“Sciamma dares the film’s viewers to recall their own childhoods and identify pivotal moments of confrontation with adult matters, such as death, grief, and the reality that parents have human flaws and vulnerabilities.”

“[F]or all of its brutality and formal simplicity, there lies a romance that I find quite endearing.”

“What seems to be an unfair catch-22 hypothetical turns out to be crucial to Will in considering how each of these souls can handle the harsh realities of life. It’s equal parts sobering and fascinating.”

“For a classic example of a chivalric epic, there is very little that speaks to Gawain’s chivalry. In fact, the film does the complete opposite: it goes out of its way to show his incompetence and his lack of courage.”

“For such a deeply personal film—one that is so rooted in Chung’s own childhood and his identity as a son of Korean immigrants—to simultaneously be so universal to the American experience and human experience is nothing short of phenomenal and praise-worthy.”

“The film could have easily been about the pertinence of memory and self, when it tries so hard to include multiple surprises at once and—as a result—loses its own sense of pertinence.”

“Just as Cassie holds everyone accountable for their complicity in Nina’s trauma, [Emerald] Fennell forces the viewer to think about their role in real-life systems of injustice, and she does so by taking them on a wild, unpredictable journey through this film where nothing is quite as it seems.”

“With a film like this there is no need to look for the human condition in any of [the] performances, because quite frankly, Lovecraft’s fiction is about the underlying terrors of the imagination rather than the characters.”

“Unlike many heist thrillers that rely on shallow suspense to hook viewers, Reichardt relies solely on the viewer’s connection to these two men to drive the suspense … and it pays off beautifully, as their relationship is perhaps the most endearing on-screen friendship in any film last year.”

“The beauty of a film like Wolfwalkers is that in a world—at a time—where the individual self is meant to follow the direction of the normative, the creative spirit suffers from the complacency of the arbitrary.”

“Mank is an admirable attempt at a biopic of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as he pens the script for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and all of the obstacles that are set before him.”

“[Lovers Rock] very deliberately focuses on Black love and joy over Black suffering and anger.”

“Unlike the ghost stories of its era, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is not a gothic film, nor is it a product of early expressionism, but instead, it is a romance that chronicles the exoneration of a woman from the dejection of her solitude.”

“In a year in which both new films and empathy are in short supply, here is a film that, if nothing else, should help to remind people that we are much more alike than we are different.”

“After all, this is what the film is about in the long run: the loss of someone who is still physically here with us, and the damage that such a loss pays on us, the outsiders.”

“[W]hen one passes away without getting to tell their story, all that remains are the images and memories they’ve left behind for others to hold on to.”

Nick Sansone reviews American Honey (2016), now streaming on Netflix.

Trevor Ruth offers his take on two Ingmar Bergman’s films, Summer Interlude (1951) and Summer with Monika (1953).

Kia Khalili Pir studies the on-screen exploration of power in The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964).

Trevor Ruth reviews Vivre Sa Vie (1962), a French New Wave drama film directed by Jean-Luc Godard.