Boyd van Hoeij

The main problem of Happy as Lazzaro is that it's unclear what Rohrwacher finally wants to say in part two, which combines the near-documentary realism of her first feature with the occasional flights of fancy of her second.

The Theory of Everything works best as a kind of surrealist carrousel of film influences and physics references and as such, it’s mostly enjoyable.

Though the script... is underdeveloped and pic is assembled in workmanlike fashion, it does feature some nicely modulated performances.

Impressive in parts, but wildly uneven as a whole.

Since from her other features it is clear she's an uncompromising director, it should perhaps come as no surprise that this film is as unapologetically personal and self-absorbed as it is, making no attempt to draw in viewers perhaps unfamiliar with the filmmaker.

Perhaps it is precisely Dumont’s point that satire and the real world have been converging for a long time, but this alone is not enough insight to sustain a movie that’s over two hours long and contains a protagonist few will warm to. for such a high-powered auteur/leading-lady collaboration, France feels decidedly unspectacular.

Perhaps Qu’s near-passive tone is meant to suggest that women don’t have much of a voice in society. But the story's almost complete lack of emotion also negatively impacts the viewers’ interest in the women’s plight. What does come through loud and clear is that Angels Wear White paints an unflattering portrait of not only how women are treated but also of how men try to protect their turf at all costs.

Directed by French director Anne Fontaine (Two Mothers/Adore, Coco Before Channel), this is another gorgeously appointed but also slightly overly formal film, with a muted emotional payoff that, while appropriate for the story’s convent setting, doesn’t exactly make for must-see cinema.

The film has two powerful, loosely connected stories to tell but not a unifying vision that could package the often-potent material for maximum impact.

This bouncy and effervescent film often has the kind of timeless charms that can also be found in the early New Wave films, even if the screenplay, set against the backdrop of the massive 1999 student protests in Mexico City, unsuccessfully tries to smuggle in a slightly more serious and topical undercurrent via the backdoor.

While Afineevsky generally manages to pack in a lot of detail, analysis, nuance and humanism, this is largely absent in the last chapter, which feels like it was rushed together at the last minute and didn’t receive the same amount of time, care and thought as the film’s previous chapters

Quillevere, co-scribe Mariette Desert and editor Thomas Marchand struggle to keep audiences fully involved in the story... Thankfully, the performances are all first-rate.

Both an unexciting and by-the-numbers history lesson and an inside-view, you-are-there look at an underreported armed conflict, the documentary This Is Congo is almost as full of contradictions as the nation it is trying to portray.

For this critic, the events in the home stretch finally feel too much like concessions to the necessities of the laws of fictional drama, with first an unexpected twist followed by a melodramatic one.

Marcello never quite manages to shoehorn in both more than a century’s worth of European struggles and sociopolitical thinking and the full story of Eden’s downfall after he’s finally become successful. Indeed, these weighty concerns capsize the entire enterprise in the final stretch, where the story runs aground on an iceberg of undigested ideas, barely developed themes and bad hair choices.

Graizer too often seems afraid to potentially offend anyone (but especially straight audiences along for the ride) and too polite to explore the darker recesses of grief, desire and sexuality.

Instead of complex personalities and dilemmas, we mostly get clichés.

The main point of the film remains its style, which is so constantly and loudly reinforced that it’s often hard to concentrate on the story.

A bright, light confection about resilience and joie de vivre into old(er) age that’s as predictable as it is disposable.

Escalante struggles to illuminate how sex and violence are connected and what this, in turn, means for more specialized types of aggressiveness and oppression, such as misogyny and homophobia.

Visually, the results are quite often striking, and they are also sharply cut together. But there’s a nagging suspicion throughout that there’s been more preparation for especially the set-pieces than would normally be the case on a documentary.

The film was shot chronologically and this is clear in the increasing fluidity of Gras’ camerawork, which is less and less searching the closer they get to the city.

Sophisticated cutting brings out the story’s complex emotional undercurrents, though “Breakdown’s” less convincingly scripted second half sputters more often than it shines.

Whereas Aferim! was a thrilling epic that uncovered a piece of Romanian history heretofore largely ignored, Hearts hardly develops a pulse, hiding the faces of the protagonists in immobile medium and wide shots while any possible emotions get snowed under by non-contextualized intellectual musings and socio-politico-historical details.

