjure depth and subtext from the ether; movie magic comes in many forms.

Macchia plays Belgian youth Pierre, a caricatured farmboy lunk whose broad sketching is made immediately effective by the actor’s touching naïveté. Practically lost on the front lines, the character’s forced grins are betrayed by his darting eyes, which always seem to be searching for something—either a way out of his country’s cruel wartime predicament, or some way to formulate the right questions about himself in the first place, and his position in a hypermasculine, militaristic hierarchy.

Pierre first lays eyes on the slender, boisterous Francis (Campagne) when the latter—his belly stuffed to appear pregnant—is playfully rushed to the men’s makeshift mess hall in order to pantomime giving birth, while spread eagle across the lunch table. A scene rife with boyish energy, it’s part prank, part celebration, since one of their comrades has just become a father. However, Dhont’s camera can’t help but frequently fall on Pierre’s inquisitive disposition. The ex-farmhand seems to love the façade and bawdy camp (not to mention, Francis’s unfettered confidence in performing femininity), though he’s a far cry from introspecting as to why.

This sets the stage for Pierre being lured away from the mud, the guns, the blood and bombs, and towards Francis’s unit: a group of young men charged with entertaining their conscripted countrymen across the European front to boost their morale. In scenes of wartime chaos, Dhont and cinematographer Frank van den Eeden craft a lurid intensity in the dead of night, a palpable danger from an unseen enemy, matched only by what becomes of young soldiers too scared or damaged to carry out their orders. They’re labelled deserters and executed by their own superiors, further solidifying the walls placed around Pierre should he even think about leaving.

As a straightforward war movie, Coward mostly works. To match the bombast of the battlefield, it summons a raucous energy whenever Francis’s cavalcade of male step-dancers dons dresses to rally the other troops. It’s a film of tremendously thoughtful setups, taking aim at the subtle hypocrisies of masculine prisons while threatening to expose their inherent homosocial allure. However, as a film about two men’s gradual romance, it is often left wanting for a real soul, and a tangible sense of connection between its characters.

In their isolated moments behind closed doors, Pierre and Francis rarely transcend their roles as individual characters. There’s little sense of actual dynamic between them (not to mention, a discernible lack of spark), owed in large part to Dhont’s reliance on dialogue and its rote presentation. In a moment of intimate choreography, Campagne lays his triangular face perfectly within Macchia’s concave sternum, as though Pierre’s heart had been waiting for someone like Francis, but this potentially beautiful moment is made odd and awkward by the fact that the two young actors must work overtime just to make it seem like their characters even like each other.

As the film goes on, Pierre’s questioning of his own identity, as a militaristic pawn, ends up at odds with Francis’s genuine dedication to the cause, as an entertainer who aims to stir up patriotic sentiment. Separately, these make for intriguing stories, but little tension stems from the young lovers ending up practically on opposite sides of war as a concept (to say nothing of the film’s lacking critical approach to the historical intersection of queerness and militarism, which fellow Cannes competition entry La Bola Negra captures far more soulfully). Despite all but establishing an internal tension between entertainment and propaganda, the movie’s political dimensions are surprisingly dulled, a flaw that goes hand-in-hand with its lead characters seldom having to fight against (or even really consider) the larger implications of anything but their own fantasy, though they’re always at risk.

Even when reality comes crashing down on its protagonists, Coward plays less like a film of thorny closeted-ness (or of re-locating queer identity within a broader, tumultuous history), and more like a prescriptive contemporary document of queer wartime cosplay, especially as the battlefield fades from the movie’s purview. All the while, however, Macchia and Campagne remain eminently watchable, capturing fleeting moments of unpredictable thought and action from behind Pierre and Francis’s respective emotional walls—which Dhont, unfortunately, never has them scale. Even at two hours in length, it’s left wanting for real substance.

More in Film Festivals

• Marine Atlan’s ‘La Gradiva’

• Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Bitter Christmas’

• Cristian Mungiu’s ‘Fjord’

• Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’

• Boots Riley’s ‘I Love Boosters’

• Alain Gomis’s ‘Dao’

Coming-of-age clashes with oblivion in La Gradiva, a story of French highschoolers visiting the ruins of Pompeii. The Cannes Critics’ Week selection (and Grand Prix winner) marks the feature debut of director/co-writer Marine Atlan, who crafts an enormously affecting tale of volatile youths—played by incredible non-professionals—and their most thorny self-discoveries.

The film is one of homespun naturalism, but Atlan also exhibits immense formal control. The sun streams gently through train compartment windows in an early scene, as young hotshot James (Mitia Capellier-Audat) has sex with Angela (Hadya Fofana), a girl in his class. This hormonally-charged introduction is one of the few moments La Gradiva affords its characters such an up-close intimacy. Before long, it pulls back to reveal the young lovers are being watched by curious onlooker Toni (Colas Quignard), their outwardly masculine queer classmate, who ends up taken with James, but whose dynamic with him grows more curious and complex during their academic pilgrimage. Atlan’s camera, for the most part, mirrors Toni’s feelings of remove by embodying an observational, fly-on-the-wall approach to capturing soulful teenage abandon.

The Italian summer sun obscures and reveals in equal measure, creating lensed hazes at dawn and dusk, while illuminating youthful, intellectual debates during daytime. The same sunrays also light the old family photographs Toni clings to, of his mysterious grandmother in her youth, when she lived in Naples—snapshots in time, not unlike the long-preserved Pompeii. For Toni, a young man cut off from his own lineage, this excursion also presents the chance to learn more about his lost history, and about which details of his tall family tales he often gets wrong.

The movie’s sprawling ensemble is completed by fellow loner Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), a reserved and bookish girl whose forceful opinions build before exploding, and by the children’s high-strung teacher Madame Mercier (Antonia Buresi, the only veteran actor in the bunch). Rare are the teenage films that meaningfully contrast youthful possibility with dispirited middle age, but Mercier, as the teens’ pessimistic shepherd, finds herself (more often than not) in a position to reflect on her own life’s trajectory while her students await the results of college applications.

On the precipice of adulthood, the movie’s young protagonists are faced with the prospect of mortality for the very first time, as they slowly learn about the volcanic materials (or “gradiva”) and sudden eruptions that encased the ancient victims of Vesuvius. This sense of life lived, but abruptly cut short, makes for a haunting mirror to the teens’ own lives, as Angela faces the reality of being used by James, Suzanne finds uncanny refuge in Toni (a fellow outsider), and their respective emotional explosions begin to mirror volcanic eruptions—especially in the way Atlan traces the fusing of volatile emotional elements. These are teenagers in love, who hate and adore their peers in equal measure (as much as they hate and adore themselves), and whose respective understandings of the world, of art, of politics and of history come into frequent collision.

What is or isn’t, what may or may not constitute a historical offense or modern social faux pas, feels in constant flux, threatening to turn even the most mundane interactions into unpredictable skirmishes. And so, Toni walks on eggshells. This mood especially extends to his dynamic with Mercier, who believes him to have given up on his academic prospects. However, the otherwise conscientious teacher is only so attuned to his sprawling inner life—a world to which we, the audience, have a front-row seat. So when she holds the pages of his hastily-written personal assignment with her fingertips, as though disgusted by it, the impact on his psyche feels monumental.

Like the casts of long-dead Pompeians, Toni is a young man encased in plaster, usually of his own making. However, even the movie’s most expressive teens come across at a similar distance. Atlan and her co-cinematographer Pierre Mazoyer employ long, voyeuristic lenses to make even the audience feel like they’re peering in from the outside, which has the double-edged effect of making each viewer feel like an outcast to a clique, while also creating, around the camera’s subjects, an invisible, self-imposed armor.

That Toni is queer certainly plays into this emotional dynamic. But La Gradiva also treads in a more modern form of queerness, where it’s socially matter-of-fact, but its contours no less strongly shape how characters relate to each other, and themselves. For instance, the question of James’s own sexuality is a mystery the movie doesn’t feel the need to broach, beyond the fact that he might be toying with both Toni and Angela’s emotions, intentionally or otherwise. From the perspective of any nostalgic adult viewer: he’s just a dumb teenager. However, the sense of immediacy and occasion created by Atlan’s camera (and Guillaume Lillo’s free-flowing, conversational editing) imbues each word and action with monumental importance.

This is, for better or worse, the most important trip of these characters’ young lives thus far. So, its most joyous, most melancholy scenes come super-charged with the energy of youthful optimism and adolescent fear, leading to surprisingly heavy outcomes once La Gradiva is all said and done. Atlan may be a mere observer to this drama, but her aesthetic approach is so fine-tuned, so invisible and organic, that the room between the subjects and the camera becomes filled with an unpredictable texture. The image, like the plaster people of Pompeii, becomes a temporal bridge, affording viewers the ability to traverse space and time, until we’re seated alongside these characters, and reminiscing on the most emotionally enormous moments from our own formative years, and the materials that made us.

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• Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Bitter Christmas’

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• Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’

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• Alain Gomis’s ‘Dao’

Some flowers bloom in darkness. As soon as La Bola Negra (or The Black Ball) begins, the screen’s rounded edges frame old postcard photos from the Spanish Civil War. A snappy montage, in stark black-and-white, features attractive young soldiers and sailors, whose uniforms have been painted over in bright pink—a tongue-in-cheek gesture somewhere between imposing and revealing a queerness tucked away and forgotten. This is how the film approaches its broad historical fiction, but its core imposition isn’t one of projecting queerness where it didn’t exist. Rather, it re-imagines (audaciously, and to completion) lost artworks and real stories left in ellipses. If anything, the movie’s view of queer history is that of a force deeply and inextricably entwined with the world, rather than at odds with it. The result is a magnificently moving triptych that feels at once novel and like a classically staged military epic.

