Critic's Notebook

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook 5 days ago The whole thing is console-coded, a living-room, controller-in-hand fantasy that feels quaint in the age of PC gaming. Whether that’s a flaw or a feature depends on whether you ever fought over the second controller. Go to Full Review Kung Fu Soccer (2026) 22% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook 5 days ago Seen from the present moment, Lucy and Kühn are not so much characters as national-mood emblems with cheekbones. Go to Full Review Gentle Monster (2026) 69% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Oct 29, 2026 The camera that was meant to extract a confession instead hands him a stage, and he mistakes the attention for absolution. Go to Full Review When a Witness Recants (2026) 100% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Oct 24, 2026 Instead of adding filler, they expand the story inward, transforming Mr. Shinkai’s gossamer-thin anime archetypes into characters with real, heavy psychological friction. Go to Full Review 5 Centimeters per Second (2025) - - - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Oct 24, 2026 The film is slight next to "Cold War," Mr. Pawlikowski’s previous film, which operated within the same parameters. Go to Full Review Fatherland (2026) 93% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Oct 18, 2026 In "Case 137," the machinery of accountability is not necessarily broken. It may be functioning precisely as intended. Go to Full Review Case 137 (2025) 95% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Oct 16, 2026 The past deserves more than a succession of recognizable tragedies and a climactic exercise in narrative bookkeeping. Go to Full Review La Bola Negra (2026) 87% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Oct 10, 2026 In trying to puncture Mr. Musk’s mythology, Mr. Gibney manufactures a little mythology of his own. Go to Full Review Musk (2026) 96% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Oct 8, 2026 The audience is left to choose between religious zealots and secular bigots, as though the only available positions were to endorse the family’s worldview or excuse the authorities’ prejudices. Go to Full Review Fjord (2026) 92% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Sep 10, 2026 The anonymity protects them, but it also creates an unsettling moral question: when responsibility is distributed among so many people and so many procedures, who, exactly, is accountable? Go to Full Review NAZA (2026) 100% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Sep 9, 2026 "A Good Little Soldier" understands that the most poisonous workplace is not necessarily the one that openly declares itself ruthless. It is the one that tells you, repeatedly and convincingly, that it cares. Go to Full Review A Good Little Soldier (2026) 92% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Sep 8, 2026 The problem is that the film’s coyness eventually begins to feel less like suspense than self-congratulation. Go to Full Review Company (2026) 47% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Sep 3, 2026 Politics is the point. The problem is whose politics. Go to Full Review Wild Horse Nine (2026) 93% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Sep 2, 2026 What looked in 1969 like a brash experiment in tabloid publishing eventually became a blueprint for an entire conception of media. Go to Full Review Ink (2026) 72% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Jun 25, 2026 If genealogy promises access to truth, "Romería" proposes something more unstable but more usable: the possibility that truth may have to be assembled rather than recovered. Go to Full Review Romería (2025) 92% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Jun 23, 2026 They literally have Tyler Durden as their neighbor. Go to Full Review The Invite (2026) 96% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook Jun 10, 2026 Spielberg’s film unfolds in a fantasy of hypothetical dangers while remaining almost completely oblivious to the far more immediate threats already shaping the world beyond the theater doors. Go to Full Review Disclosure Day (2026) 79% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook May 15, 2026 "Parallel Tales" functions so transparently as a kind of self-justification, its dramatic tensions often feel strategically misplaced. Go to Full Review Parallel Tales (2026) 19% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook May 12, 2026 Its elliptical construction never feels self-conscious; revelations emerge naturally, with the light touch of a filmmaker secure enough not to overexplain. Go to Full Review The Electric Kiss (2026) 54% - -

Martin Tsai Critic's Notebook May 1, 2026 Whether one finds this persuasive or merely programmatic may depend on one’s tolerance for abstraction untethered from dramatic momentum. Go to Full Review Silent Friend (2025) 94% - -