Very knowing about female friendships and the different possible reactions to forced social change, this is a lovingly acted film that, unfortunately, derails in the third act; the calamitous events depicted work fine as a blunt metaphor for where the country found itself or was headed, but doesn't convince on a narrative level or in terms of its psychological impact on the characters.

This is the second feature from Pakistani-Norwegian filmmaker Iram Haq, but unfortunately it lacks the nuance and insight of her impressively poignant yet controlled debut feature, I Am Yours.

Barbosa doesn’t seem very interested in questioning Buchmann’s intentions — the idea of cultural appropriation never comes up, for starters — with the young man depicted as sincere if clearly naive.

No good performance can hide the fact that what happens during roughly the first hour is perhaps beautifully laid out and told but also extremely familiar. There is an expectation that Akin, also credited with the screenplay, will somehow step it up in the second half with a new twist or unexpected insight. But quite the opposite happens, as the narrative becomes both more melodramatic and erratic.

Slight but quite amusing ... But despite a few good gags and committed performances, the nagging suspicion that this eccentric concept would’ve worked better as a medium-length work or even a short remains.

If the film remains largely watchable it is because Farhadi has cast some of the finest actors in Spain and they know how to breathe life into their characters even when they don’t have all that much to do (though a few of them have quite a lot to say).

The work’s considerations of the intimate connection among being, art and life finally feel quite superficial.

Though complementary, the pic’s images and voiceover never quite fuse into a single whole.

McCarthy more often seems to apply a generic style to his substance, rather than actually use a stylistic choice to help suggest or demonstrate something about his story and characters.

Sobel’s inexperience with the feature-length format and the requirements of specific genres shows, with Workers Cup constantly struggling to reconcile the horrible fate of what are essentially modern-day slaves with the aspirational side and dreams of victory and beyond that are the end game of any underdog sports story.

The film’s first hour and last reels are now a not completely organic fit, taking things from an intimate and personal level to a global scale while skipping over an awful lot of things in between.

Because Sono tries to set the manga’s storyline, with its stylized violence, in the very real, post-earthquake/tsunami disaster area, Himizu struggles to find a coherent tone.

More convincing in its outrage and inspiring in its show of what the people’s will can do as long as the masses protest and demand to be heard, than as a rigorous historical analysis.

A serviceable piece of B-movie entertainment without an ounce of originality

[A] handsomely produced if occasionally rather old-fashioned feeling period drama, which plays like a soap opera in which the characters just happen to have better manners and finery.

Rahim has a great face but isn’t given enough opportunity to make it clear to audiences what his character is going through beyond the most basic emotions.

The overall result remains quite light, is occasionally funny but finally never manages to probe very deeply.

The acting from the central four actors is quite soulful, but we don’t get enough access to these characters’ inner conflicts. Too often, the narrative’s configuration feels like an intriguing second draft instead of a ready-to-shoot script, something that someone with an external eye might help finesse into something truly captivating.

A less successful aspect of the film is Cognet’s attempt to tie the concentration camps as contemporary spaces into the narrative, with shots of the now practically empty landscapes -- some tourists here and there notwithstanding -- interspersed throughout.

The Players is an odd beast that, like all omnibus films, is only as strong as its weakest link.

Though a lot of it is well written and directed and, quite often, funny or poignant, the individual scenes rarely become part of a larger whole.

Sagnier and especially Baye try to locate the heart in their cartoonish maternal characters, and newcomer Lasseron is at least a warm and spunky presence in a role that's severely underwritten, though all of them are frequently upstaged by all the bells and whistles newcomer Neel feels he needs to keep throwing at the screen in order to mask the fact there's not much of story in the first place.

Truth is indeed sometimes stranger than fiction but Ripstein struggles here to turn his odd collection of two-dimensional characters into real people. What does impress is the gorgeously crisp black-and-white cinematography, which deserves to be seen on the big screen.

Troy Espiritu’s plot-driven screenplay and Mendoza’s preference for a gritty, documentary-like style mean that the final result is neither as deep nor as resonant as it could have been.

The rock-solid bond between the film’s two drifting 17-year-olds... is the film’s undeniable highlight but the true depth of their friendship crystallizes quite late and is too often obscured by a subplot involving minor characters caught up in a cross-border drug running operation.

