The Best Movies & Shows Released in 2023 on Kanopy

You would expect a courtroom drama to be built around damning pieces of evidence, passionate speeches, or certain social issues lending weight to the investigation. But what makes Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall so remarkable is how direct it is. Triet doesn’t treat this case like a puzzle for the audience to […]

The first few minutes of Robot Dreams are so deceptively simple and pleasant that it’s hard to think of a conflict that could keep the film moving. But something does happen—life happens, which sounds annoyingly vague, but it’s true. Life happens, and the rest of the film is about how Dog and Robot survive the […]

Journeying from Africa to Europe without an official permit isn’t just risky, it’s dehumanizing, if not lethal. And though we’ve heard about the many unfortunate ways migrants have suffered, never has the crisis been as intimately and intensely portrayed as in Io Captain. Here, we get to see who Seydou and Moussa were before the […]

La Chimera is often meandering. Scenes flitter about and move at different paces, resembling dreams more than they do reality, but they’re hardly trivial. Just the opposite, they enchant you with their beauty and confront you with deep, existential questions that haunt you long after the film’s run. You won’t find obvious answers here though, […]

As the third instalment in Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” trilogy after First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), Master Gardner rounds up the issues at stake in a most profound way. For anyone who’s seen a film either scripted by Schrader (such as Taxi Driver) or directed by him, there will be […]

The Royal Hotel sees Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) resorting to take up a dire live-in job behind the bar in a remote desert part of Western Australia. Although they’re warned that they’d “have to be okay with a little male attention” in the outcast mining town, their financial precarity overrides the potential […]

On the one hand, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a tense thriller—an excellently set-up heist that makes you wonder, until the end, whether the low-budget operation succeeds or not. On the other hand, it’s a thoughtful rumination on the evil and influence of Big Oil, which despite its relentless destruction of environments and […]

Abel Ferrara’s protagonists have always searched for higher meaning in a flawed, messed-up world of pain and violence. If 1992’s Bad Lieutenant took Harvey Keitel to church for one of American indie cinema’s most spectacular endings, Padre Pio doesn’t offer such solace. Ferrara (who’s been living and working in Rome for years now) teamed up […]

The agonizing tug of war between dogma and desire is sharply illustrated in writer-director Laurel Parmet’s feature debut, set inside the claustrophobic confines of a conservative Christian community in Kentucky. Seventeen-year-old Jem (Eliza Scanlen) is at the age her elders believe is the right time to start thinking about a lifelong partner — a choice […]

Jules’ wacky premise — an extra-terrestrial crash-lands in eccentric widower Milton’s (Ben Kingsley) flowerbeds — is a bit of a misdirection. While the movie is technically a sci-fi (featuring, as it does, some very out-there alien engineering), it’s really a charming, mostly-human drama about the isolation and surreality of aging.  Though the mute presence of […]

Strange things are happening in the sleepy cul-de-sac where Cameron Edwin (comic Jim Gaffigan) lives: cars are falling from the sky, space rockets are crash-landing in his backyard, and his doppelgänger has just moved in next door and stolen his job. Unnerved by all these weird occurrences and feeling like a failure in light of […]

Who among us hasn’t committed a white lie to save a relationship? And who among us hasn’t yearned for the full and brutal truth? In You Hurt My Feelings, Nicole Holofcener digs into that paradox and delivers a film that is honest and funny in equal measure. Here, the writer-director doesn’t just use a hilarious […]