Split between three distinct timelines, whose connections grow gradually clearer, the film from directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo—who are collectively known as Los Javis, and were awarded Best Director at Cannes tied with Fatherland‘s Paweł Pawlikowski—conjures gay Spanish history by extracting it from whispers and lost writings. It turns these into painful poetry scrawled across a vast cinematic canvas. One story begins in 1937, with a naively Mussolini-aligned village being bombed by air, by the very Nationalists they’d hoped to welcome. This vicious prologue sees one of the massacre’s only survivors—a skinny, sensitive man named Sebastián (musician Guitarricadelafuente in his first film role)—joining up with this fascistic group out of self-preservation, despite them having killed his mother.

Elsewhere, in 1932 Granada, a father-son story of hidden identities and class divides unfolds in more operatic hues. A suave youth named Carlos (Milo Quifes) attempts to join the ranks of a fancy casino and social club, only for its senior membership to deny him—they vote him down by way of picking black balls; the origin of the term “blackballing”—owing to rumors that he’s a homosexual. And finally, nearly a century later in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González), a curvaceous Spanish historian in Athens, casually scrolls Grindr for a hookup while trying to decide on a thesis subject for his PhD. This ends up being a family drama too, as Alberto learns of a secret lineage via an inheritance from a grandfather he never knew, though it’s told in a more restrained and realistic mode than both prior stories.

Slowly, and then with forceful abandon, these parallel tales cross-pollinate through aesthetic echoes, their sounds and images pouring into one another at every temporal jump, despite their disparate styles. While the movie’s modern tale is of a gay man out in the open, searching prosaically for purpose, its Civil War story is one of closeted self-discovery—the country bumpkin Sebastián has barely been exposed to queer ideas—while its casino saga circles the question of whether Carlos will stand his ground, or lie for the sake of acceptance, no matter how it damages him.

Eagle-eyed viewers (and those familiar with gay Spanish poetry) will recognize the latter as a filmed version of the incomplete stageplay from which the movie gets its name, written by Federico García Lorca. The playwright himself is a looming, invisible presence through most of the film, existing as a spiritual observer just beyond the frame (he had been killed by 1936). However, Los Javis’ historical fiction realizes the themes of concealed desire in which Lorca often dealt, even though his eponymous play would have been his first with an explicitly queer protagonist, had it been completed.

This sense of loss, and of history subdued, equally informs Sebastián’s narrative, wherein he’s tasked with watching over a prisoner of war from the rival Spanish Republican faction, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), a handsome gay rebel drawn from history, and with a real connection to Lorca. It isn’t long before Sebastián is taken with Rafael, in ways he doesn’t yet understand. However, these themes of repression play out initially at odds with Alberto’s more languid contemporary saga. Its focus is an openly gay man slowly connecting with both his personal and political history, and in the process, contextualizing the film’s early 20th-century stories, as a continuum oft-ignored.

The movie’s three, tonally distinct threads are bound by a sense of occasion and momentum that centers gay history—not only as a series of factoids, but as distinct emotional undercurrents, which Los Javis compel their viewers to intuit from the plot. In their purview, gay history is one of innuendo, of anonymity and subterfuge, of desire so white hot it burns a hole right through you, of emotional self-harm, and eventually, of strained family ties. It’s even one of pageantry, as Carlos engages in musical revelry buoyed by dismay. Meanwhile, Sebastián becomes an observer to (and oblique participant in) the minor tale of burlesque performer Nené (Penélope Cruz in a thundering cameo), whose artistic expression is co-opted by state militarism—a subplot approached with a more critical eye than fellow queer Cannes competition entry Coward. However, Nené’s kindness towards Sebastián also begins to expand his understanding of the world. For instance, she’s the first person to alert him to the existence of transgender people and drag performers, of whom she states: “Transvestism is the fantasy of possibility. War is the opposite.”

This notion is key to Los Javis’ forceful unspooling of history, in which queerness is undoubtedly a distinct social and political identity, and yet, one the filmmakers frame as intrinsic to civilization. In a world already torn between oblivion and survival—which manifests as two early 20th-century men wrestling with their places in volatile societies—it slots naturally within the jagged dynamic formed between violence and self-loathing. Were queerness non-existent, a world at war would have to invent it just to quash the threat of tenderness.

For Alberto, the modern and occasionally spoiled man whose story sticks out awkwardly, La Bola Negra threatens to curdle into a finger-wagging lecture about how good modern gay men have it compared to the suffering of their forebears. However, it resists this convenient instinct by having Alberto discover and engage with the movie’s other stories—alongside his own fragile family ties, and his relationship with his estranged mother (Lola Dueñas, performing with anxious naturalism). In the process, even Alberto’s tale becomes one of belonging, as he slowly finds his place not only in modern society, but within the last century of Spanish history, and—with the help of a Lorca historian played by Glenn Close—within a tradition of expressive art and poetry obliterated by shame.

Queer art has always existed in the margins, and while La Bola Negra‘s aesthetic approach runs counter to this notion—it’s as mainstream and digestible in form as the biggest studio classics—this is also one of its most affecting facets. Its purchase by streaming juggernaut Netflix speaks to the naked sentimentality at play and the movie’s broad potential reach, but it also represents life imitating art in fortuitous ways. 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. But like the film’s modern discoveries of the past—which work to contextualize historical tumult—its impending dissemination to mass audiences comes pre-loaded with reminiscence, courtesy of a narrative that urges modern viewers to consider the long and winding road to this relative queer normalcy. That Alberto can live such a mundane life becomes imbued with miraculous qualities.

That Los Javis’ film is not radical in form, but traditional, is made retroactively powerful in the process, owing to its liberated sense of scale—as though the shackles of financial constraint were no longer a factor in cinema of its ilk. Granted, no one movie can change the landscape so quickly, but this is the rare time a queer film has felt like insider art, without the need for compromise. By the time it dares to re-imagine the lost pages of Lorca’s play, it all but becomes a conversation with history itself, literalized through powerful personifications of nature, which further snap into place its saga of transformative context, and transformative yearning.

Without giving too much away: a poem appears early in the movie’s sprawling 155-minute runtime, which one of the central characters doesn’t fully understand, until he’s endured the loss and heartache of which its verses speak. La Bola Negra similarly justifies its existence, as exactly such a Rorschach test. Its filmmakers, like its characters, seem to hope that their work won’t be a necessary comfort in decades hence, out of the belief that radical change is not only possible, but is perpetually ongoing. But until such a moment arrives, making films like this one less urgent through permanent progress, Los Javis have created a towering war epic that twins internal and external conflicts on the precipice of global change, in ways that render the soul—making it more open to, and more capable of, bearing witness to its joys and sorrows, and understanding its own strength and fragility.

More in Movie Reviews

• Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Bitter Christmas’

• Cristian Mungiu’s ‘Fjord’

• Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’

• Boots Riley’s ‘I Love Boosters’

• Alain Gomis’s ‘Dao’

If there were ever a film destined to be mistaken for centrist apologia (if not outright conservative propaganda), it’s Romanian director Cristian Mungiu‘s Fjord, the searing social drama that won him his second Palme d’Or. However, its emotional impetus is contradiction, so any conflicted feelings when viewing it through a political prism are not unwarranted. Building on the discomforting courtroom unfurling of RMN—his 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.

It is, on its surface, rather simple. A remote, progressive Norwegian town becomes the new home of a staunchly religious couple from Romania: software developer Mihai Gheorghiu (Sebastian Stan) and his Norwegian nurse wife Lisbet (Renate Reinsve). Their strict, evangelical parentage fuels rumors and triggers an investigation by Child Welfare Services when one of their adolescent children shows up to school with unexplained bruises. However, this clash between citizens and the state isn’t merely one of systemic dynamics, but of the unsolvable dilemmas that emanate from ideological skirmishes. If one were to trace the characters’ arcs and trajectories, in a traditional sense, not much changes over the movie’s 146 minutes. However, Mungiu’s controlled form, and his actors’ carefully restrained performances, turn the movie’s thematic plateau into an inescapable minefield of ethical deadlocks.

While its plot bears passing similarity to the didactic Bollywood drama Mrs. Chatterjee vs Norway—a film based on real events—Fjord‘s fiction is engineered (in the most meticulous, technical sense) to seem much more Socratic. However, from its opening images, in which Stan’s balding, imposing patriarch towers menacingly over his children while showing them affection, it becomes apparent that Mungiu is not only drawing from cultural (and perhaps personal) experience, but is molding a peculiar visage meant to both sow doubt and emotionally exploit it. There’s an inflexibility to how the Gheorghius are written, as though they were antonymic embodiments of everything modern Scandinavian society held dear (from socialist values to a self-proclaimed liberation from religious doctrine). And yet, the detailed humanism with which Mungiu carves even these rigid characters turns Fjord from mere thought experiment into a riveting drama tinged with self-aware humor. It’s hard not to guffaw at even the most intense debate between Norwegian secularism and evangelical faith when the tilted crucifix of Norway’s flag flutters in the wind just outside a character’s window, occupying half the frame. Where you’re going can’t be divorced from where you’ve been, so the Romanian Mihai may as well personify Norway’s own entanglements with Christian extremism.

