Kay Lena Ndiaye’s documentary on the CFA franc is handsomely mounted, but lacks specificity and a clear thesis.
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Zhang Jialing’s Total Trust is a claustrophobic, challenging portrait of life under the totalizing Chinese surveillance apparatus.
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Ananta Thitanat’s slow cinema documentary on the dismantling of the Scala theatre in Bangkok plays like a non-fiction version of Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn.
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Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor’s Satan Wants You presents the origin story of the Satanic Panic as a slick true crime thriller.
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Georges Hannan’s Undertaker for Life! attempts to lift the veil on the world of morticians, but refuses to engage with the visceral discomfort of death.
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John Wick: Chapter 4 is as much endurance test as action epic, but it still delivers the excellent action choreography we expect of the series.
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Clint Eastwood’s Sudden Impact, the fourth Dirty Harry picture, combines the rape-revenge film with the reactionary cop picture to fascinating results.
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Chander Levack’s I Like Movies is a coming-of-age film that relies on the specificity of its character and setting to compensate for its conventional narrative.
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Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul is an intimate examination of a troubled young woman.
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Michael B. Jordan’s Creed III is another examination of what makes a man in a cinematic culture that’s hardly interested in the question.
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Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool is a transgressive work of body horror that provides a moral critique of the elite through its shocking content.
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The Gerard Butler-starring Plane is a no-frills action thriller that leans into convention to satisfying results.
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Dwayne Johnson’s DCEU superhero film is a pale imitation of a Zack Snyder film, and proof of why the DCEU is being rebooted.
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Kyle Edward Ball’s low-budget experimental horror film is a dissociative nightmare.
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Damien Chazelle’s epic tragicomedy, Babylon, is yet another investigation of the personal cost of art and a wildly ambitious, if uneven, ode to silent cinema.
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Hirokazu Kore-eda transforms what sounds like a dour thriller into a heartfelt examination of forgiveness and what constitutes a family.
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Sean Anders’ musical riff on A Christmas Carol starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds is a hyperactive, amiable, and incoherent bit of Christmas content.
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Charlotte Wells’ debut feature, Aftersun, is a cinematic act of recollection and a tribute to a father she never properly understood.
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Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, a remake-of-sorts of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, creates a portrait of animal personhood in its tale of a donkey passed between owners in modern Poland.
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With Avatar, the biggest film of all time, James Cameron makes a populist blockbuster that works as a cinematic baptism for the viewer.
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