Ben Croll

For all its stodgy touches, the film itself is like a cast-in-amber relic of the not-so-distant past.

It’s all perfectly well-done, and it all recedes into memory the instant you leave the theater.

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.

Toxically indulgent ... Add up nothing but the shots of jiggling butts and you’ll have an hour’s worth of footage.

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.

Take your seat and bask in the presence of the coolest characters actors working today, but don’t ask for more than a few chuckles. Don’t call it fan service – call it coolness oblige.

What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? is hardly a disappointment, but it does, in places, feel like a missed opportunity.

Mike Leigh’s expansive, exhaustive, and extraordinarily thorough portrait of early 19th-century political activism is, to put it one way, deliberate in pace and tone. To put it bluntly — and in an argot more readily familiar to its cast of working-class characters — the film is bloody well dull.

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.

No one is spared in Donbass, director Sergei Loznitsa’s scathing look at the (still ongoing) war in eastern Ukraine.

This is a story about power, but it’s also a story about place. More than that, you’ve really got to see it to believe it.

It has a couple of nice reversals, two or three good laugh lines, and a caustic but not too acid skewering of cultural institutions. It goes down easy, it’s relatively unmemorable and it’s fine. Close, on the other hand, is exquisite.

For all of its meticulous construction and often masterful craft, the film remains something to coldly admire rather than easily embrace, often playing more as a collection of accomplished filmmaking moments than as a fully enthralling whole.

Though the film occasionally assumes the airs of a slow-burning thriller, the overall product remains a firmly intellectual exercise.

The ultimate success of 7 Days in Entebbe varies from scene to scene, and even more from actor to actor.

Unsane brims with curiosity about digital technology, discomfort with corporate bureaucracies, and is spiked through and through with icy wit – in short, it could never be anything but a Soderbergh film, and a particularly delicious one at that.

Victoria & Abdul is an otherwise benignly toothless, pleasantly glossy affair, but it does force us to confront one tricky question: When treating a subject as fraught as British imperial rule, when does a film’s benign inoffensiveness become offensive in and of itself?

Not only is Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri the director’s most accomplished film yet, it’s also his most compassionate.

mother! begins as a slow-burn and builds towards a furious blaze. Awash in both religious and contemporary political imagery, Darren Aronofsky’s allusive film certainly opens itself to a number of allegorical readings, but it also works as a straight-ahead head rush.

An undeniably entertaining watch, Suburbicon stumbles when it tries to recycle effective old ingredients into something new.

Not only is The Shape of Water one of del Toro’s most stunningly successful works, it’s also a powerful vision of a creative master feeling totally, joyously free.

Downsizing is rife with witty visual touches and inspired comic premises but never quite comes together as fully successful whole.

This material could make for a powerful work, but Viceroy’s House is certainly not it.

The always-understated director never mines the domestic situation for excessive melodrama, instead opting to step back and wryly examine the three leads’ contradictory impulses.

For all the great action and idiosyncratic antagonists (Erika Toda, as a brutally efficient warrior who can’t stomach violence is a particular standout) Blade of the Immortal is altogether too much.

Offering plum roles to Catherines Frot and Catherine Deneuve, The Midwife is a minor-key crowd pleaser about friendship, forgiveness and rolling with the punches.

One Week and a Day succeeds in recreating that precise feeling, as hard to articulate as it is commonly felt, where exhaustion wears down any line between emotions.

Ghost in the Shall is a technical knockout, a here-and-now valentine to what design wizardry Hollywood can pull off in 2017. At the same time, it does so in service of a tired tale full of repurposed visual tricks, storytelling clichés and big-studio concessions.

By no means a failed film, this two-hander about toxic-codependency from Romanian director Călin Peter Netzer is best in small-moments and insightful asides, but does a disservice to the relationship at its heart by honing in on one single thought and hammering it home again and again and again.

Spoor remains witty throughout, breaking even the tensest moments with the lead’s acid-tongued appraisals of the local hunters.

At once a darkly comic social satire, a pitch-black moral thriller and an earnest plea to recognize mental illness, The Dinner is a seven-layer dip overflowing with compelling individual ingredients that, when mixed together, make the finished dish awfully difficult to digest.

Though the film is all surface, that surface is precisely the point.

Anchored by Natalie Portman’s achy-eyed performance, Jackie is, despite a few wrinkles at the end, about the best version of this story you can get.

Wim Wenders’ 3D snoozefest The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez is not a good movie. It’s not a good movie, and at the same time, it doesn’t fail so spectacularly so to provide a compelling secondary reading.

A blood-soaked, bone-crunching hymn to religious devotion and faith, Hacksaw Ridge doesn’t hum Mel Gibson’s favorite themes; it shouts them.

There are sequences and stand-alone shots that will stick with you long after you’ve washed the insipid narration from memory.

Shrouded in grief and chilly to the core, Andrew Dominik’s mournful documentary One More Time With Feeling is at once sobering in tone and intoxicating in style.

Nocturnal Animals is an impressively ambitious effort, one part mean Texas thriller, one part middle-age melodrama, and makes for a meta-textual riddle that is almost as pleasurable to reflect on as it to actually watch.

Though the film is not more than sum of its parts, well, those parts are pretty great. You just wish they belonged to a slightly deeper film.

There’s a great movie buried somewhere in American Honey — heck, there might be two of them. But at its current length, it resembles nothing so much as fine spirit overly diluted with water. The care and quality is all there, but in this iteration they ain’t coming through.

The film traces a strong, steady line to a foregone conclusion, and that steadiness is exactly the point.

Its languid pace befits the Recife setting, and Filho sets many scenes on long walks down the coast or just after a particularly satisfying mid-day nap. His world is filled with music, dance and wine, and if the film takes a some time to get where it’s going, the beachfront setting remains a pleasant place to stay. Call it an escapist tale about stubbornly staying put.

Filipino director Brillante Mendoza’s neorealist indictment of police corruption looks unlike any other film playing in Cannes’ Official Competition. It’s just that what sets the film apart is its visual ugliness.

A spectacularly misjudged mix of humanitarian intentions and gonzo-terrible execution.

Though a vengeance riff, it remains a Farhadi film all through, so dancing around each other means a lot of talking about action instead of doing action. And that’s fine – the former playwright is uncommonly gifted in writing third acts, where each line of dialogue and simple gesture are imbued with meaning.

The film is riotously funny, and Isabelle Huppert has never been better.

A small, cyclical film about the value of a small, cyclical life, Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson is a perfect version of itself. His ode to small pleasures and the simple life comes in the form of a simple film that is a small pleasure.

Call it scenery in search of a film. Call it a film in search of a purpose. Call me when Guiraudie releases his next one, because, damn, the guy’s got talent.

Dolan shoots in tightly held close-ups, forgoing spatial staging for the immediate pleasures of fabric and light. Whereas similar imagery filled his previous films with energy and life, here it just makes the somber piece feel more claustrophobic and inert.

It’s a perfectly enjoyable, perfectly forgettable nostalgi-comedy that will be taken to task for not being anything more.

Jean-Stephane Sauvaire’s film is not so much the story of a fighter as it is a story that wants to fight you.

“Mektoub, My Love” is never about anything more than its own style.