Stan has, of late, become the actor arguably most at odds with his rise to prominence as a cog in the Marvel machine, between his Berlinale Best Actor-winning role in the satire A Different Man and his Oscar-nominated turn as Donald Trump in The Apprentice. With Fjord, he completes an even more perplexing transformation, as a terrifying father whose stillness embodies the strictness of his beliefs, and whose tough love radiates through the screen in eerie hues, even (and especially) in quiet moments. Reinsve, meanwhile, follows her more radiant roles as a modern woman in search of herself in The Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value (not to mention A Different Man as well) by contrasting a distinctly reserved appearance with the mystery of how exactly she relates to her domineering husband, her five children of various ages, and their culture at large, behind closed doors. We only see what Mungiu wants us to see, as though the film were a court docket, but Mungiu’s lead actors create confidently beguiling dispositions, and in the process, conjure imaginative possibilities sure to instill everything from affection to disdain in the average viewer.

The couple’s older children, Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu), befriend the daughter of their new neighbors, a spry girl named Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), who seems intent on getting them into trouble. Jealousies at school and strange interactions near their respective homes suggest the potential for their friendship to place a wedge between the adolescent siblings and their parents. But before this narrative can come to fruition, observant school staff and the country’s swiftly moving legal system act on circumstantial evidence to take Elia, Emmanuel and their three younger siblings from their parents’ care, on the suspicion of physical abuse.

The Gheorghius’ strict Biblical parenting (in a country of 70 percent non-theists) informs a cultural stereotyping that sits alongside the system’s genuine concerns. However, once these preexisting notions are exposed, Fjord doesn’t seek to dismantle, challenge or reinforce them. They are, instead, a core facet of the movie’s backdrop, existing in a consistent form that imbues the movie’s subsequent court proceedings with completely inevitable predispositions. And yet, this predictability is part and parcel of Mungiu’s approach to constructing a saga where answers, especially easy ones, never present themselves. The drama provides enough hints to ensure you’ll come to quick conclusions about what did or did not transpire, in a strict factual sense. But just as swiftly, the movie widens in thematic scope, in order to broach larger philosophical queries.

It becomes an anxiety-inducing stress test of progressive belief, centering not on the factual “right” or “wrong” of the case, but of egalitarianism itself, and of maintaining democratic liberties when the ones at stake are objectionable, detestable, or even harmful in nature. “My beliefs aren’t on trial,” Mihai states at one point, after having spent much of the movie gladly accepting support from rancid extremists to get his children back. And yet, there’s no avoiding the sense that he’s correct, whether or not his actions and methods ought to be disqualifying.

As the film goes on, one could conjure innumerable principled reasons—as many Norwegian characters do—to see the Gheorghius stripped of their rights as parents, down to the seeming homophobia that trickles down to their young children. However, at the root of democratic belief is an equal application of the law, and measuring these values against their most extreme manifestations is an exercise worth engaging in. The specifics of Fjord, realistic or otherwise, complicate what equality even means, in any nominally progressive society that values wide-ranging multiculturalism. It’s hard not to wonder about (and be bothered by) the open-ended uncertainties Mungiu suggests, about the degree to which personal liberties and beliefs can or should be infringed upon.

Even if there’s a legal or moral correctness to the actions of the state, the very context of the Gheorghius being a minority in Norway—even if their religion fosters fascism elsewhere, like Brazil or the United States—engenders a broad, structural re-orienting of the movie’s drama along David-and-Goliath lines (a comparison even the movie’s more zealous characters make). And in addition to its dimensions of lawfulness and morality, there is also the emotional element, and the human element, portrayed in complex hues by Stan and Reinsve, and enhanced by Mungiu’s roving camera as he seats us alongside them in unbroken takes, as both observers and participants in legal proceedings.

Beyond a point, the frigidity of Mungiu’s signature cool-blue palette is even warmed by Mihai and Lisbet’s multifaceted presence, urging empathy in a direction to which any nominally liberal or leftist viewer might be understandably resistant. For at the core of Fjord isn’t the pursuit of answers, but rather, a confrontation of never-ending questions, about the limits of personal autonomy in a modern civilization that claims itself truly democratic. Even if one believes the state ought to be deputized with these responsibilities—as one very well might after watching Fjord—Mungiu’s lens refracts the self-professed enlightenment of impartiality, to reveal the stalemates inherent to this alleged Utopianism.

Such is the nature of human society. It’s frictional and fractal. Something, some form of hypocrisy or incongruity, is always bound to seep through… but what do you do when you reach that place? What can you do? How do you stay righteous when the greater good involves inevitable harm, no matter where you come down? This is the existential despair in which Mungiu is dealing, and from which the movie’s drama emanates.

Perhaps the nature of belief is that, beyond a point, it’s unshakable, and few minds will be radically changed by even the most controversial court case (let alone a politically loaded Palme recipient). But in the case of Fjord, the film makes it necessary to recognize the cracks in one’s own load-bearing mental, emotional and ethical contours, if only to prevent their eventual breaking.

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• Boots Riley’s ‘I Love Boosters’

• Alain Gomis’s ‘Dao’

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• David Greaves’s ‘Once Upon A Time In Harlem’

The credo of Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters is best summed up by a repeated line of dialogue: “Now is not the time for nuance.” It’s exchanged on several occasions between members of a ragtag fashion heist group, as they try to avoid or deny personal contradictions. They do so, notably, in a film that tries not only to highlight clashing opposites but also to educate its viewers about them through surrealist satire. The movie wears its heart (and its brain) on its bedazzled sleeve, and it ensures you know exactly what its politics are at every turn, usually through news chyrons or characters explaining underlying themes practically down the lens. Riley is perhaps the only overtly Marxist filmmaker working in Hollywood—itself a contradiction, with which he wrestles here—so the anti-nuance of his perspective is commendably audacious, at least in theory. In practice, it’s visually and emotionally incoherent, and seldom entertaining, squandering potent ideas by making them thuddingly obvious and unpleasant.

Riley’s style has a gonzo energy that worked wonders in his 2018 debut, the race-and-class-driven call-center satire Sorry to Bother You, two-thirds of a great film buoyed by purposeful aesthetic and thematic evolutions. He brings that same audiovisual verve to I Love Boosters, which makes for an entertaining intro to his bubblegum, arts-and-crafts world. However, these designs seldom elevate (and are seldom elevated by) his scattershot storytelling. The movie follows small-time con woman Corvette (Keke Palmer), who both admires and steals from fancy fashion designers to make ends meet, with the Robin Hood excuse of making high-end clothes affordable to the average Joe. Corvette’s sisterhood, consisting of amusing but underutilized Black actresses like Naomi Ackie and Taylour Page, are known as the Velvet Gang, and they engage in ludicrous shoplifting schemes that are usually worth a laugh, like when Page’s character Mariah holds her breath to magically appear more light-skinned, and in the process, attracts less suspicion. It’s magical realism by way of maximalist social commentary, as is Riley’s M.O., and it yields the occasional debonair technique, like a moment of fearful realization captured with a gliding double dolly à la Spike Lee and a space-warping Hitchcockian dolly zoom. But these fun little flourishes soon fall by the wayside.

The gang eventually targets one of Corvette’s idols, the blunt, high-strung, micro-aggressive Christie Smith (Demi Moore) by working in one of her exploitative retail outlets. This kicks off a loopy sci-fi heist saga whose oddities work individually on occasion, but the totality of which is a headache. It’s a great-looking film to be sure, assisted by the fact that Smith’s boutiques only stock clothes of one loud shade at a time—as Will Poulter’s pedantic store manager reiterates—allowing the visual palette some variety between scenes. However, the imagination behind Riley’s ideas seldom digs deeper than this ostentatious surface.

Corvette’s financial anxieties are externalized in the form of an enormous ball of bills and eviction notices rolling downhill, following her through initial heist scenes like a boulder chasing Indiana Jones. But this playful conceit exists only to reiterate what’s already been established about her life, before disappearing altogether. Kaleidoscopic cues, like Smith’s penthouse tilting at a severe angle, afford Palmer some wonderfully cartoonish physical comedy. However, ideas like these feel pulled from a hat and dropped into Riley’s creative process without rhyme, reason or resonance in later scenes. You might chuckle in the moment, but in the long run, it’s hard to locate lasting meaning behind the visual language.

Instead, an assemblage of political ideas—surrounding race, housing and policing, all wrapped in a send-up of respectability politics—are presented through secondary and tertiary means, like TV screens blaring the news in broad, easily digestible parody and pamphlets denoting pyramid schemes as a path to financial freedom. That Riley can so effortlessly flesh out this world’s fictitious propaganda makes it all the more disappointing that the tangible details of the world itself are only slightly tilt-shifted from our own (and sometimes, literally tilted), yielding an uninspired mockery of power. “What if a thing you recognize was slightly bigger?” is hardly biting satire, to say nothing of how poorly this lacking visual ambition bodes for a film about fashionistas.

The story eventually widens to include a Chinese character, Jianhu (Poppy Liu), whose own grudge against Smith concerns the treatment of her factory-working family in Qingdao, as the film attempts to connect the dots of capital and labor across the globe. However, its “Workers of the world, unite!” underpinnings are severely kneecapped by its half-baked genre metaphors that are at once too complicated and over-simplified.

Without getting into excess detail: a metaphysical gizmo ends up at the center of Jianhu and the Velvet Gang’s punk rock schemes, but its tongue-in-cheek function rests on characters having to explain what it actually does for much of the runtime, leading to unwieldy, motor-mouthed monologues about dialectical materialism. While this device is designed to grant heady ideas a digestible visual form, the fact that it requires ceaseless exposition is practically the film becoming an accidental metaphor for its own failures to transform the conceptual into the emotional or the visceral. In the process, this gesture towards Das Kapital ends up appealing only to those already immersed in Marxist or Hegelian theory, but not in any meaningful way beyond mere reference or base recognition. It’s the Glup Shitto of communism.

