Ben Croll

Ultimately, “Golda” holds three firm beliefs: That Meir is a leader to admire, that Mirren is an actress to adore, and that all interactions must be reverse engineered to fit this limited scope. It makes for a superficial biopic and blinkered bit of history, but does give the venerable performer a new accent to chew on and the chance to blow some smoke.

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.

Brother and Sister seems more like a retread (and a retreat) than anything that’s come prior, marking a new step forward for the lauded director by taking a disappointing step back.

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.

If, when printed and sent off for posterity, a snapshot like “Coma” offers a small degree of archival value — while answering the question Bonello poses at the start — it might also arrive as a postcard from a time all-too-thankfully gone by.

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.