This is a picaresque road movie about two mismatched characters, with rookie director A.B. Shawky offering a motley and not entirely smooth cocktail of drama and melodrama, a dash of social critique and insight, some chuckles and a few tugs at the heartstrings, mainly by virtue of its near-virtuoso score.

In terms of its overall look, Cinderella the Cat blends blocky, videogame-like 3D/CGI animation and voluptuous, watercolor-like 2D animation. It shouldn't work, yet it does create a coherent universe.

Some individual scenes are certainly striking and the couple’s complex relationship and chemistry are believable but the overall narrative retains an erratic and somewhat jerky quality as the various elements don’t always logically build on what has come before.

Though blessed with a spectacular true story and character to work from, director and co-screenwriter Lars Kraume...fails to breathe much life into the stuffy, overly complex enumeration of the historical facts.

So full of explanatory flashbacks and animated sequences visualizing the characters’ invented yarns that their real dramas are indeed almost obscured.

Quite powerful despite relying on familiar storytelling tropes.

Minutely observed and framed with great precision, this finally has a few too many characters and twists to become a fully satisfying drama.

The film’s beauty lies in its carefully observed details and the larger story’s got nowhere particularly surprising to go.

It’s rather odd that Ellis, who co-wrote the screenplay with former Kubrick assistant Anthony Frewin, can’t come up with anything more action-packed or tension-filled in the first hour than a broken teacup. Valkyrie this is not.

Yeo isn’t experienced enough to convincingly pull off genre acrobatics this complex, delivering a film that often feels derivative in terms of its style and that doesn’t have the storytelling goods to let all these different influences coalesce coherently.

Though it is convincingly played and sensually shot, the film has about as much narrative as the characters have parts of their bodies covered on the beach.

After taking a couple of left turns following its thriller-like opening, Salvo unfortunately returns to a more conventional register in the closing reels, though the atmospheric picture does continuously fascinate on a visceral level.

While the film as a three-hour whole feels unbalanced, a few heart-to-heart conversations between Daniele and Ze cut directly to the core of the material, exploring the uses of fiction and lies in situations like these.

Clearly Diaz wanted to make a sotto-voce exploration of a difficult and heavy topic — instead of a histrionic melodrama — but in trying to rein in the emotions, he seems to have practically scrubbed them out completely. The screenplay, also by Diaz, is so predictable that most of the characters simply seem to be going through the motions, with audiences remaining at an arm’s length even during the supposedly cathartic final moments.

This story of sibling camaraderie and familial strife at a Burgundy winery unfolds against the backdrop of reliably picturesque views, with its bouquet of largely familiar elements presented with a modern finish.

Tellingly, all of the film’s emotional highlights come from scenes involving the animal rather than the human protagonists and there are only very few scenes in which the two interact in a manner that feels entirely synergetic.

Audience’s tolerance for this kind of heavy-handed, occasionally very mannerist symbolism may vary, though Messina does ensure that the religious parallels never completely eclipse the contemporary characters.

Intended as a 90-minute nail-biter, the movie starts off strong but loses steam about halfway through and never quite recovers.

The frequent voice-overs, in which the boys read what they wrote (heard over shots of them writing), add distance rather than insight because it is not the action of writing that's revealing but the events and thought processes that led them to write what they did.

More a film about ideas and theories rather than a story that’s more directly involving emotionally.

A high-carat cast...tears into the juicy material with relish for the most part, but by trying to keep the prolonged sit-down affair from becoming excessively stagey, Moverman adds too many distracting flashbacks to maintain the original’s hard-hitting and well-aimed gut punch.

Though the film’s European scenes carry too little dramatic weight and might be confusing for those unfamiliar with the novel, the Morocco-set opening 40 minutes are beautifully and quietly observed.

Thankfully, the screenplay doesn’t portray the story in simple terms of good or evil, but that doesn’t mean that there’s quite enough nuance or insight to constantly elevate the material above the level of a well-made-but-TV-ready biopic.

Taken together, the shorts offer some scraps on Berger the man and the artist and thinker without really supplying a full overview, while also exploring some of his main preoccupations in ways that would benefit from at least some prior knowledge of his work.