How exactly does this work on screen? Usually, someone explains the theory underlying the aforementioned MacGuffin, and how it either heightens contradictions or deconstructs elements of the mise-en-scène (it may as well be wizardry), but very little of this is inherent to what transpires on screen. It relies largely on dialogue imbuing Riley’s images with clunky meaning—that is, when the camera deigns to actually capture the punchlines. Some of the movie’s chase scenes, although rendered with neat artistry like stop-motion, whiz by so quickly, and with such haphazard editing, that the gags are partially glossed over, if not entirely missed. The whole film feels chopped to pieces. It’s neither polished enough to satisfy the average cineplex patron, nor impressionistic or discombobulated enough to be avant-garde. Instead, it exists in a lukewarm, malformed middle ground, and it feels like it landed there by accident.

At the heart of I Love Boosters is, in fact, a simple but revolutionary idea: that fashion, and creativity at large, belong to the people, who can steal it back from predatory corporations by uniting against them. It’s hard not to read this as a question of cinema itself, and how mainstream visual art in the United States exists at the mercy of the profit motive. But the expression of this idea is far from radical, with symbolic genre musings bogged down by pedestrian outcomes. For example: the film employs its genuinely transformative sci-fi gadget to give already-disgruntled workers some nicely worded picket signs, as though the proletariat were primed for protest, but were being held back only by a lack of organizational conviction. In keeping with the gizmo symbolizing the filmmaking process, perhaps exploited workers just need an I Love Boosters to really get the hint. There’s an unavoidable self-importance to the film that supersedes what could’ve been its actual importance; rather than stirring the soul awake, it lectures it to sleep, and it doesn’t do a particularly polished or compelling job of this either.

Ironically, Corvette’s story is elucidated through the strict confines of capitalist cinema, wherein the primary emotional concerns are tethered to an individual protagonist and a by-the-numbers arc that feels entirely obligatory. Underscoring her character is the notion that she’s lonely, something we’re told several times by her comically mysterious love interest (played with ferocious commitment by LaKeith Stanfield, whose presence sends visible ripples through the fabric of the screen). The antidote to Corvette’s isolation, we’re told, and told, and told, is connecting to other people, something she eventually does through organized rebellion. It’s a nice thought, but it would’ve been nicer had it been shown, and dramatized, rather than being repeatedly mentioned.

One could argue that the singular protagonist, with their individual goals, has endured because it’s a more interesting mode of big-screen storytelling (or, you know, an easier one to sell in individualistic societies), but filmmakers in the Marxist tradition, like Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Jean-Luc Godard—the latter of whose name Riley practically invokes on screen—were responsible for creating new forms of montage wherein ideas were captured through suggestion, abstraction, motion and rhythm, or even cinematic arrhythmia. If they went against the grain, it was to open new pathways to understanding what movies could do or could be—and therefore, how we could relate to them and to the world around us.

By (perhaps unfair) comparison, I Love Boosters features some of the most banal unspooling imaginable for a film buoyed by such spicy buzzwords as “heist,” “high fashion” and “class consciousness.” Its only trailblazing element is the zany, eruptive score by music project Tune Yards, which creates momentum at times, and emphasizes some of the hard cuts to comedic images (the Velvet Gang shuffling out of a clothing store wearing dozens of stolen layers is a raucous delight). But 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?

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Weddings and funerals are perhaps the rituals that most bind cultures across space and time. This affords Dao—the sixth feature by French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis—an enrapturing universality born of detailed specificity, as it presents a funeral commemoration in West Africa alongside a wedding in France a year later. The film places unrelenting emphasis on the meaning behind traditions and their subsequent evolution when people move away and return. And yet, this sharp focus on migration is expressed through liberating artistry, which engenders an alluring familiarity that makes the three-hour runtime feel like a breeze.

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. It begins with Gomis offering a documentary peek into his casting—or at least, a peek he frames in documentary form—before dramatizing the more intimate parts of his life. The script was inspired by a funeral ceremony for Gomis’ father in the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. The writer-director welcomes us into this personal tale through the lens of his professional identity to highlight how the filmic and the cultural, and the individual and the social, inextricably overlap.

It’s here, in this pseudo-documentary introduction, that we meet several of the movie’s actors as they first audition and screen test together. These include the nonprofessional Katy Corréa, the film’s eventual lead, who seems reluctant to participate but whose input Gomis actively seeks. In fact, he asks most of his actresses—many of them first- or second-generation Africans in France—what types of roles they fantasize about playing. Some suggest doctors. Others conjure complicated, villainous vixens. The implicit suggestion is that this exercise is about the kinds of complex parts, or even real-world professions, they are often denied.

Before long, Gomis introduces his bifurcated plot, in which Corréa’s character, the middle-aged immigrant Gloria, returns to her small Guinean village a year after her father’s funeral for a commemoration ceremony. It is also the first time in many years that her French-born daughter Nour (D’Johé Kouadio, also glimpsed in the movie’s opening) has visited the dusty rural locale, making it a long-overdue opportunity to connect with her roots. However, she no longer speaks any of the local languages, such as Wolof and Manjak, if she ever learned them in the first place, leaving her mother to act as interpreter and cultural guide as she meets various aunts, uncles and distant relations.

The two women are greeted with a mix of beaming pride and subtle disdain by the poverty-stricken village, highlighting the ever-complicated dynamics of postcolonial emigration and its unavoidable class dimensions. It is here, while introducing Nour to her relatives—who inevitably comment on how much she has grown—that Gloria also mentions her daughter’s pending nuptials the following year. This quickly propels us forward in time to the wedding and its lush countryside retreat, as the plot reveals itself to be largely a cinéma vérité depiction of each series of events as they might naturally unfold.

Cutting unobtrusively back and forth between the wedding and the days-long memorial, Gomis implicitly binds together the two halves of Nour and Gloria’s lived experiences through extended scenes of family gatherings and song and dance. He films these parallel narratives with the same warmth he brought to his musically tinged Congolese family drama Félicité, which in 2017 won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale. Although Dao left this year’s festival empty-handed—a major surprise—it remains a significant contribution to contemporary African cinema.

There is no dearth of conversations in the village about the lingering effects of colonial rule, and no shortage of awkward interactions either, such as an estranged cousin arriving at Nour’s reception with a surprise pregnant girlfriend. This leads to numerous stilted exchanges and eventually a hilarious scuffle. Gomis orchestrates it all with such free-flowing verve that it feels neither academic nor overly chaotic, but entirely naturalistic, as though he had simply dropped in on a real family and begun filming.

Gomis builds each extended scene with immense care, both for the moments themselves and for the way they adhere to the larger back-and-forth structure. The result is often euphoric. The aforementioned fisticuffs, despite their sloppiness, become the subject of some of the most rousing filmmaking you are likely to see all year, set against a jazzy soundtrack whose rhythms mirror the movie’s improvised nature. Back in the motherland, the instrumentation takes on more culturally specific tones, but the fundamentals always cross-pollinate: rhythm and percussion, joy and uncertainty.

However, the biggest difference between the movie’s two halves is perhaps the level of rootedness in each ritual. The village commemorations are centuries old, and Nour learns their meaning for the first time as each tradition unfolds. In contrast, her wedding is a patchwork of cultures, both French and West African, with popular English-language tunes and even made-up a cappella songs included for good measure. As much as Dao is a film about death, it is also, as its title suggests, a film of cultural rebirth and of finding oneself in moments of uncertainty—not just individually, but collectively—and of conjuring tangible things and ethereal ideas to pass down.

And yet, despite the movie highlighting the distinction between native and diaspora cultures, the very roots of tradition loop back around by its end in lucid fashion. Gomis never equivocates and avoids didacticism through a robust presentation of the village’s folkloric beliefs, which, when it comes to memorializing the dead, center on finding certainty through spiritual communion to better understand how the deceased died and what they leave behind. Regardless of where Gomis places his camera—in the place he is from or where he is headed—he finds people at their most vulnerable, reconnecting with old friends and lovers and preserving or creating rituals to confront the uncertainty of existence itself.

Through all this, Gomis’s filmmaking embodies the very concept of Dao—perpetual spiritual motion that binds people together despite historical tumult. The result is a work of documentary simplicity imbued with a sense of occasion. When it begins, you may only have a faint sense of who is who. But three hours later, it’s as though you have spent a lifetime with these families that now feel like your own.

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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. The stark monochrome drama follows a 17th-century woman in the guise of a man—such is the nomenclature used by the characters and the gentle narrator (Marisa Growaldt)—but its underlying emotional mechanics are distinctly queer. This brings to the fore the question of who and what the movie is really about, but that vital dilemma is nestled within the larger, more pressing, impeccably performed story of a person whose precarious freedom rests on a knife’s edge, resulting in Sandra Hüller being awarded the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for Best Lead Performance—her second time winning the trophy since Requiem in 2006.

Somewhere in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War, a facially scarred soldier, referred to in voiceover only as Rose (Hüller), inherits farmland by impersonating a fallen comrade and establishes a homestead—a luxury only afforded to men. The narration sets the story’s parameters: that of a woman pretending to be a man as she tries to live free from the confines of structural misogyny. History is filled with women donning trousers to escape patriarchal norms, but also with likely transgender men who may have been conferred this designation in times and places where no such language for trans-ness existed. But whichever way a modern audience might interpret this story, its telling aligns—often intentionally—with that of the conservative Protestant villagers from whom Rose must hide the nature of her identity.

