Ben Croll

Few leave unscathed as the handheld camera whip-pans and fast-zooms between cringe-comedy and genuine pathos and back again — especially once the hapless prof paves his own road to hell with his good intentions.

The result is an always engaging, sometimes enraging, and occasionally revelatory doc, stretching from Civil Rights to Substack, that every so often reveals something more jarringly (and appealingly) adversarial.

One of Ozon’s richest and most satisfying works in years — that rarest of literary adaptations, one that honors a foundational text precisely by finding something new to say.

Ben Hania shows little interest in agitprop. By burrowing into the granular details of this one tragedy on this one day, she arrives at an extraordinarily far-reaching articulation of an acutely contemporary emotion.

Instead, the film skewers and sympathizes in equal measure, mocking the pipe dreams suggested by its title and stirred by even the faintest hint of recognition, while still making clear that Ed’s literary gifts are genuinely worth the fuss.

Playing like variations on a theme, Jarmusch’s shaggy-dog triptych affably loops through moments of awkwardness and family strain, finding fresh notes in the repetition.

The Testament of Ann Lee is a loud film about the quiet within, almost always choosing to impress rather than entertain.

As filmmakers, Covino and Marvin are singularly committed to each bit, pushing all premises to the comic extreme. Their characters, however, are less than steadfast and true.

Yes is a tortured film, from a tortured artist, about a tortured man, meant to torture us with a kaleidoscope of anguish and a coterie of grotesques. Formally, the film nearly bursts at the seams, as Lapid’s camera spins fast and frantic and out-of-control, with the color contrast and soundtrack turned all-the-way up, keeping the film forever on assault mode.

Many might come up with a sequence that overlays gangster and horror tropes with bursts of violence and dance; few would then toggle between first-and third-person perspectives; and only Bi Gan would have that first-person camera start singing karaoke.

Taking a sturdy, mainstream premise — a big-city careerist reflecting on her life path during a trip back to the holler, in a setup that faintly echoes “Sweet Home Alabama,” among a hundred other rom-coms — and shading it with moral grays, natural light, and a more unvarnished turn from a well-known star, Leave One Day plays uncannily like a Gallic cover of a Sundance movie, gussied up and vaunted onto the international stage.

A procedural is never just about the case, even as the inquiry barrels along. To his credit, Moll ably recognizes as much, making his procedural a fine example of the form.

A labor of love and a product of considerable craft, Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague — which chronicles the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless — is more than just a valentine to the French New Wave; the film is also a stealth showcase for a filmmaker rarely heralded (or for that matter, tribuned) for his technical sophistication.

Aster has always had a knack for confrontation, while Phoenix works best as an open-nerve. That the duo should prove so adept tapping into a vein of neurotic action is one of the many brutal surprises in a social satire as blunt and broad as America itself.

Without ever leaving the bar, Blue Moon offers a snapshot of wartime America expressed wholly through shifting public tastes (and the attending egos left shattered.)

The film, in short, exhilarates and exhausts in equal measure, abundant in ambition and arduous, at points, in execution. And after six long years of waiting, one can hardly fault a bit of excess generosity – even if the feast leaves you stuffed if not quite satisfied.

The themes are broad and brassy as the film that explores them, and all the better still. It was about time for someone to take such a big swing, and to hit the ball so far out the park.

While Youth (Homecoming) certainly benefits from the seven hours of weaving-machine whir that preceded, the film quite ably stands alone.

If the three main draws are too confirmed in respective talents to deliver a subpar performance or a slipshod composition, their shared billing can never quite deliver this film from listlessness.

Though adapted from the book (and life) of William S. Burroughs, this carnal film builds just as much on the filmmaker’s ongoing interest in unmet desire, finding greater ecstasy in the wait than in the act.

Don’t let the name fool you: April is a wintery affair. By far the most uncompromising vision to play at this year’s Venice Film Festival, director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s slow cinema horror show might also be the most audacious.

The Order might be the filmmaker’s most accomplished work to date, offsetting a kind of broody fatalism against natural splendor, and punctuating the bloody affair with an action beat.

Taken as a whole, The Brutalist both mourns and celebrates American ambition –the ambitions of an immigrant class trying for a new life with no guarantee of success, and the ambitions of a filmmaker filling a canvas with a lifetime of obsessions.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice goes all-in on the legacy front, offering everything you want and less, playing as a Burton buffet that leaves you stuffed if not quite satisfied, and in no real hurry to go back for thirds.

Like a sheep in wolf’s clothing, Halina Reijn’s surprisingly genteel Babygirl might bare the occasional fang, but it doesn’t have much bite.