A film with some real stunning visual highlights but a narrative throughline that feels patchy and unbalanced.

There are too many twists, insignificant literary references and drawn-out scenes of sex and violence to sustain either the pic’s running time or its ideas, with Sono’s message obscured in the final reels by an ambiguous treatment of his leading ladies.

Absent any real sense of who these three women are as individuals, most of their behavior is reduced to what feels like tics that are meant to illuminate character in a rather crude way.

The story [lacks] a clear narrative or emotional throughline to connect all of the film’s setpieces.

There’s no doubt Mirica can film the hell out of a location or a character’s face, but as for telling a fully gripping and involving story? The jury’s still out on that one.

If the pic is ultimately an entertaining ride, it is because Sudeikis takes the audience by the hand through this very unlikely story that was inspired by true events.

The film frequently privileges art direction over emotion, and a constant sense of wonder based on visuals alone proves impossible to sustain over the lengthy 130-minute runtime.

What keeps the material from feeling too scattershot is the vitality of Cassel’s performance, which is full of life even when he’s not always in the best of health. He’s a much-needed charismatic center that almost manages to keep the entire enterprise together.

This moody, black-and-white period piece always intrigues, even if it only intermittently catches fire.

Handsomely packaged, the film unfortunately is also too well-behaved and lacking in psychological depth to really set itself apart from countless other WWII dramas.

The critique of those in power and their need to put down others — preferably foreign or different-looking people — in order to stay on top is as relevant in 2019 as it was in 1980, when the novel was first published. But like its noncommittal production design, which combines various North African, Middle Eastern and Asian influences for the locals and locales, the critique itself remains finally quite dull and dispersed because it's so broad and unspecific.

It is uncompromising filmmaking, certainly, but also insular filmmaking that will make a tiny little circle of intellectual cinephiles very happy while leaving everyone else — this critic included — completely cold.

The screenplay... seems to generally lack a throughline or focus, coasting from party scenes full of drugs and alcohol to work-related drama but rarely managing to get inside the head of the self-destructive character the designer had become by the 1970s.

There's little in terms of the tension associated with police thrillers, but it's also not a socio-realist drama or a character study, instead echoing parts of these genres at different times so there's a constant sense of deja vu and reminders of other, better films without the material ever really coming into its own.

While the rapport between the middle-aged Paul and the thirtyish Alice is a fascinating give-and-take — they are essentially equals because one’s lack of experience is compensated for by the other’s lack of ideas — there is no real room for either to grow or be transformed. Their relationship, while full of exchanges, is finally quite stagnant.

Nicloux is unable to instill the material with any tension.

Schoenaerts is his usual, intense self, Exarchopoulos has here found her best role since Blue and there’s no denying their chemistry is wild. But their characters become prisoners of the many twists and turns of the narrative instead of rising above it; their personalities aren’t revealed through the story so much as they are constrained by it.

The main issue with the film's screenplay, written by the director, is that it is trying to cover too much ground and yet be tonally light on its feet.

Though it contains some nice twists, the story is largely predictable and old-fashioned in ways both good (the characters’ unlikely come-what-may camaraderie) and bad (misogyny and machismo abound).

This unquestionably good-looking film, shot by world-class cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis (The Drop, Bullhead), plays like a Low Countries-variation on the classy Spanish-language work of Guillermo Del Toro, at least in terms of style if not substance, with what little narrative there is more of a clothesline for small-scale set pieces rather than a conduit for character insight.

The result feels like a dry and endless lecture more than an involving human story about serious issues. It’s a movie that’s all subtext and no text — and even the subtext struggles to make a point that’s more complex than a blunt truth.

The film’s main problem is that it can’t decide what it wants to be and ends up not having enough time to develop anything in any depth.

It feels like a sermon delivered by an extremely cine-literate preacher.

Recognizable human behavior is not this film’s forte -- which wouldn’t be a problem if something else would take its place but Punch never finds the right tone for the heterogeneous material, with sweetly melodramatic scenes alternating with high drama, some light action and farce.

What we are thus left with is a film that's made with an impressive level of craftsmanship but with exceptionally dubious politics, as if 21st-century moviemaking magic had been let loose on a terribly conservative and hopelessly blinkered 1980s relic of a script.