Reviews

Through the looking glass: Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is something smarter than girlboss fantasy or canny corporate sellout—it’s a grappling, rather, with the fundamental ways in which we represent and relate to reality

Close shave: Masc, a new program on Criterion Channel, offers a rebuttal to the transphobic charge that transition and gender nonconformity are 21st-century phenomena

Sing out: a program at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles showcases the many possibilities of concert movies—both as cinema and as performance—through a range of classics

It belongs in a museum: the latest big-screen adventure featuring Harrison Ford’s grizzled archeologist only faintly recalls the streamlined pleasures of series highpoint, Raiders of the Lost Ark

Another green world: with its pop imagery, sonic dissonance, and vision of life after Armageddon, Marco Ferreri’s 1969 dystopian fable brings to mind a film by George A. Romero remade by Jean-Luc Godard

Screen time: multimedia artist Josh Kline’s sprawling exhibition at the Whitney Museum attempts to untangle climate change, consumerism, and the function of art in the face of catastrophe

Sunrise: Pietro Marcello’s latest, Scarlet is a tender, sumptuous fairy tale which exemplifies the director’s deft straddling of documentary and fiction, realism and illusionism

Double vision: reality isn’t what it's cracked up to be in mid-festival standouts like Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Todd Haynes’s May December, and Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall

Watch it grow: the final entry in Paul Schrader’s “lonely man” trilogy is less about race than it is about broad-strokes ideas of freedom

Time fades away: on the occasion of Shinji Somai’s ongoing retrospective at the Japan Society, critic Emerson Goo offers a primer on the director’s audacious, and enduring, filmography