Ben Croll

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

More than the fervid cartoon violence and Cage’s rococo line readings, the film’s greatest asset lies in its simple, cold-blooded premise.

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.

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.

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.)

It requires, and ultimately rewards, patience.

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

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.