Leo Goldsmith

Leo Goldsmith 4Columns May 1, 2026 As nonfiction, Our Land at first seems like a very different kind of film, and yet it is still greatly concerned with the limitations of perspective, as well as the forms and technologies that capture and make its events legible as images. Go to Full Review Our Land (2025) 98% - -

Leo Goldsmith 4Columns Nov 15, 2025 ...Sirāt is...something more grandiose and self-consciously epic, an apocalyptic action spectacle whose back half in particular is structured around an increasingly grim and nerve-wracking sequence of events, catastrophes, and even explosions. Go to Full Review Sirāt (2025) 90% - -

Leo Goldsmith Artforum Jan 26, 2024 Somber as these proceedings are, what’s most distinctive about the film’s distillation of the trial is its perhaps inevitable element of theater. Go to Full Review The Trial (2023) - - - -

Leo Goldsmith 4Columns Apr 21, 2023 Even Beau Is Afraid’s character portraits—usually a strength in Aster’s work—seem, despite the tumescent running time, strangely underdeveloped, even caricatural...it’s a surprisingly uninspired effort. Go to Full Review Beau Is Afraid (2023) 67% 71%

Leo Goldsmith Artforum Sep 15, 2022 This fantasy -- one of prevention, perfectibility, and preparedness -- is Riotsville’s true theme, and its principal irony resides in the way the documentary’s own mechanics are entangled with its construction. Go to Full Review Riotsville, USA (2022) 91% 56%

Leo Goldsmith 4Columns Mar 25, 2022 It conveys the simplistic sense that the largest issues of the dayof institutionalized violence, oppression, and social stratificationare mere personal pathologies. Isnt the point not to free your mind, but to free Palestine? Go to Full Review Ahed's Knee (2021) 74% 50%

Leo Goldsmith 4Columns Jun 4, 2021 The subject matter at hand demands a degree of toughness that All Light, Everywhere shies away from in favor of a more fluid rumination that doesn't quite land on a point. Go to Full Review All Light, Everywhere (2021) 94% 64%

Leo Goldsmith Reverse Shot Feb 18, 2021 Just Don't Think plays a game of its own, then, candidly revealing one moment and slyly obscuring the next. Go to Full Review Just Don't Think I'll Scream (2019) 94% 62%

Leo Goldsmith Hyperallergic Feb 22, 2020 The film functions much like their analytical camera -- allowing us to bring the past closer to us, to examine it in detail, to reach out and touch it. Go to Full Review - - - -

Leo Goldsmith Not Coming to a Theater Near You May 21, 2019 The monster battles... are among the best in the entire series. Go to Full Review Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack! (2001) 65% 78%

Leo Goldsmith Not Coming to a Theater Near You May 21, 2019 While there is an overall lack of excitement... the film nonetheless delivers on anonymous citizens fleeing in terror, roaring beasts blasting and beating the hell out of each other, and iconic landmarks and urban infrastructure being utterly devastated. Go to Full Review Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla (1994) 63% 79%

Leo Goldsmith Not Coming to a Theater Near You May 13, 2019 While Terror of Mechagodzilla is not exactly a good film, it at least veers into slightly darker territory than some of the later Showa efforts. Go to Full Review Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975) 43% 59%

Leo Goldsmith Not Coming to a Theater Near You May 13, 2019 This showdown, a father-and-son team up held amid a blizzard orchestrated in a last ditch effort by the experimental meteorologists, is the film's true highlight, a curious denouement to an already odd film. Go to Full Review Son of Godzilla (1967) 63% 30%

Leo Goldsmith Not Coming to a Theater Near You May 11, 2019 Invasion has many pleasures, not least of which is its resemblance to Honda's earlier, more purely sci-fi ventures... But perhaps its most remarkable feature is its subtle, but noticeable steps in rehabilitating Godzilla's character. Go to Full Review Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) 50% 63%

Leo Goldsmith 4Columns Feb 22, 2019 The shape of Transit becomes close to that of a double helix, in which the convoluted managerial processes of immigration become intertwined in the recursive patterns of desire. Go to Full Review Transit (2018) 94% - -

Leo Goldsmith Reverse Shot Feb 15, 2019 The documentary is more substantial (and dialectical) than a Facebook dog-spotting video. But it dabbles in the same paradoxes of humanity's peculiar relationship with animals that most animal media share. Go to Full Review Los Reyes (2018) 100% 67%

Leo Goldsmith Not Coming to a Theater Near You Oct 27, 2018 This is, one might argue, what the audience has paid to see and what they've always wanted to see: the then-most famous couple in the world, at home in both the literal and figurative sense, unguarded and au naturel. Go to Full Review Eyes Wide Shut (1999) 77% 74%

Leo Goldsmith 4Columns Oct 26, 2018 It's a pity that a work so precisely constructed as Burning too often devolves into yet another male-insecurity movie...dwelling intently on male pathology at the level of character psychology and signposting its connections to the problems of the day. Go to Full Review Burning (2018) 95% 80%

Leo Goldsmith Village Voice Feb 20, 2018 Barber's overabundance of language and logos - her insistence on the artificiality and constructedness of the Scientist's natural environs - positions the jungle as a space of subconscious play rather than a lost paradise. Go to Full Review In the Jungle (2018) - - - -

Leo Goldsmith Village Voice Jan 16, 2018 We are not, as in so many a contemporary documentary, made to merely identify with the position of cameraperson, but are forced to consider and find our own ethical and political positions. Go to Full Review Bitter Money (2016) 89% - -