Boyd van Hoeij

Expertly assembled across the board, Censored Voices tries and largely succeeds in providing a corrective to the idea that Israel’s 1967 victory was a quick and clean operation.

There’s a decidedly campy side to the proceedings that Koutras effectively juxtaposes with the hard-edged realities of contemporary Greece, a beautiful but hostile nation wrecked by the ongoing economic crisis and a place in which xenophobia, racism and homophobia seem to fester freely.

A pretty straightforward coming-of-age story that’s well-observed and manages to be intimate and explicit without becoming exploitative.

Part of the beauty of Nostalgia is that the many metaphors and surprising parallels between the universe, archaeology and Chile’s recent past rise organically from the material.

The film deftly explores the story's complex moral issues from several sides.

Lolo has a solid laughs-per-minute rate and enough twists to overcome the occasional screenplay hiccup.

Lindholm here makes yet another modestly scaled but effective drama that asks more uncomfortable questions than it answers.

Instead of a straightforward narrative arc for the small cast of characters, the film -- gorgeously shot and framed by Cemetery of Splendor cinematographer Diego Garcia -- combines a documentary-like look at their everyday lives with a fascinating if not entirely clear-cut exploration of body and gender issues.

By simply contrasting short sequences that each tell a small story, Wiseman constructs a much larger mosaic.

There are no false notes in the ensemble but Francella, with dyed grey eyebrows, and Lanzini, saddled with black sideburns the size of dead mice, are clearly best in show. And the film finally gives audiences the long-awaited confrontation between the two in a strong sequence toward the end.

An explosive combination of highly personal moral drama and a wider, scathing portrait of a country in which corruption and greed seem to be the only shared values left, this well-oiled narrative machine is further aided by a clever ticking-clock mechanism that actually ratchets up the tension the longer the characters’ vodka-soaked, blame-game speeches are allowed to go on.

Though the story has undergone quite a few changes, what’s intact is the novel’s grittiness and emotional honesty, which more than compensates for the occasional coming-of-age cliche.

Though in several ways related to the previous Heimat films, this beautifully shot black-and-white feature is accessible even for those unfamiliar with Reitz’s previous work.

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.

What we're looking at is, in essence, an artwork that looks at other art — a concept film about a conceptual art project. It suggests that a one-minute part can be the whole for one viewer or that, conversely, the whole is made up of an infinite amount of smaller parts that can each tell only a small part of the story.

Muylaert does a deft job here of plotting her story and setting up her characters and their predicaments in ways that immediately invite reflection.

The sobering message of the film is that independence doesn’t really mean anything in Africa if you’ve got resources that richer countries have an interest in and a general population that remains woefully poor and uneducated.

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

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.

Newcomer Van Acken is a phenomenal find and she’s never less than believably torn between doing the right thing and being her own person.

While the gorgeous widescreen landscapes have a pencil-and-aquarelle quality, the characters themselves are literally rougher-edged, a clever reminder of the hand-drawn, sketchlike quality of traditional animation.

The film’s ambition and dexterity is somewhat of a mixed blessing, with, for example, character motivations given short shrift in the sprint to the finish line.

This is the kind of indie doodle of a movie in which several potentially interesting ideas co-exist but never quite come together and where supporters will call the narrative "freewheeling" while naysayers will insist on "rambling."

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

The film’s only weakness is its ending, which is so subtle it risks being interpreted by the majority of viewers as enigmatic or unclear.

Utterly uneasy to watch but strikingly and confidently assembled, the film is a powerful aural and visual experience that doesn’t quite manage to sustain itself over the course of its running time, but is a remarkable — and remarkably intense — experience nonetheless.

Ambitiously mounted but wildly uneven.

My Golden Days more often privileges emotional truths over historical veracity. This helps not only to make the past dilemmas of the protagonists feel more immediate and real, but also suggests how, looking back, we see our lives as a succession of emotional experiences, not dry historical facts.

Caissy and his editor, Mathieu Bouchard-Malo, manage to construct something that acquires a cumulative force that speaks compellingly and much more generally about the intersection of youth, education and personal morality than the specific cases of these often nameless, zit-sprinkled pieces of work.

Initially somewhat wispy-feeling, this 72-minute feature transforms in its final reel from an ironic divertissement to a work of considerable feeling and intensity.

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).

The film remains stranded in a sort of genre no man’s land.

Based on a true story that's perhaps less famous than some others but just as intriguing, this serious-minded — no Helen Keller jokes, please — period film is nonetheless quite entertaining and, finally, moving.

Lafleur delivers an affecting, funny and eccentric -- in the best sense of the word -- meditation on that in-between state that people in their early twenties find themselves, as they are technically old enough to participate fully in all of life’s activities but they still lack the experience to know what they really want or what’s really good for them.

