Ben Croll

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.

Small Things Like Things is a modest gem.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It requires, and ultimately rewards, patience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 film isn’t a total wash. Seydoux finds ways to move and emote through her Noh mask, and Dumont finds interesting avenues to explore, tracking the uneasy dance between compassion and commodification when dealing with hot-button stories. Only it’s all too much, too long, too repetitive, too one-note, too contemptuous of the very idea of cinematic pleasure to really land.

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.

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.

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

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.

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