This isn’t so difficult at first since she lives alone, surrounded only by servants and farmhands with separate quarters, though out of caution, she still sleeps in a horizontal cupboard. However, it isn’t long before a neighboring farmer offers her his daughter’s hand, a proposal which Rose cannot convincingly refuse. Once the bride arrives—the young, homesick Suzanna (Caro Braun)—her daily routine becomes a captivating tightrope of deception.

Of course, injecting themes of duplicity into a narrative ostensibly of trans identity, even in its subtext, comes with contemporary concerns, given the harmful stereotypes of trans people trying to fool potential suitors or force their way into bathrooms under false pretenses, often resulting in real violence against them. While the filmmakers may not think of Rose as a transgender story, it speaks the language of one, and Hüller seems to have approached it with a grey area in mind (in an interview at the Berlinale, the actress mentioned taking inspiration from Albert Nobbs, the 2011 drama in which Glenn Close’s eponymous character walks a similar line). But even when Rose is viewed on its own terms—a lens it eventually justifies through some intriguing, contradictory dialogue about the character’s past—the film’s discomforts regarding modern queer issues become a key part of its text. For one thing, Rose keeping her supposed façade a secret is a matter of basic survival rather than deceit. For another, when minor characters begin to have their suspicions, their intense focus on her genitalia as proof positive of her lived truth can’t help but reflect the hateful pushback to modern trans liberation.

However, even if one were to adopt the simplest, or least controversial, version of the story, i.e., the saga of a woman pretending to be a male soldier, this would still afford Hüller the full spectrum of meaningful dramatic performance. There’s a broadness at first to Rose’s careful, stilted gesticulations, not to mention her short temper and verbose arguments, which might initially read to modern viewers as the overt performance of gender. However, hidden within this specter of social masculinity is an alluring authenticity. The more time we spend observing Rose, the harder it becomes to interpret her broad-shouldered rigidity, matched by cinematographer Gerald Kerkletz’s careful compositions, as anything but a product of deep-seated fear rather than trickery.

Hüller, from beneath her calculated gait and facial prosthetics, reveals Rose’s idiosyncrasies and anxieties, such as repeatedly chewing on the flattened bullet that scarred her cheek, which she keeps close by, tied around her neck. Death and pain are never far from her mind or from her body. The way she bristles at suggestions she doesn’t like or that endanger her secrets, or how she loses her cool with Suzanna even behind closed doors, can be traced to her dire need for self-preservation. It’s a magnificent performance—not for its pretense but for its raw emotional honesty. Though let it not go unsaid: Braun’s work as Suzanna, an initially restrained woman who slowly emerges from her shell, is just as captivating and offers Rose the complicated chance at something resembling honest companionship and thus true freedom, in whatever way it can exist for her.

The looming questions of trans-ness are answered and refuted by the text in equal measure, though the manner of each instance is key to how the film can be read. Rose does, in one moment, state that she had no intention of actually being a man, but the specifics of who she confesses this to, and why, make her an unreliable narrator (once again, it all comes back to her guiding survival instinct). The only other time the question is explicitly broached comes from the story’s narrator, who hints that Rose began experimenting with male dress from an early age. Who, here, is to be believed, and what are the underlying implications of this assertion in both a modern and historical context? Well, that’s a question worth confronting, but the movie makes determining this with any certainty difficult. Even the narrator’s view of this story feels incomplete, since she doesn’t ever mention the male name Rose gives to other people—something that may, the movie eventually suggests, have been lost to the pages of history alongside Rose’s firsthand accounts.

Whether Rose is a trans man trying to live authentically or a woman cross-dressing to escape oppression, the implied and explicit brutality upon being found out—and being seen as a woman trying to establish her place in the world—remains no less troubling by the time the credits roll. This is what ultimately makes Rose so engrossing and what helps situate Hüller’s performance within the overarching drama. While there’s only so much we can know about the character, given the distance at which she’s presented—usually, we can discern this only from what she says to other people and what’s said about her—the care and intimacy with which Schleinzer presents Rose make her uniquely compelling. She’s a protagonist whose desires are fundamentally at odds with the basic tenets of traditional cinema. She wants only to embody the mundane and the unremarkable, but the action around her repeatedly forces her into positions of bravery and principled stands.

In its mere 93 minutes, Rose creates an entire world that skirts along the edges of historicity, demanding that it be read in the vein of a dusty historical record on which we’re likely to project our modern understanding of social norms and perhaps even wrestle against them, to say nothing of trans viewers who might identify with the story. Whatever form the hero takes, the villains—whose violent bigotry comes dressed in the robes of religious conservatism—remain a terrifying historical echo. The result, in the end, is an enthralling drama that’ll rile you up for the right reasons if you let it.

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William Greaves, the late documentary filmmaker who died in 2014, drew from a multitude of inspirations in his day, from boxer Muhammad Ali in sports chronicle The Fighter (1974) to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in the experimental meta-movie Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968). However, perhaps his most vital work was one he never quite decided how to finish, despite filming it in 1972. Now, after more than 50 years, his son David Greaves brings his father’s greatest feat to stunning completion: the afternoon he spent capturing a gathering of over a dozen luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance at the home of jazz pianist Duke Ellington.

After introducing its posthumous concept (using letters and voice recordings from the late maestro himself), Once Upon A Time In Harlem moves quickly from the historic New York neighborhood into Ellington’s townhouse, where Greaves’s bright lights and 16mm cameras welcome various guests of honor. It’s a murderer’s row of legendary figures: painters like Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden, Richard Bruce Nugent and Ernest Crichlow; musicians like Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle; theatricians like Leigh Whipper and Regina Andrews; the photographer James Van Der Zee; Ida Mae Cullen, the widow of poet Countee Cullen; and so on.

Each of them is introduced with a text slug line that quickly disappears. There are so many pioneers present that it’s hard to keep track as they pour into the party, but thankfully, their names and titles reappear on screen nearly every time they speak. They are described, notably, not only by their chosen professions but by their roles in Black activism over the decades—for instance, the scholar and civil rights leader Richard B. Moore. Their work laid the foundation for the Harlem Renaissance (in the 1920s and 1930s, though some argue it began earlier), and it belongs to a historical moment in which visible, boundary-pushing African American artistry went practically hand in hand with political action.

Soon, the free-flowing assembly settles into a living room gathering, libations firmly in hand (and after a while, less firmly), marked by whip-smart debates over the group’s contemporaries and its departed elder statesmen (among them, diametrically opposed thought leaders like Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois). Through individual sit-down interviews, which function as regal portraits, Greaves allows each distinguished forerunner their own time and space before cutting back to the group discussions. In many cases, with the help of editors Lynn True and Anne de Mare, David Greaves presents both these forms of documentation—the individual and the collective—side-by-side, not unlike his father’s early split-screen experiments.

The result is both endearing and invigorating, as the movie—a time capsule of a time capsule—affords these aged icons the space to ruminate and reflect on key moments of cultural transformation, often in close-ups of teary eyes that gently reveal defiant fervor. Their vivid memories of interacting with late greats like the sculptor Augusta Savage collide with intellectual debates over the works of not only their forebears, but—in hilarious, inebriated moments—each other’s works as well. Harlem Renaissance author Nathan Huggins is particularly taken to task for his perceived analytical missteps, but his retorts are just as compelling.

From a top-down perspective, the film illuminates an oft-flattened diversity within Black academic thought, itself a response to varied approaches to racial and financial inequity. However, Greaves’s formal approach magnifies the meeting’s intellectual contours in alluring ways, revealing the intimate passions and interpersonal histories that not only once drove this movement but also still drive its successors. Some of these subjects last saw each other 50 years ago, while others have kept in touch, but the crisscrossing of their paths has woven a monumental historical fabric that Greaves and his filmmaking descendants bring to light in wistful, powerful fashion.

Stark photographs from before and during the Harlem Renaissance, of vicious crimes committed against Black bodies, and of young would-be freedom fighters gazing at the viewer from a century prior, are paired with narrated poems by the likes of Cullen and Langston Hughes. The era’s mood and zeitgeist are granted three-dimensional life by these artistic pairings, practically an act of curation by the film and its creators. Meanwhile, at the party, older members of the group, like then-nonagenarian Whipper, recall their childhoods during Reconstruction, their parents’ lives under slavery, and, in happier moments, the songs, poems and cinematic monologues they learned and performed decades earlier.

That they remember these as if it were yesterday creates a tangible continuum across time—a bridge between our present, the filmed past captured by Greaves on celluloid, and the recalled pasts of the film’s participants, which appear either as early black-and-white footage or as verbal recollections. The film reminds us that these seemingly distant events—the inspired art movements from a century ago and the horrors that fomented them—exist practically within living memory. It allows us to reach out and almost touch them.

That Once Upon A Time In Harlem can finally be seen is owed to the tireless efforts of director David Greaves, his stepmother Louise Greaves (who passed away in 2023) and preservationist Bill Brand. However, William Greaves remains the movie’s vital creative force. Watching it today, it’s hard to shake the feeling that he knew it would become a document of the distant past, someday in the future, a temporal relationship that informs his aesthetic approach.

The film may be erudite in nature, but its visual language is anything but austere. Greaves positions his cameras, and thus places the audience, not at a distance from these debates, as casual observers, but rather, within them as participants (much like Mati Diop’s recent African art restitution chronicle Dahomey). That we can hear Greaves’s voice, and that we glimpse his sound equipment from time to time, makes him just as much of a participant, especially in the knowing moments when he departs from topics of analytical debate and requests the movement’s most revered keepers reach deep into their bags and pull out delightful party tricks, in the form of impromptu performances.