We take frequent and foolish pleasure watching the four charismatic leads brush up against one another while bristling against their assigned roles, with the film giving performer time to shine.

Viewed under the right conditions — that is to say, late at night, in a certain headspace and surrounded by an audience of fellow travelers ready to take the ride – “Cuckoo” will offer an awful lot of big-screen fun. Only those external factors are nearly necessary to meet an overeager film with only one note to play.

Small Things Like Things is a modest gem.

The director’s comfort with the more placid rhythms of arthouse animation results in some appealing detours whenever the frenetic narrative stops to feel the breeze.

This slight-but-winning confection will have little effect on the controversial director’s galvanizing public image but, after a string of stuffy disappointments, Coup de Chance will offer comfort to the filmmaker’s many completists – especially given Allen’s intimation that this 50th film might well be his last.

If Dogman has very little to say, it coasts on style amiably enough, showcasing another gonzo turn from Caleb Landry Jones, and presaging Luc Besson’s return. For good or ill, this old mutt still has some bite.

A peak-performance engine running wholly on charisma, Richard Linklater’s Hit Man revives and revitalizes a genre in awfully short supply.

If The Killer is chilly-to-the-touch and anchored by a quiet and intensely physical performance by Fassbender, the filmmakers nevertheless wring an awful lot of wit from this frigid world.

Like any good conductor, Cooper knows that the smallest of gestures elicits the most thunderous response.

That the film remains witty and wise throughout its most lurid stretches makes the Venice Golden Lion contender one of the year’s most unexpected heart-warmers. That the filmmakers lavish commensurate attention on all those bawdy embellishments also guarantees you a bloody good time along the way.

Given the film’s abridged runtime and its genuine playfulness, even Wes-skeptics might find themselves cracking a wry grin from time to time.

It should come with little surprise that Ferrari astounds when Mann’s focus narrows to pure gear-head reverie; unfortunately, in between the film’s narrative engine often sputters and stalls.

With story beats and character turns that strain well beyond familiarity, Elemental matches formal adventure with storytelling timidity. Here is a new spin on the old formula, livened up by advances in technology and delivered with real artistry. The film is full of complex and volatile parts, all held together in the most elemental of containers.

Like a Brueghel or a Bosch, Youth (Spring) is less an individual portrait than a bustling portrayal of types — lovesick fools and weary old souls, agitators and wallflowers, peacocks and young parents-to-be, all united and made equal by the same shared and endless labor and the same cramped living quarters. And all of them — but for two outliers — united by age.

Corsini has delivered a wonderful film, a beautifully calibrated coming-of-age drama that ever so elegantly flutters questions of race, class, guilt and opportunity through a seaside summer breeze.

As it calls the institution of marriage to the stand, Triet’s piercing film holds the ambient tensions and illogical loose ends of domestic life against the harsh and rational light of a legal system that searches for order in chaos.

Neither provocation nor counter-point, The Zone of Interest is instead a furtherance, a new take on an ungraspable madness we must never let ourselves forget.

More frustrating than a misfire, “Jeanne du Barry” suffers instead from near total myopia, roaring to life with wit and ingenuity when the constellations align and the lead’s star can shine, and dwindling before the risk of any possible eclipse. The film burns hot and bright — and quickly flames out.

No matter how outwardly anodyne, nearly every frame is a product of rigorous blocking and choreography, stamping each shot with a kind of Good Filmmaking Seal of Approval that makes the chasm between the film’s deliberateness and opacity all the more vast.

Afire doesn’t have that much story to tell or cards to turn over. When it does run out of reveals, we’re left with a character too thick to catch up and an approach that begins to double itself.

At a taut and elliptical ninety minutes, a couple of awkward final steps hardly feel like fatal flaws. Getting in, getting down, and getting out as style hopping sizzle reel, Disco Boy heralds a promising new talent who totally has the moves.

Dhont tracks it with the elegant (if hardly new) symbolism of the changing of the seasons. Carefree summer gives way to the fall harvest, which soon leads to a winter of shared discontent. But he is a generous and patient director of his unknown and more established performers, giving all moments to shine.

It’s a bit of a mess, no doubt about that, but a fascinating one.

Efira imparts her character’s early anticipation — and eventual yearning, bliss, and hurt — using nothing but a glance. Rachel is a woman of the world with a universe inside.

