Binary systems: two Berlinale standouts, Our Body and Orlando, My Political Biography grapple productively with the boundaries between subjective and objective experience
Reversal stock: even after a rash of changes, this year's edition still retains the fest’s long-standing commitment to adventurous international art cinema
On the grind: Mark Asch, Beatrice Loayza, and Devika Girish get together for an epistolary exchange about the thoughts and, yes, feelings elicited by Magic Mike’s Last Dance
Look again: the first film from the Nobel–Prize winning author engages Ernaux’s career-long fascination with photography to tell the story of an disintegrating marriage
Homebound: our critic digs into a new and alternative streaming service for experimental and artist-made films that includes a healthy selection from the Canyon Cinema catalog
Eyewitness: with Saint Omer, Alice Diop offers a brilliant examination of all that cannot be elucidated about the “clawing duality that haunts so many Black people the world over”
Drink it in: James Cameron’s much-hyped, space-whale opus seeds the franchise with a militant environmentalism that sets the film apart from similar feats of entertainment engineering
Tall tales: the light of Steven Spielberg’s cinema is both illuminating and disillusioning, and in the autobiographical The Fabelmans, the auteur subjects himself to its glare