That we’re seated around the same center table as the guests, often at or below their eye level, positions us practically as children sitting at their grandparents’ feet, watching them narrate childhood stories, eagerly awaiting the moments in which they brim suddenly with youthful zeal while revealing emotional, artistic and intellectual energies we didn’t know they still possessed. Few experiences in one’s early life are as formative or as moving. Greaves ensures that his engineered gathering (and rigorous intellectual exercise) will tug at the heartstrings by framing an otherwise academic past through the language of nostalgia.

No matter one’s distance from the Harlem Renaissance, Once Upon A Time In Harlem transforms its cultural milieu into personal memory, suffusing history with enormity and reinvigorating it for generations to come.

More in Movie Reviews

• Gregg Araki’s ‘I Want Your Sex’

• Agnieszka Holland’s ‘Franz’

• Luca Guadagnino’s ‘After the Hunt’

• Brian Vincent’s ‘Make Me Famous’

• Nia DaCosta’s ‘Hedda’

• Gus Van Sant’s ‘Dead Man’s Wire’

While not exactly a return to form, Gregg Araki’s first feature in a dozen years is nonetheless a welcome comeback. A kinky workplace sex farce, I Want Your Sex is crafted in the vein of Halina Reijn’s more serious erotic drama Babygirl, which Araki claims to have found too “sex negative.” Its story, penned alongside Karley Sciortino, sees introverted college graduate Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) ensnared by the advances of his seductive older boss, the provocative art magnate Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), who turns his world and relationships upside down.

The film is a wonderful performance showcase that begins with a campy mystery. Elliot, nose bloodied and clad in women’s lingerie, stumbles out in a daze to the mansion swimming pool of his employer, only to find her naked and face down in the water. As he’s interrogated by a pair of straight-laced detectives (Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville, who try to suss out binary motives), his recollections return to a few months prior—specifically 9½ weeks prior, a cheeky tribute to erotic thriller maestro Adrian Lyne—and acquaint us with the movie’s major players.

Desperate for a job, Elliot applies to be Erika’s assistant during these lengthy flashbacks, while studying up on her verbose, often contradictory proclamations on modern art—which she delivers in the nude. After a flirtatious interview, where Erika hopscotches back and forth across the line of appropriate workplace banter, Elliot is hired suspiciously quickly, much to the chagrin of Erika’s stylish, sour-faced executive Vikktor (Daveed Diggs), who can’t help but stare daggers at the art world rookie.

Elliot doesn’t really belong. Everyone in Erika’s art studio is a trust fund baby with an immaculate, often boundary pushing sense of style (for instance, a self-assured, skirt-wearing male assistant played by Mason Gooding), while the fresh-faced Elliot shows up with frumpy, unremarkable dadbod fits—alongside subtle rings, studs and mannerisms that hint ever so slightly at a subdued queer questioning. It’s perhaps this sense of unease that makes him such easy prey, but initially, he doesn’t mind. Despite having a girlfriend, the sardonic, withholding Minerva (Charli XCX), and a doting roommate/best friend, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders), something’s missing in Elliot’s life—a hole Erika fills in more ways than one when she makes him her sub in the bedroom, and he gradually agrees to debase himself in unexpected ways.

He experiences an immediate sense of liberation followed swiftly by palpable discomfort. Araki’s unobtrusive, irreverent approach—reminiscent of his “Teenage Apocalypse” films in the 1990s—affords Hoffman a physically expressive performance halfway between cutesy and comically perplexed, verging practically on slapstick thanks to his airtight timing. Elliot is way in over his head, but having his deepest desires fulfilled (which is to say, being turned into Erika’s sex slave) unlocks something within him. Araki, however, takes the air out of this momentous self-discovery with the singular intention of ensuring he doesn’t treat sex too solemnly or as too big a deal. Some moments become cartoonish in the process—at times literally, through hand-drawn augmentations. (Someone should hire Hoffman as a live-action “AWOOOOGA” wolf.)

Granted, this approach to sexuality works when it’s primarily audiovisual, but there are clunkier moments wherein it takes the form of finger-wagging conversations that hit you over the head. Araki, once the enfant terrible of the Gen X queer scene, seems under the impression that kids these days are sexless prudes (he has his characters state as much), positioning I Want Your Sex as a film of permission to let loose and live. It’s hard not to wonder if a tale of blurred lines during power-play is exactly the right venue for this statement—if for no other reason than the approach feels self-defeating.

Still, there’s a tremendous amount of fun to be had. The performances are all fine-tuned, including and especially Wilde, as an unhinged sex monster whose sociopathic selfishness runs deeper and darker than you might expect. Despite dressing and behaving with a sense of sexual emancipation, her views on her own erotic photography seem to shift depending on the whims of who she’s talking to. Perhaps Araki is aware that, despite his prowess, he isn’t the singular authority on sexual imagery. But whether or not Erika is some vessel for an older artist—one entering a complicated world of instant cancellations (would it surprise you to learn Erika rails against “wokeness”?)—these anxieties help Wilde craft a marvelous performance that hides pulsing anxieties in plain sight.

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. It’s a film in which queerness and BDSM are spoken of with a frankness that the repressed teens in Araki’s 1993 landmark Totally F***ed Up could only dream of—which perhaps raises the uncomfortable question of where an artist like Araki even belongs in a world where these boundaries have long since been pushed and prodded. Is there any dangerous territory left for him to tread? Maybe not. However, a film of such bawdy allure remains a welcome departure from the self-imposed (though more likely, corporately imposed) norms that might stifle sexual expression, despite the cinematic ground broken by Araki and his ilk over several decades. Maybe the filmmaker has his grump-flavored fun, if only as a reminder that there’s still room for raunchy, entertaining trash in the American indie scene.

More in Film

• Review: Agnieszka Holland’s ‘Franz’

• Review: Luca Guadagnino’s ‘After the Hunt’

• Review: ‘Make Me Famous

• Review: Nia DaCosta’s ‘Hedda’

• Review: Gus Van Sant’s ‘Dead Man’s Wire’

This was a year of numerous stunning nonfiction releases, as well as many festival premieres of works yet to be distributed. When viewing them in unison, it’s clear that the medium’s stylistic and thematic ingenuity could not be in better hands. These 25 films from 2025, hailing from all across the globe, represent the very best of what documentary cinema has to offer. 

Afternoons of Solitude

• Streaming on MUBI

From Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra, the brutal, hypnotically textured Afternoons of Solitude skirts traditional documentary conventions by capturing its young bullfighter subject in moments of both performance and privacy, without the use of interviews or voiceover. A radiant, ugly film about death, animal cruelty, and the fragility and beauty of the human form. 

The Alabama Solution

• Streaming on HBO Max

Directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman—and by the numerous Alabama inmates documenting their own abuse on smuggled cellphones—The Alabama Solution is an unflinching look at systems of power, and a full-throated call for reform. Given the risks its subjects take just to be heard, it feels dangerous to watch, as it carefully exposes statewide corruption and the violence it breeds.

All the Empty Rooms

• Streaming on Netflix

In just half an hour, Joshua Seftel’s reflection on American gun violence lends credence to the power of images through its careful composition. All the Empty Rooms follows journalist Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp in their efforts to memorialize schoolchildren lost to mass shootings by capturing their tiny bedrooms—preserved in amber for years by their grieving parents—as a stirring eulogy to the many lives taken far too soon.

Architecton

• Streaming on HBO Max

What can stone and concrete reveal about a people? Gunda director Viktor Kossakovsky attempts to answer this question through meditative and momentous shots of landscapes, ruins and mineral quarries. These are further interspersed with conversations on architecture, cultural values, and the rise and fall of civilizations—abstractions given solid (and rhythmic) form in Architecton.

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions

• In theaters now

Part impressionistic sci-fi, part pulsing visual essay, Kahlil Joseph’s spellbinding feature debut BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions takes after his two-screen OSCAM installation and chronicles African American liberation and revolutionary thought by filtering them through the sounds of Detroit Techno. Academic citations sit side by side with contemporary internet memes, as Joseph traces cultural transformations and the thorny paradoxes inherent in reimagining the world through Black art and history.

Cover-Up

• In theaters now; streaming on Netflix December 26

From directors Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, the biographical documentary Cover-Up is as reverential as it is confrontational, in its perusal of legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Set against the largest U.S. government and military scandals of the last half-decade, it captures Hersh’s life and outlook with an unflinching (though by no means uncritical) eye, and in the process, lays bare the cyclical nature of unchecked power.

Emergent City

• Streaming on PBS POV

Transitions, establishing shots, and other connective tissue become the primary canvas in Emergent City, Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s chronicle of an evolving New York neighborhood. The people, leaders, and liminal spaces of Sunset Park in Brooklyn are extricated from the forgotten cracks of national discourse, in a story of speaking truth to political power, and how complicated it can actually be when a community tries to free itself from capitalistic bonds.

GEN_

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

Dr. Bini, an elderly, zany Italian hormone specialist, is the persuasive centerpiece of Gianluca Matarrese’s GEN_, an unconventionally straightforward documentary about trans issues and gender dysphoria. Through Bini’s quirky bedside manner and his biting frankness with his patients, the film creates a sense of normalcy around bodies often demonized in the political sphere. It’s the rare film whose simplicity verges on rebellious.

Hair, Paper, Water…

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

Returning to the remote Rục tribe in Vietnam, dramatist and documentarian Minh Quý Truong collaborates with Belgian director Nicolas Graux for Hair, Paper, Water…, a melodic 71-minute portrait of a rural grandmother recalling her childhood as she floats downstream with her city-dwelling grandson. Combining natural splendor with meticulous sound design, the 16mm movie heightens the senses amidst its political, linguistic, and anthropological examination of the modern world and the people it leaves behind.