If Panahi makes us understand Jafar, he also recognizes the rippling effect of his choices. Such is the dense and intricate layering of this deceptively simple film, which has a no-budget aesthetic and a novelistic sprawl.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed remains, at heart, a simple and intimate profile of a woman who sees art and activism as one and the same.

Once more, the filmmaker’s level of formal control is exemplary and precise, and his lead actress game for whatever comes her way. Only one can’t shake the feeling that all of it runs against the film’s ostensible message, that is another case of Monroe’s agency taken from her.

Dead for a Dollar is a proud heir to a longstanding lineage of low-budget westerns. Consider that a feature and a bug.

Like the hundred pounds of latex cast over Fraser’s body, the film itself requires its performers to act through an overbearing pall. But for the most part, it has room for only one voice.

Genuinely frightening in stretches and with the creep-o-meter jacked up to 1,000 all the way through, “Bones and All” is somehow more and less than a simple horror flick, and not quite a rambling romance.

“Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind” is an amiable and easy watch that doesn’t explore too many of the singer’s more unseemly aspects and, by design, cannot.

An autobiographical portrait that somehow leaves you knowing less about the subject at hand, and a study of actors, warts and all, that offers little insight into the artistic process.

When chewing through some oddly phrased text, Qualley’s non-verbal tics offer twice the information with half the winces, making “Stars at Noon” sometimes feel like two films in one. There’s the paranoid thriller and the dreamlike dirge; a steamy drama and its feminist reappraisal; the work of a master with the promise of new kinks to iron out and maybe greater heights to which to soar.

What sets The Eight Mountains apart is the degree to which co-directors van Groeningen and Vandermeersch strip away so much pretense and artifice, leaving nothing but a strong central question: What makes and prevents people from meaningfully connecting? The filmmakers then strike a refreshingly unsentimental tone when answering it.

With bleak serenity of a man who has peered into the abyss and responded with a smile, the filmmaker offers no answer or easy way out to the intractable, and perhaps foundational, human capacity for hate than with his own virtuosic talent.

Soberly shifting from war thriller to apocalyptic drama to oddly sentimental buddy film, “Onoda” bears the weight of its many filmic forefathers. But as it pulls off such moves with such quiet force, it also represents a different kind of emergence.

This Much I Know to Be True mostly offers the simple pleasures of good songwriting, performed by charismatic singers, captured elegantly onscreen. And that’s not nothing! However, come the one-hour mark, Dominik does work in more interview footage, revealing a film in many ways structured as a response to its predecessor.

The breath of life and beating heart at the center of countless, Russian nesting doll layers of artifice and art-house reference, actor Denis Menochet doesn’t just anchor Peter von Kant, he makes the Francois Ozon project a film.

Like a steady hand holding a straight razor, Argento cuts through the story with clean swipes. Dark Glasses has little room for twists and turns; it holds nothing up its sleeve and asks little more of the viewer than to sit still and enjoy the ride.

Like nearly all of Dupieux’s previous work, Incredible but True stretches a high-concept, low-execution premise about as far as it can go, wrapping things up the nanosecond before they outstay their welcome. But unlike his previous work, this film leaves the viewer with a pleasant, and almost bittersweet aftertaste; it almost leaves you wanting more.

Amirpour takes on the Big Easy, mixing a heady cocktail of EDM beats, Hollywood treacle and southern sleaze and sipping down Bourbon Street.

Co-directors Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn would rather offer viewers a no-concept, light and breezy big-screen hangout, betting that audiences will turn out to watch a pair of beloved celebs cut loose, and that the actors’ megawatt charisma will be enough to carry the show. At least for a certain amount of time, the bet pays off.

Another World succeeds in captivating on the sheer strength of its caustic tone, which offers a sustained performance of ice-cold contempt quite unlike anything Brizé has tried before.

Like that abyss, the film offers a substantial degree of exploration for those willing to do the work and take the dive.

The Last Duel reveals itself as something all too rare on the current Hollywood field of battle: an intelligent and genuinely daring big budget melee that is — above all else — the product of recognizable artistic collaboration.

Doing away with any pretense of docu-realism, Spencer is neither a film about specifics nor any of conventional biopic; it is instead a sort of haunted house chamber piece that doesn’t try to locate the real woman behind the legend — as the title might suggest — as it does to reimagine her within a wholly different pop lexicon.

Parallel Mothers often finds Almodóvar doing Almodóvar, leaning into all of his tics and obsession for this tale of two women whose lives become forever linked when they meet in a maternity ward.

Make no mistake, Petrov’s Flu is a formidable piece of filmmaking; it is also an exercise in style that uses its own virtuoso technique as a blunt-force tool against the audience.

