NYT Critic's Picks

NYT Critic's Picks

Picks by New York Times film critics.

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NYT Critic's Picks
  • 12:08 East of Bucharest

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    Corneliu Porumboiu • Romania • 2006 • Three men ask an age-old question: whose revolution was it?

    It’s December 22nd in Vaslui, a small town in Romania. A few days before Christmas, and also the anniversary of the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu and thus the fall of communism. Three agi...

  • 3 Faces

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    Jafar Panahi • Iran-USA • 2018 • An Iranian road film, foregrounding female perspectives.

    Behnaz has received an alarming video. Marziyeh, a young woman, personally appeals to Behnaz for help, then appears to commit suicide onscreen. Visibly shaken, Benhaz walks off the set of h...

  • 5 Broken Cameras

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    G. Davidi and E. Burnat • 2011 • Palestine-Israel • A portrait of life in the occupied West Bank.

    A personal portrait of life in the occupied West Bank––a Palestinian farmer turned filmmaker documents life in his West Bank village as Israeli settlements grow closer and closer.

    A ...

  • A Faithful Man

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    Louis Garrel • 2018 • France

    A quintessentially French portrait of shifting love and loyalty.

    Abel has just gotten back together with Marianne, nine years after she left him for his best friend. Soon, however, Abel is being pursued by Ève, a young woman who has been infatuated...

  • A Hard Day

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    Seong-hun Kim • 2014 • South Korea• One of the highest performing thrillers in South Korea.

    Gun-soo, an off-duty homicide detective, is involved in a hit and run while driving home from his mother's funeral. Rather than calling the authorities, he panics and covers his tracks. Whe...

  • A Touch of Sin

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    Jia Zhangke • China • 2013 • Four ordinary citizens are driven to the brink of violence

    A local boss runs a small village in China’s northern Shanxi province. He’s gotten rich selling collective property, and while most of the villagers look the other way, Dahai, a solitary coal...

  • Acasa, My Home

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    Radu Ciorniciuc • Romania-Germany • 2020 • A family living on the fringes of Romanian society.

    The Enache family has lived in the wilderness of the Bucharest Delta for nearly two decades. Gica and Niculina’s nine children spent their childhoods sleeping in a hut on the lakeshore...

  • Ajami

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    Yaron Shani & Scandar Copti • Israel • 2009

    Ajami is a bustling multi-ethnic neighborhood in Yaffa, a place where Palestinian immigrants, Israeli Arabs, Christians and Jews live alongside each other. They share the same streets, the same sorrows. Omar has been targeted in reveng...

  • Aquarius

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    Kleber Mendonça Filho • 2016 • Brazil • Clara refuses to leave her home to make way for a high-rise.

    Clara lives in a low-rise apartment building close to the beach in Recife, a small city in northeast Brazil. Her well-established life is threatened by the arrival of ruthless prop...

  • Archipelago

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    Joanna Hogg • United Kingdom • 2010 • A subtle critique of the manners of the British upper class.

    A family gathers on the remote island of Tresco, off the southwestern coast of England. Amid this rugged landscape the matriarch, Patricia, takes lessons from a local painter, while...

  • As I Open My Eyes

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    Leyla Bouzid • 2015 • Tunisia

    Farah struggles to pursue her singing career during a revolution.

    While her parents have traditional aspirations for her, Farah is spending her summer performing in a political rock band, while carrying out a clandestine affair with one of her bandma...

  • Barbara

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    Christian Petzold • 2012 • Germany

    Steeped in the life in former GDR, a woman is torn between two worlds.

    Barbara Wolff arrives in a small town in East Germany, having been transferred from Berlin's prestigious Charité hospital following an unspecified transgression. Consigned to...

  • Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché - Trailer

    Pamela B. Green • United States • 2018 • A fascinating profile of a lost pioneer of early cinema.

    Alice Guy-Blaché entered the film business in 1894, at the age of 21. By 23 she was installed as head of production at French company Gaumont and directed several films before moving to the United ...

  • Bikes vs Cars

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    Fredrik Gertten • Sweden • 2015 • An argument against the automobile.

    A battle is being waged for the soul of the road. In cities across the globe, inefficient transportation reigns supreme—humans commute in cars, machines that suck down gas, belch out pollution, and clutter stree...

  • Bugs

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    Andreas Johnsen • Netherlands • 2016 • An entry point to that most desirable cuisine: insects.

    With global food shortages on the horizon, forward-thinking chefs, environmentalists and food scientists are turning toward an unexpected source of protein: insects. For three years, a c...

  • Buoyancy

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    Rodd Rathjen • Australia • 2019

    Fourteen year old Chakra lives in Cambodia with his family, where he labors each day in the rice fields his older brother stands to inherit. Yearning for freedom, Chakra secretly works with a local broker to make the passage to Thailand, where he ...

  • Call Her Applebroog

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    Beth B • United States • 2016 • A deeply personal portrait of acclaimed artist Ida Applebroog.

    Ida Applebroog was born into an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family in the Bronx in the 1920s. As one of three daughters to a father who had prayed for sons, her childhood was less than cheerf...

  • Camille Claudel 1915

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    Bruno Dumont • France • 2013

    The year 1915. Camille Claudel has been living in an asylum for two years. In her previous life, Camille was a brilliant sculptor, the protégé-turned-lover of Auguste Rodin. Convinced that jealousy drove Rodin to concoct a plot to kill her, Camille...

  • Climates

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    Nuri Bilge Ceylan • Turkey • 2006 • A crowning achievement by a contemporary master.

    Isa and Bahar have been together for a while. Holidaying by the seaside, the weight of their history is felt in their silences, in stolen glances. Isa has been secretly seeing another woman, and B...

  • Court

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    Chaitanya Tamhane • 2014 • India

    A folk singer must navigate contemporary India's labyrinthine legal system.

    By day, Narayan Kamble teaches young children poetry at a local school; in the evenings he performs folk songs at political protests, lamenting the lack of social mobility...

  • Custody

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    Xavier Legrand • France • 2017

    Miriam and Antoine's nearly two decades of marriage have arrived at a bitter divorce. Sitting before a judge, Miriam seeks sole custody of their two children—Joséphine, nearly eighteen, and her younger brother Julien—but Antoine is ultimately given ...

  • Dawson City: Frozen Time

    Bill Morrison • 2016 • USA

    The intersection of cinema with the peak of the Canadian Gold Rush.

    Bill Morrison's documentary transports us to a landscape where early cinema intersected with the peak of the Canadian Gold Rush.

  • Don't Call Me Son

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    Anna Muylaert • 2016 • Brazil • Pierre's world shifts when forced to live with his biological family

    A poetic, provocative portrait of a young man's fluidity, Don't Call Me Son offers a richly layered examination of family, class, and sexuality in contemporary Brazil.

    Living with...

  • Elena

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    Andrey Zvyagintsev • 2011 • Russia • A woman fights for what's hers after her husband's death

    Delving into the psyche of a morally ambiguous female protagonist, and featuring a haunting score by Philip Glass, Elena is a bold and stylish study of crime and punishment in contemporar...