Ben Croll

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.