Boyd van Hoeij

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).

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.

There is no denying the visceral power of Wang’s insistence on looking encroaching death, as it were, in the eye and the filmmaker exercises appropriate restraint when the final moment does come.

A film that’s an emotional rollercoaster and socio-political tract rolled into one.

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.

The film tries but often struggles to properly fuse the personal and the political.

Is it possible for a viewer to be touched by a character’s predicament and despair when every element of their life is so strikingly arranged? Because Pfeiffer disappears into her role and plays it small, and because Dosunmu’s modus operandi privileges visuals and the unspoken over dialogue and facile melodrama, the film sort of gets away with it, if just barely.

While the precociously talented Sidney, played by Logan Lerman, is not an uninteresting character, the artificially constructed nature of the narrative gives the supposedly shocking revelations way too much importance, essentially subjugating any sense of character development and flaws to its mystery-type structure.

Western is a naturalistic, almost documentary-like feature that slowly builds.

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.

Writer-directors Andrea Testa and Francisco Marquez shrewdly use their Average Joe protagonist to explore questions of (feigned) political disinterest and civil responsibility under a repressive dictatorship.

The Divine Order (Die Goettliche Ordnung) is an entertaining, if largely predictable, story of an individual swept up in the tide of history.

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.

The main problem is that the directors often struggle to assign meaning to their images that helps advance either the narrative or illuminate the emotional state of their main character.

Often shown in dark, flat and agitated closeups, Goic and Duran are both compelling performers.

Though somewhat slow out of the starting blocks, this finally caustic drama, set in early 1980s Bratislava (then in Czechoslovakia), accumulates power and insight as it builds over the course of a tense parents-teachers conference, punctuated with the necessary flashbacks.

With a slick, outsider’s perspective on the City of Angels and some interesting possibilities that are set up early on, this Message gets off to a great start. But the screenplay becomes a muddle and then a mess in its second half.

Four Days in France is certainly not a character- or narrative-driven drama, an impression reinforced by understated acting of the cast. What the film does offer is gorgeous shots of the French countryside and an idea of how different gay men navigate present-day life in France, especially away from large urban centers.

A soft-spoken and perceptive film set in the Modernist small-town marvel that is Columbus, Indiana, this is a specialized art house treat that announces the arrival of a new director who combines small-scale, Ozu-like humanism with an impressive command of the formalist possibilities of film.

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.

The sound of the zipper on Diane’s handbag, for example, becomes extremely ominous in Mermoud’s capable hands, while two distinct musical themes, written by Christian Garcia and Gregoire Hetzel, respectively, further enhance the mood and help establish the film’s bona fides as a classy and classical psychological thriller.

It is clear that Serraille has made a portrait of a very specific individual but that she’s also saying something more general about her own generation.

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.

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.

The use of both dialogue and film language is sophisticated; sometimes Ismael’s Ghosts borders on overripe melodrama, while at other times it relies on genre tropes but then gives them an unexpected twist. [Cannes Version]

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

The screenplay...is very good in its many observational scenes, which here are more straightforward and less laced with irony and dark humor than in Women.

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