Boyd van Hoeij

Beautifully played and impeccably lit and composed, this high-quality family drama takes its time to introduce its flawed but human protagonists and then steadily builds toward a payoff that’s at once cathartic and artfully restrained.

A quite absorbing but never riveting or revelatory overview of Armstrong’s career and testy personality.

Like in all of the director’s work, psychologically reductive readings of the characters are absent, though intriguing performances give audiences a way into the material.

This is essentially an absorbing and intelligent exploration of queer desire spiced up with thriller elements.

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.

Two minor problems in the closing reels hold the film back from instant-classic status.

A nail-biter that’s actually quite light on action but so well-scripted and shot, it’s nonetheless edge-of-your-seat material.

Les Coquillettes never comes off as an elaborate in-joke; instead it feels like a sincere attempt to convey what the very particular rush of a film festival, rarely seen onscreen, can feel like from inside the bubble.

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.

[An] intimate and dexterous debut feature.

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

Jean-Francois Laguionie’s consistently enjoyable, inventive and beautifully crafted tale is a color riot suitable for all ages.

There are no big surprises in store in terms of where this setup is headed...But the pic’s pleasures are nonetheless numerous, starting with its talented cast.

The unknown cast is aces, and Moshe inscribes his loquacious film in the Western tradition without overdoing the references to the classics.

A gossamer debut feature that compensates for its lo-fi look with glimpses of profound humanism.

Mikkelsen impresses here as a warm-hearted man who finds himself caught up in a situation way beyond his control.

A mostly slick, entertaining and emotionally involving recombination of fresh and familiar elements.

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.

Legrand's decision to leave things intentionally unclear early on so he can draw the audience into the family’s problems and consider them from various sides finally works against the third act’s cold hard facts.

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.

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.

There is no denying that, initially, Transit’s story might feel excessively oblique. But as the film slowly puts its formalistic and thematic cards on the table, it becomes clear that its storytelling technique is really just a reflection of its core themes.

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.

A highly political movie that's also a personal story of two men going head-to-head while the women around them are left to pick up the pieces, this gorgeously shot and classily acted feature might be a reel too long but is nonetheless a fascinating piece of work.

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.

Eccentric and occasionally hilarious, this is yet another uniquely Bozonian creation, which this time explores the transmission of ideas between teachers and students and the tricky notion that our good side might not necessarily be our best side after all.

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.