Heightened Scrutiny

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

Following a transgender attorney challenging the U.S. Supreme Court, Sam Feder’s Heightened Scrutiny is as much a plea for social equality as it is an inquiry into corporate news media, and its rarely-examined toxic runoffs. Through seemingly traditional means—primarily, sit-down interviews—it traces the building blocks of prejudice, and the way it can slither its way from uncritical editorializing into the very foundations of the law, all while smuggling a vibrant portrait of community in order to highlight what (or rather, who) is at stake.

Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958–1989

• Available to buy or rent on Apple TV

Over three and a half hours, Göran Hugo Olsson’s archival odyssey Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958–1989 scrutinizes decades of Swedish public broadcasting. In the process, Olsson not only weaves one of the most comprehensive filmic tapestries of the modern West Bank and Gaza conflicts, but traces the shifting biases that determine how these stories are told, and how they’re cemented in the public consciousness.

Letters from Wolf Street

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

In the wake of festering far-right sentiment, Letters from Wolf Street sees immigrant filmmaker Arjun Talwar train his lens on his sleepy Warsaw enclave. Through wry observations—and the director’s Indian-accented Polish voiceover—the film explores the evolving fabric of modern Poland through its mundanities, and through the struggles of fellow outsiders to embed themselves within the country’s rich artistic history.

My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

A five-and-a-half-hour documentary that zips by at light speed, Julia Loktev’s riveting My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow begins in unassuming territory by capturing the everyday lives of dissident reporters challenging the Putin government. However, its premise implodes with Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, transforming the film into an intimate and defining real-time portrait of modern journalism under fire from an authoritarian regime.

Orwell 2+2=5

• Available to buy or rent on Amazon and Apple TV

Combining contemporary newsreels with the personal and fictional writings of George Orwell—primarily, Nineteen Eighty-Four—Raoul Peck’s Orwell 2+2=5 lays out the English author’s prescient warnings in chilling ways (courtesy of narration by Damian Lewis). While its juxtapositions may seem obvious on the surface, Peck refashions this archival exercise into not just an examination of Orwell himself (and the wartime experiences that molded him), but a mournful retrospective on how such accessible cautionary tales have gone unheeded in 2025.

The Perfect Neighbor

• Streaming on Netflix

Using the state as its primary lens, Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor traces a years-long dispute between neighbors using extensive police body camera footage to recount a story that ends in deadly tragedy. With Florida’s “stand your ground” gun laws at its center, the movie’s wrenching human toll is imbued with lucid political dimensions, thanks to its transformative filmmaking. 

Predators

• Streaming on Paramount+

A documentary about the Chris Hansen-hosted reality sensation To Catch a Predator, David Osit’s Predators—told through both archival footage and contemporary interviews—is part media retrospective and part ethnographic study, exposing the raw impulses and the murky legality of vigilante justice as entertainment. However, what makes it particularly powerful is the way it unfurls as a painful personal story about Osit himself, as he gradually turns his camera 180 degrees in service of discomforting questions.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

• Available to buy or rent on Amazon and Apple TV

Sepideh Farsi’s Gaza chronicle, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, would be a powerful film about resilience even if its enterprising subject—25-year-old photojournalist Fatma Hassona—hadn’t been killed in an Israeli airstrike after its completion. This wrenching reality brings the movie’s form into even clearer focus: using one cellphone to film another, Farsi captures her numerous, glitchy video calls with Hassona in a manner that not only emphasizes the tragic distance between them but makes the viewer want to reach out through the many layers of technology to comfort the radiant artist as bombs fall all around her.

The Secret of Me

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

Three Identical Strangers producer Grace Hughes-Hallett follows in the footsteps of the aforementioned masterwork in her directorial debut, the equally mysterious childhood chronicle The Secret of Me. Winding and enraging, it follows an intersex adult subject, Jim, through recollections of rigid social mores and shocking medical malpractice, as he narrates the harrowing childhood experiences that ripped apart his sense of self.

The Settlers

• Streaming on BBC Select, Amazon Prime, Apple TV and the Roku Channel

One of Louis Theroux’s latest and most prolific specials for BBC Two, journalistic documentary The Settlers is a stark and detailed chronicle of modern colonial thought. Across the one-hour exposé, armed Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Zionist thought leaders alike hoist themselves with their own petards, even when only mildly challenged by the seasoned reporter, blurring the line between confession and braggadocio in unbelievable ways.

Shuffle

• Releasing theatrically January 16, 2026

A film about systems of recovery turned against their subjects, Benjamin Flaherty’s Shuffle is part essayistic inquiry and part dramatic self-portrait. With his infuriating tale of predatory rehab facilities—told in extraordinary visual detail, using screens and social media to shine a light on chilling evils—Flaherty doesn’t just seek to expose fraudulent claims, but uses his camera to re-humanize numerous addict subjects so often abused and denied grace.

Sirens Call

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

A sci-fi fantasy that dovetails into a challenging portrait of Americana, Miri Ian Gossing and Lina Sieckmann’s Sirens Call is a shimmering, phantasmagorical chronicle of Merpeople cosplayers—a community centered around the acceptance of politicized bodies. Thematically queer and aesthetically folkloric, the film’s kaleidoscopic approach is practically transhumanistic—even though its focus is on flesh-and-blood characters. The result is cinematic sleight of hand that disguises (and eventually reveals) radical thought from beneath a seemingly ridiculous surface. It shines like a diamond.

The Tale of Silyan

• In theaters now

Directed by Tamara Kotevska, The Tale of Silyan uses white storks as a window into the lives of Macedonian farmers, their struggling economy and their local fairy tales. As the political tides of Europe continue to shift, this tale of struggling humans and endangered birds cross paths when an injured stork, Silyan, is adopted and nursed back to health by a lonely farmer, Nikola. However, what sets it apart from run-of-the-mill conservationist movies is the multifaceted way it uses the sounds and images of its avian subjects, turning them into ghostly observers and, in a sense, musical composers guiding the story. The world from a bird’s eye view.

Thoughts & Prayers: Or How to Survive an Active Shooter in America

• Streaming on HBO Max

Through its title—and then, through a multitudinous array of student interviews and product demonstrations—Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock’s Thoughts & Prayers: Or How to Survive an Active Shooter in America contrasts the paralyzing helplessness in the face of America’s gun epidemic with the financial opportunism in its wake, i.e., the training-and-safety industrial complex that makes its bread off mass tragedies. These are, on one hand, a necessity in a world of recurrent school shootings and political stalemates, but Canepari and Dimmock present them with the requisite absurdity, resulting in a chilling snapshot of a society eating itself.

Underland

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

In less than 80 minutes, Robert Petit’s Underland traces both humanity’s deep past and its possible futures through subterranean landscapes. From nuclear facilities, to unexplored caverns, to forgotten people inhabiting urban sewers, Petit excavates submerged spaces, turning them into haunting theses on societal fabrics, while inviting the audience to witness (and imagine, and reflect upon) what roots us to the Earth, and why we look to the stars for answers.

Yanuni

• Awaiting U.S. distribution

Richard Ladkani’s thrilling ecological doc Yanuni both embodies the splendor of the Amazon landscape and captures—in the vein of a polished political action thriller—the tale of Juma Xiapaia, a young indigenous woman fighting to preserve it. With up-close-and-personal portraits of eruptive violence, alongside meditations on love and adrenaline-fueled portraits of righteous militancy, the film combines poetic reflections with whiz-bang urgency, resulting in one of the most complete and affecting activist documentaries in years. A true testament to the form.

The first and final scenes of any film are vital, and contained within these bookends you can find the entire story of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Unfortunately, nearly everything in between is standard biopic filler and reinforces filmmaker Scott Cooper’s unique position in the Hollywood landscape: he’s a tremendous director of actors and quite unremarkable at most other parts of the job.

Based on Warren Zanes’ Bruce Springsteen biography of the same name, the film (which Cooper both directed and wrote) tells the story of how the famed heartland rocker created Nebraska—perhaps his most time-tested album—but it seldom has anything to say beyond observing his emotional troubles during this period, often at great dramatic distance. Despite this contained focus on a one-year period, Deliver Me From Nowhere is very much a decades-spanning saga in the tale of most by-the-numbers “true stories” about revered figures and begins with a monochrome depiction of a young Springsteen (Matthew Pellicano Jr.) listening to his father (Stephen Graham) abuse his mother (Gaby Hoffmann) in the next room. A hard cut from his haunted expression to the adult Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) delivering a full-throated, thoroughly embodied performance of “Born to Run” in 1981 creates a strange but appropriate thematic link between these childhood events and Springsteen’s ’70s mega-hit. Regardless of what the song was actually about (in short: a girl), its lyrics become an obvious cipher here for a man escaping his past at lightspeed. If only the rest of the film had maintained this momentum.

As mentioned, Deliver Me From Nowhere does in fact conclude with a touching gesture toward catharsis, so in theory one could string these brief opening and closing acts together to create a much more impactful short film without losing very much by way of story. However, viewers then wouldn’t be treated to the real delights of a Scott Cooper joint: broad caricatures who become imbued with beating humanity in a way so few American filmmakers tend to manage. As Springsteen begins work on his next album, he sees the process as a long-overdue exorcism of personal demons, while his record executives et al. want more hits for the radio. The Boss, however, is largely shielded from these demands, leaving his manager and producer Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) to advocate on his behalf.

