It’s a phenomenal move to start the film with Mark (Sam Neill) already driven mad by the claustrophobic suspicion of the Cold War and his role as a functionary of repressive state apparatus. Żuławski only pushes the character further from there, driving Mark deeper and deeper into the psychosis of his toxic masculinity, his reliance on failing heteropatriarchal norms, and his inability to comprehend the sheer force of his wife’s desire. It takes the film to a fever pitch of intensity that very few films are able to match. Isabelle Adjani brings a terrifying intensity to her role and is both wildly unsettling and more attractive than anyone else has ever looked on screen. Disjointed and unnerving and all the more brilliant for it.

On paper, the most disturbing of these Anderson adaptaions of Dahl but this one didn’t quite click.

A wonderful microcosm of Anderson unearthing sincerity from layers of artifice while drawing attention to the artifice.

A compelling experiment in marrying Anderson and Yeoman’s aesthetic to a straight adaptation although Dahl’s original text contains several Anderson hallmarks: nested structure; quick-wittedness. Very significant right now to hear Sugar saying “I don’t want to be the richest man on Earth.”

A best-of of the Alien franchise that brings together the best elements of the series but never manages to resolve the franchise’s long-running identity crisis. Though I hated this when it came out, I’ve softened on it a lot and think it works well at building slow-burn tension, developing interesting characters, and pursuing some resonant themes around colonialism, imperialism, and genocide, creation and destruction, and fascism’s pursuit of imagined purity. However it falls down in its attempts to link to the other films in the franchise particularly PROMETHEUS and ALIEN and its position in the franchise canon as an explanation of the Xenomorphs’ origins is a fundamentally misguided and self-defeating endeavour. Better than I remembered but a film that should not exist.

A grand, sweeping science-fiction spectacle that is utterly hampered by the script’s atrocious dialogue, clunky exposition, weird pacing, and scientist characters that never act like scientists. It’s as if Jon Spaihts’ original script for Alien: Engineers were run through a machine-learning tool which inserted as many of Damon Lindelof’s late-’00s to early-’10s writing quirks and thematic obsessions as possible.

An undeniably bourgeois but sensitive drama about the dull yet emotionally fraught admin and logistics of the end of a life. Assayas portrays the deep melancholy of dividing up the residue left in the shape of a person after they’re gone and the sadness of seeing an object that has been used, cherished, and loved being turned into a museum piece for people to walk past. It’s a generous, wistful film with just enough of a hint of sharp social criticism underneath: both of the mercenary way the house’s objects are seized upon and the implied incestuous proclivities of the bourgeois artistic set.

EL CONDE’s opening narration carries the underlying implication that the major figures of late 20th Century neoliberalism were literal vampires. By the end, any subtlety to this satire is gone and the heavy-handedness of the allegory becomes rather draining. The film’s interesting if unsubtle allegory positioning neoliberal politicians influenced by the Chicago Boys as bloodsucking vampires is undermined by the third act’s frankly silly revelations. There are some undeniably beautiful images—a young Pinoche (Clemente Rodríguez) licking blood off a guillotine’s blade in Revolutionary France; the older Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) gliding above the streets of Santiago, cape flapping in the breeze—but they’re in service of a film that never really comes together.

I’ve been to that carousel in Brooklyn: walked around the riverfront and had my photo taken in front of the Manhattan backdrop by the person I love. But PAST LIVES felt like a memory long before that scene. It’s so deeply and delicately enmeshed in a sense of time(s) and place(s) that it feels specific, it feels real, it feels like a memory in a way that tears a feeling open inside you. Despite the script’s jabs at the voyeuristic nature of cinema and Arthur’s (John Magaro) self-reflexive monologue about the clichéd story structure, PAST LIVES feels wholly original, wholly new, and wholly real.

A very charming little film about loneliness, ennui, and displacement. The film is driven by Anaita Wali Zada’s subtly expressive central performance but there’s something to love in both of the other two central players, Gregg Turkington and Jeremy Allen White, each expressing a different facet of American loneliness. There’s more than a little bit of Ben Sharrock’s LIMBO in how the film is shot and how the camera’s rigidity, its fixedness, and the boxy, claustrophobic frame speaks to the film’s themes. A quietly devastating critique of America’s imperialism and platitudinous culture.