If you build it: a pervading sense of mourning is the most coherent thing about Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, an otherwise largely unfocused and self-important movie
Trick mirror: The Substance seems inescapably in thrall to the seductive, glossy surfaces of Hollywood beauty standards that it is supposedly skewering
Righteous outlaw: The Goldman Case is a brilliant example of a courtroom drama that eschews familiar tropes, placing an individual subject into the context of a larger, historical subject in scrupulously open-ended fashion
Bird in the hand: in Tilmann Singer’s new alpine horror flick Cuckoo, an onslaught of contrived plot twists and uneven performances undermine an ambitious pastiche of genre tropes
Look both ways: three new publications of Chris Marker’s texts expand our understanding of him as a multimodal artist, as attentive to the formal qualities of cinema as to matters of prose, graphic design, and civic issues
Hands up: it’s been a feeble year for horror, and a batch of high-profile summer releases—A Quiet Place: Day One, MaXXXine, and Longlegs—offer scant remedy
Sing me back home: Angela Schanelec's Music is a hypnotic reverie about hands and feet, landscapes and bodies, gazes and gestures, and people suddenly lifting their voices in song
Summer's end: Annie Baker's filmmaking debut locates poetry in the interstices, inviting the viewer to experience the passage of time in company with her characters
Sign up for the Film Comment Letter!
Thoughtful, original film criticism delivered straight to your inbox each week. Enter your email address below to subscribe.
