Smackdown: Doug Liman’s Road House remake and Dev Patel’s the vigilante thriller Monkey Man, two exemplars of the Action Movie, balance style and substance to different effect
Dirty work: Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera unearths the contradictions at the heart of a brittle society where culture is yet another arena in which the wealthy exploit the poor
Wellness check: Nicolas Philibert’s new documentary On the Adamant is the latest in a long line of film portraits of hospitals, including films by Frederick Wiseman, Claire Simon, and others
Raindrops keep falling: Charles Burnett’s long unavailable The Annihilation of Fish is an interracial love story that does not make race and age “problems” to be solved, but treats them as mere facts of existence
Smile through it: a trilogy of early features by Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris explore the misogyny constraining women’s everyday lives—and their acts of disobedience and rebellion—through complex, provocative narratives
Look back in anger: the Polish filmmaker is perhaps best known for the proto-psychedelia of 1965’s The Saragossa Manuscript, but much of his formidable filmography consists of realist dramas that explore lost innocence and doomed love
Every grain of sand: Denis Villeneuve’s blockbuster remains, for all its bombastic bricolage of religious and cinematic iconography, a stolidly professional and surprisingly unimaginative adaptation of the sci-fi classic
Smoke gets in your eyes: this year's edition included titles like Direct Action, exergue – on documenta 14, Favoriten, and Dahomey, all of which probe, in very different ways, the responsibilities of civic and cultural institutions
The French Chef: Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things, starring former off-screen lovers Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel, boasts all the classic elements of culinary cinema, but deploys them to culturally and narratively specific ends
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