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.

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.

Like the director’s previous feature, Jo for Jonathan, this is a minutely observed story of great modesty that thrives on transformations so tiny, the film deserves to be seen on the big screen.

Crucially, though all the characters get a little eccentric at times and some of their antics seem to have been imported from boulevard comedies rather than inspired by real life, in the overall scheme of things, the ensemble remains grounded in a recognizable reality.

Talky and cerebral, this theatrical drama juxtaposes space and light and explores ghosts from the past and love in the present.

What’s finally tragic about their destiny of choice is not that the couple succeeded in becoming immortal together but that everything leading up to their death was the result of very banal actions and shot through with an extreme sense of loneliness.

It helps immeasurably that Gainsbourg, as an actress, is as intense as her presence feels evanescent, always seemingly onto the next moment already, leaving everyone in her wake.

Campillo thankfully refrains from offering on-the-nose explications for behavior and decisions, instead letting audiences infer psychology and motivation from on-screen behavior, with the entirely naturalistic performances of Raboudin and Emelyanov beautifully tuned in to each other and the material.

There’s a sense that the goings-on are more quirky than comical.

Impressive in parts, but wildly uneven as a whole.

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.

Bouncy, with snappy dialog to spare and a great young cast headed by breakout star Shameik Moore, this is a crowd-pleaser from start to finish.

The film’s combination of psychological drama -- cue the childhood trauma -- with blood-splattered limb-cutting, talking heads in the fridge and talking pets on the couch is a risky one that finally works because Perry and Satrapi find the right tonal mixture for the material.

The film contains numerous stylistic flourishes... But none of these elements advance the story, prompt a deeper emotional response or suggest something new about the characters, reducing them to meaningless window-dressing for what little story their is.

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.

A beautifully animated tale of the growing friendship and occasionally rather cloying emotional travails of two 12-year-old girls.

The character development here is understated but beautifully laid bare by a quartet of top actors.

The third feature of Romanian auteur Corneliu Porumboiu that again takes a clichéd-seeming premise and carefully proceeds to turn it on its head through logic, absurd humor and the consumption of vast quantities of cigarettes.

By contrasting what the investigators are trying to uncover with the youthful adventures of the children, Dumont seems to suggest that the world of adults, despite appearances, is so rotten that it can only be stomached and perhaps even saved by two things: laughter of the tragicomic kind and a child-like innocence that somehow needs to be maintained into adulthood.

The screenplay, written by French arthouse writer-director Antoine Barraud (Les gouffres) with an assist from U.S. scribe Edwards, too often seems to be under the mistaken impression that making a movie for kids means everything needs to be overly spelled out, especially by using as many short-hand clichés as possible.

The conceit is pure genre fluff, but the underlying economics make less sense upon closer inspection... That said, Maiga projects so much intelligence and integrity it's hard not to warm to her character and she has believable chemistry of the mismatched kind with Boublil, who's up to his usual but quite charming shtick.

Tonally surprisingly coherent, Franco’s apostles seem to have directed, as Pauline Kael would’ve said, on their knees.

Quite powerful despite relying on familiar storytelling tropes.

The Salt of the Earth doesn’t reveal so much as gracefully confirm that the empathy and humanism that make Salgado’s photojournalistic work so special are also a part of the artist’s outlook on life.

A mixture of raw, first-hand footage, shot by protesters themselves, and more self-possessed interviewees ensures that the chaos and sometimes lethal risks of protesting come across as strongly as the pressing sociopolitical reasons behind them and the effects the events have had on the participants.

The narrative’s general rites-of-passage layout is of course extremely familiar, though, especially for foreign audiences, many of the stories-within-stories and characters that dot this particular journey will feel new as well as delightful.

It's a tough and cerebral but finally illuminating film.

Ribeiro’s screenplay, which is marbled with moments of humor as well as emotion, feels extremely well-tuned into the conflicted emotional lives of his adolescent characters, who often retreat into the safety of their childhood comfort zone after every exciting, but also scary, excursion into the adult unknown.

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

Cartoon violence and action, gore and humor, all rolled into one schlocky but enjoyable package.

A low-key verite charmer.

[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.

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

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.

Dante again smoothly combines moments of romantic and screwball comedy, schlocky genre elements and an overarching retro feel for this cute and pretty efficient zom com.

The director clearly takes depression and suicidal urges and the possibility they may be hereditary very seriously but that doesn’t mean that the film isn’t often very witty.

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.

What makes the film so accessible despite its controversial subject matter is Wnendt’s total command of tone, which is never vulgar or intentionally out to shock.

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.

There is a clear sense here that Coixet is completely out of her depth in this genre exercise, which is all excessive surfaces and no tension, however hard the music and sound effects try to tell audiences otherwise.