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.