In Léa Morel's long-awaited fourth feature, the end of the world arrives not with spectacle but with the slow disappearance of a single fishing village — and the camera refuses to look away.
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There is a particular exhaustion that settles in around mid-June, when Cannes recedes into memory and the summer's middlebrow slate begins to assert itself. We are, as ever, uninterested in the middle. This week brings Léa Morel's meditative fourth feature, a quietly devastating debut out of Locarno, and two festival discoveries that demand your attention before the discourse moves on. We have written about all of them at length — no star ratings, no hot takes, no algorithmic summaries. Just eleven critics, four cities, and the films we believe will matter by autumn. If that sounds like the kind of cinema conversation you want in your inbox, the newsletter is below.
— Margaret Holloway, Editor-in-Chief · Brooklyn, NY
Theodore Vance's debut is a slow-burn road movie that treats a stranded waitress, a broken radio, and a single snowstorm as the materials of existential dread.
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Anika Brandt's stately ensemble piece uses a single country house and three siblings to ask what, exactly, we are owed by the people who raised us — and whether love is enough.
Read the ReviewEight new essays from the past two weeks — covering festival debuts, repertory rediscoveries, and one quietly masterful streaming oddity.
A grieving architect returns to her hometown and finds the city has been quietly unbuilt around her.
A nine-day weekend becomes a forensic study of bourgeois paralysis in Olivier Ménard's fifth feature.
An understated road movie about a man who drives because he cannot, yet, speak.
A documentary about projectionists becomes a quiet elegy for the rooms they once kept alive.
Two sisters inherit a failing oyster farm and the unexamined history of their late mother's silence.
A neo-noir that uses a single hotel lobby and one very long night to reconsider an exhausted genre.
An experimental theater piece, filmed; a meditation on the lines actors choose to forget.
A new 4K restoration revives a near-forgotten Portuguese gem that deserves a second life.
"Monroe Movie does the only thing that matters for film criticism in 2024: it makes you want to watch the movie. Not the take. Not the discourse. The movie."
— Sight & Sound, "Best Online Film Criticism" Round-up, 2024
Eleven critics across New York, London, Berlin, and Tokyo. Four hundred years of collective moviegoing, give or take a matinee.
Editor-in-Chief · Brooklyn
Founding editor. Has written 1,400+ reviews for Monroe Movie. Believes the best film of every decade is the one you saw at fifteen.
Senior Critic · New York
Covers American independent cinema and repertory. Maintains a private spreadsheet of every film he has seen since 2003.
Contributing Critic · Berlin
Specializes in German and Central European cinema. Former programmer at the Berlinale Forum section.
