​At the AFI Fest screening introduction Hugh Welchman joked that The Peasants was the second, and would probably be the last film animated by hand painting each shot frame by frame. The first, of course, was also made by him and his parter DK, the acclaimed Loving Vincent. A documentary about Van Gogh seems the perfect pair for hand painted animation in the style of its subject. For a follow-up the Welchman’s decided on oil paintings and a nearly 800 page Polish novel, Chlopi or The Peasants.

​Much of recent film has been obsessed with technology and its potential to usurp the existing order. Just this year we have seen Mission:Impossible Dead Reckoning and The Creator grapple with the dystopian consequences of an eternal march toward tech utopia. Sam Esmail is no stranger to the networks and servers that connect our modern existence, the director is, after all, the creator of Mr. Robot. With his first feature in nine years, Leave the World Behind,  Esmail supposes that technology has long since hobbled society and that the bonds between people and nature have already been frayed.

Loss is a strange experience. Someone, or something close to you is suddenly gone, their existence extinguished and, yet, they still occupy the minds and stories of everyone who ever knew them. The life of a lost one “can keep unfolding itself to you” as Mr. McCarthy tells a grieving Greg in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. But what if the lost love one isn’t a person and what if all their memories could be explored, like a diary for those left behind. These ideas set the stage for Kogonada’s After Yang.

Ask just about anyone and they’ll tell you that they want to do the right thing. An instinct for altruism is natural but it doesn’t always come from the purest place. Plenty of times good deeds and kind words are as much about self preservation as they are about real impact. As the most insidious voices have grown louder in the the last few years, so too have the performative ones denouncing them. With his directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World, Jesse Eisenberg has a little fun with performative allyship.

Sean Baker has never had problems finding cinematic drama — and a deep well of empathy — in the lives of people on the brink. To large degrees, all of his films have revolved around well intentioned folks doing the best they can in the face of debilitating financial situations. Be it Sin-Dee (Kitana Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) working the streets of LA or Halley (Bria Vinaite) doing sex work on the side to keep a roof over her daughter Moonee’s (Brooklynn Prince) head, Baker’s characters clearly hold his respect. Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), the central figure of Red Rocket, is a new type of lead for the director. One that might just test his patience.

Expectations are always high for a well regarded auteur, but they were especially lofty for Celine Sciamma following her revelatory 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. From Water Lillies to Girlhood, the French director has always had a piercing vision, but Portrait brought her the largest audience and most fervent acclaim of her illustrious career. So how did she choose to follow it up? With Petite Maman, a 72 minute fable about a young girl meeting her mother as a child, of course.

For decades film has told the stories of young people finding their way in the world to dazzling effect. There is something so universally relatable about those late teenage years where you feel like you’ve figured it all out and seeing it with the gift of hindsight you realize that those answers wouldn’t come until much later. The hard truth is that coming of age doesn’t happen all at once and that next phase of life brings with it doubts, big decisions and so much more uncertainty. Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World posits that people don’t stop growing up, even when they’re grown. 

A tale as old as time, how much can true love transcend? Is it simply an intertwining of attractions or is love something more, something so inherent to our very being that we’ll find our way back to it under even the most dire of circumstances? These are questions posed by Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze in What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, a film that askes much but answers sparingly little. 

If there has been one silver lining of a massive, life altering pandemic forcing us all to stay home, it may be the other pandemic that it placed on hold. Simply by virtue of schools being closed, the coronavirus pandemic has ushered in the longest period without school shootings in the United States in decades. Although our current torment consumes much of our thought, it’s worthwhile to remember the trauma it temporarily alleviated. Fran Kranz’ Mass is a bruising reminder.