This side of things—the logistics of creating the next big hit or cultural phenomenon—features little by way of discernible drama despite the many arguments that play out in the confines of various offices. And yet it can be intriguing to watch in its own way, as Landau becomes the de facto point-of-view character for lengthy stretches, talking up Springsteen’s genius to anyone who’ll listen (including and especially David Krumholtz’s Columbia record exec) while barely giving any pushback to the artist himself. There’s a sense of inevitability to Nebraska coming into being (and the iconic Born in the U.S.A. after it, which used many of his original concepts for the former). On one hand, this rarely affords the movie any meaningful stakes. On the other, it allows Strong to create a cautiously eager version of Landau who practically bleeds adoration for Springsteen. Similarly, Paul Walter Hauser plays an eager recording engineer who goes along with Springsteen’s intentionally lo-fi plans for Nebraska, while Marc Maron plays a mostly silent studio mixer who, despite a few incredulous reactions, largely goes along with things. After all, who is he, and who are any of them, to question the Boss?

This kind of idolatry is usually the raison d’être for jukebox “IP” biopics like Deliver Me From Nowhere, and there’s a refreshing honesty to the hagiography refracted in Strong’s doting gaze. Granted, the film is prevented from veering into full-on Boss propaganda by the personal half of the story, in which he enters a romance with radiant single mother Faye Romano (Odessa Young), a relationship that feels doomed by the very same inevitability that colors the movie’s making-of-Nebraska half. He offers her, up front, a premonition of what will inevitably happen—that he won’t be able to commit himself to loving her so long as this album and its ghosts hang around his neck—but with the movie’s parameters all clearly established, in the studio and behind closed doors, there remains little reason to watch it beyond its performances. Springsteen will prioritize his work, people will laud his musical talent and he will eventually confront the wounds of his past, but none of these are framed as part of a story where Springsteen’s or anyone’s human impulses threaten to derail the inevitable for even a moment.

White’s conception of Springsteen is joyful to witness, not just for the way he impersonates the Boss’s gravelly voice and vein-popping performances but for the way he conjures Springsteen’s spirit through exaggeration. He crafts a sense of mood (and moodiness) where the film might not otherwise contain it, brooding to the extreme and sitting in Jersey and New York diner booths hunched over to the side, leaning so far that he threatens to keel over. He doesn’t so much play Springsteen as he does an imaginary, effortlessly cool, deeply tormented version that James Dean might have portrayed, and Deliver Me From Nowhere is slightly better for it. In tandem with Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography, which subtly silhouettes the superstar and turns him into an icon even in mundane settings, the film has tremendous physical architecture even if its emotional architecture is practically null.

Clichés abound in the form of flowery dialogue, but the kind that, when imbued with enough cinematic gusto—Springsteen speaks of “finding silence amongst the noise”—can transcend their trappings and become jubilant. Unfortunately, here they end up as overwritten pablum that struggles to convey meaning.

There are movie references aplenty, from Springsteen discovering dark subject matter through a Terrence Malick film and flashbacks of him enjoying Charles Laughton’s sumptuous The Night of the Hunter with his father. But these only serve as mood boards, presented as-is when Springsteen watches them, rather than becoming stylistic or thematic influences for the artist or for the film at large. They become reminders of how comparatively little by way of style or philosophy Cooper puts into his work, even if his protagonist can be seen watching them, enjoying them and being influenced by them in a way that makes his wheels silently turn. But what that influence leads to, and the synapses it fires, remain something of a mystery.

At the end of the day, Deliver Me From Nowhere is a film worth looking at and observing from the same distance that Cooper frames his impenetrable version of Springsteen, whose troubles hover over his creative process like a gloomy cloud. But the camera seldom looks past the pristine surfaces it creates in order to explore those problems or Springsteen’s connection to the many lyrics we see him jotting down throughout the runtime. “Double album??” he scrawls at one point, underlining it twice in a gesture that hilariously ends up with about as much weight and meaning as any of Springsteen’s actual lyrics—in a film nominally about the lifelong pain that fuels them. Sure. Double album. Why the hell not?

The garish excess of generative A.I. receives a fittingly excessive dressing down in Radu Jude’s Dracula, a self-reflexive comedy that skirts ethical lines with a purpose. The nearly 3-hour rigmarole about a director taking shortcuts to assemble an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s gothic classic takes a stake to the heart of every pressing political and cultural concern you could conceivably rip from the headlines. But it’s hard not to read its eagerness as a lack of focus, given the movie’s frequent meandering and the languorous gaps between its smartest and funniest moments.

The film’s opening montage is a pronounced mission statement, in which numerous ugly A.I.-generated clips of the titular Count goad the audience into fellating him. The film’s vulgarity of language, however, is nothing compared to the vulgarity of these images themselves: dead-eyed simulacra that become an all-too-fitting bridge between the genre classic and modern venture capitalism stripping media for parts. After all, in an era of infinite Dracula studio films, what better (or more perverse) way to update the story than by twinning it with digital golems that feed off resources and spit out something pretending to have a soul?

The film’s various subplots are connected by the appearance of a novice director (Adonis Tanța) who justifies each creative choice to the camera as he consults his A.I. assistant at a dimly lit table. “Yes, mein Fuhrer,” the software responds from his iPad, before the movie cuts between various live action scenarios he’s “written”: a burlesque Dracula dinner theater shot with cheap video cameras, scenes from F.W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu infected by pop-up ads and an unrelated romance adapted from Romanian novelist Nicolae Velea—a tale whose tragic ending Jude ruins with a ludicrous A.I. action climax. These sources are largely in the public domain, but when it comes time for the film to rip from legally protected works (like Francis Ford Coppola’s sensuous 1992 version), the gloves come off, as the fictitious filmmaker employs his trusty assistant to create hilariously mutated and sexually explicit re-creations that might, in a court of law, be dismissed as parodical use.

Right up front, the film presents a bizarre moral conundrum. The generative A.I. of software like ChatGPT and Sora depends on skimming copyrighted works, a theft that becomes central (and in a strange way, essential) to Jude’s comedy, which pulls from numerous existing versions of Dracula to craft interludes between its various live-action plotlines. Granted, A.I.-generated video isn’t an enormous part of the movie’s nearly 3-hour runtime—it’s certainly no What’s Next?, the ugly hallucinatory all-A.I. feature programmed at the Berlin Film Festival—but the technology’s inherent flaws are exploited both narratively and aesthetically. But does that make it permissible? Jude, perhaps more so than the tech bros he skewers, appears to at least have a conscience about these things and lets the aforementioned debate occur in the minds of the viewer as the film goes on. On one hand, perhaps Jude ought not to use the tools he’s claiming are a strain on resources and a bane on our collective consciousness. On the other hand, not a single viewer will come away from Dracula thinking well of the technology, even if the movie overstays its welcome.

Jude has, in recent years, taken aim at the pillars upholding cinema and society, structures he lampoons with works like the gig economy takedown Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. His Dracula feels like a logical extension of that film, with its phantasmagorical lo-fi subplot about the real-life Vlad the Impaler (upon whom Dracula was based) coming to life from a screening of the 1979 Romanian drama Vlad Țepeș before eventually running a video game sweatshop. Here, like the pipeline of Romanian folklore to Hollywood’s bottom line, exploited Romanian workers are forced to play through online games and sell successful accounts to American buyers (the kind Elon Musk was once accused of purchasing).

Along the way, versions of Vlad can be seen confronting Romanian tour guides profiting off his image while contorting the meaning of his life and history. He even sucks the lifeblood of an old woman at a medical facility where celebrities like Charlie Chaplin and world leaders like Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu allegedly enrolled to unnaturally extend their lives. As much as Jude’s film takes potshots in every conceivable direction, it’s also a concise thematic adaptation of the kinds of fears and desires that have made vampire cinema such a long-lasting commodity. He maps these tales of personal power and societal control onto modern concerns of unrestrained capitalism running amok, resulting in a strikingly relevant work. However, it isn’t long before he also has characters recite entire passages from Das Kapital in order to reaffirm his goals of highlighting the vampiric nature of the bourgeoisie. You know, just in case you missed the subtlety of a filmmaker character explaining his technofascism right down the lens.

The resultant farce, which hopscotches between plots at random—aptly, given its in-world “screenwriter”—is filled with lengthy conversations that explain (and over-explain) its thematic sinews connecting technology and labor. As intellectually stimulating as the film may be on paper, it can prove occasionally arduous in practice. That it also pulls from other Universal monster landmarks like James Whale’s Frankenstein feels like a smart in-joke about the tumult of A.I. mad science-ing and post-COVID societal mania, until this too becomes the basis for wordy exposition. It’s a smart film in concept, but it’s hard not to wonder if Jude assumes its intended audience isn’t on his level, resulting in a compromised piece that stops dead in order to explain its own jokes at length.

Then again, maybe this is part of the movie’s elaborate gag about technology evolving unchecked: the idea that media regurgitation will eventually go hand-in-hand with the dumbing down of society, resulting in an audience that may need deep and shallow cultural references alike explained to them in detail. Parts of the climax even rest on an angry mob of real actors moving in awkward, jittery fashion, as though the internet’s generative digital slop were no longer decipherable from reality. Even so, these clever satirical flourishes seldom make Dracula any less of a chore to sit through in its final act or during its forty-five-plus-minute live action setups to fleeting A.I. punchlines.

As exhaustive as it is exhausting, Jude’s A.I.-tinged Dracula mash-up is the first and only time some of these technologies have seemed useful. But that their use here in service of highlighting their own soulless brutality should, in an ideal world, ensure that it’s the last time they’re made useful as well. But if there’s any prescience in Jude’s madcap vision of a creative world in crisis, it won’t be long before someone feeds off even this idea and spits out an artistically lesser (but more commercially viable) meta-take on the technology, all but proving the movie right.

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