The implications — ethical and otherwise — that the film raises are too vast to be papered over with a closing plea for tighter gun control. The sentiment is fair and true and absolutely valid. But delivered as sober end titles at the end of “Nitram,” one can’t help but notice a certain irony in such small white letters barely hiding a much darker abyss.

Appraising her country’s various ills with a healthy dose of Gallic gallows humor, the filmmaker has delivered a kind of screwball comedy full of physical gags, rat-a-tat dialogue and intricate choreography that veers towards a weightier third act while offering plenty of belly laughs along the way.

Casablanca Beats argues that the power of personal expression can turn the world on its head. And for a good spell, the film does just that.

Between Two Worlds is highly self-aware, at some points simply playing up the odd dissonance of seeing as glamorous a figure as Juliette Binoche scrubbing toilets, and at other points making more caustic commentary on the impossible task the book and adaptation set out to accomplish.

Ducournau’s follow-up to “Raw” is more than comfortable in its genre trappings, offering grab bag nods to past masters and positively delighting in sex, violence and grisly prosthetics as it chants “Long live the new flesh” from the film world’s toniest perch, inviting all gathered to join along.

It requires, and ultimately rewards, patience.

You get the sense that Hamaguchi is playing with the idea of prologues, of elements that sit just beyond a narrative arc that shades everything that follows. It’s a wonderful impulse that works beautifully in the film — perhaps a little too beautifully, however, because the prologue outshines everything that comes next.

Perhaps it’s a way for Hansen-Løve to show the way artists pick from their own lives, or maybe it’s a way to muddy the meta waters even more. That ambiguity does not always work to the benefit of a film that always teeters on the brink of self-indulgence, mind you.

For all of his self-imposed restraints, Ozon remains a terrific actors’ director, with both Marceau and especially Dussollier giving lively performances that afford the film its limited spark.

You can’t call a film as lurid and alive as Benedetta a closing statement, but there is something valedictory about the erotic religious drama, which finds time to explore questions of voyeurism, sadism, masochism, systems of power, perversion, repression, rebellion, storytelling, divinity, irony and belief. Oh, and sex — plenty and plenty of nun-on-nun sex.

Bracketed by genre on both ends, the middle third of this 140-minute film becomes a gentle tale about a misfit finding in a platonic relationship a kind of second chance in life. In other words, it becomes a certain kind of Tom McCarthy film — and then gets back to the overarching story.

Despite the sound of gunfire off in the distance, Notturno is less a film about life during wartime than the life that subsequently follows it, as those damaged by the violence try to move forward.

Does it all work? Not quite, but you can’t fault a film for its ambition, least of all one that does manage to bring it all together for a deeply moving home stretch.

Larraín’s odd little film dances to the beat of its own drum, that’s for certain. But it does pay off in a wholly satisfying way.

The craft is meticulous and the level of detail elaborate, but the story itself is simple as can be.

An easy-going film that coolly ambles forward as a series of short sketches and vignettes, while maintaining a fairly detached tone.

The film studiously avoids melodrama or theatrics of any sort, enfolding instead as a kind of melancholic tone poem.

Bong delivers a stunning return to form with this newest venture, which takes bold leaps between tenors and tone, but holds together beautifully thanks to the director’s unparalleled visual/spatial sophistication, and his unsparing social indictment.

Ly rather cleverly inoculates his film to charges of repetition by outright owning them. Of course, you’ve seen stories like before. The film freely admits, these exact same stories, these preventable tragedies and pointless injustices have been manifesting themselves for hundreds of years.

Visually ravishing ... [A] piercingly intelligent treatise on art, agency and queer love in the 18th century.

[A] sci-fi head trip ... If the film can be somewhat unsubtle in its thematic questions, it matches that with an equally loud color palette – and you know what, that’s perfectly fine.

If the narrative can sometimes wane, the film’s enveloping atmospherics remain tight throughout.

Not only does Shoplifters skillfully entwine several disparate threads he’s explored over his prolific career, it does so with the understated confidence and patient elegance of an artist who has fully matured.

In his 2014 Palme d’Or winner, Ceylan unpacked thorny issues of ethics and morality with a surgeon’s steady patience; he employs a similar approach here, only the territory is much less fertile.

Honoré’s deliberately paced, willfully unsentimental character study is like the yin to the yang of last year’s Cannes Grand Prize winner, “BPM.” Whereas Robin Campillo’s ACT-UP drama argued that the personal was political, and did so with lightning-bolt urgency, Honoré’s film is a more subdued rumination on community and connection.