Deborah Young

It is, at least in its closing hour, a moving dramatization of maternal feelings.

Despite its grim subject, the powerful storytelling projects the strongly affirmative message that it's a miracle to be alive and bear witness to those who did not survive. This memorable film, one of Techine's best, is in no way limited to gay viewers.

Though it risks political incorrectness every step of the way, film is more a pleasant laugher than a sharp-edged satire.

An impressively mature directing debut from Italian actress Valeria Golino, who crafts an often engrossing character study around an assisted suicide activist.

Documentary has the fascination of watching an African "Judge Judy" with a more important case load. It also offers the satisfaction of seeing the law being used to change patterns of social injustice.

It’s hard to think of a less dramatic subject to fictionalize, yet in its own quiet way, Hive builds a strong storyline around the self-reliance and determination of an uneducated country woman, played with glammed-down but riveting cool by a granite-faced Yllka Gashi.

Gentle, touching tale.

It’s the opposite of sensational; quiet, dignified and ruminative, it gets far closer to real Chinese people than a TV-style travelogue, though its many references to events in modern Chinese history will probably lose the casual viewer.

A fairly successful attempt at satire, though given the subject, there's a lot of darkness under the carpet.

Dyrholm is at her multifaceted best here in the glammed-down, uglified role of an older rock ‘n' roll star on the skids.

Though convincingly set in the lower depths of Lima, the story embodies a universal truth about the experience of former soldiers in many times and places.

A film that lingers in the memory in spite of being rather irritating to watch.

This film is straight out of the bottle with no metaphoric or psychological pretensions.

On his first trip behind the camera, the British-Iranian Amini shows his skill at working with actors and sensing the way they can fill out literary characters. His screenplay generally feels more naturalistic than Highsmith, the dialogue less spare.

Surprising, disconcerting and droll, this Italo-Swiss co-prod packs the grotesquerie of an Ulrich Seidl film minus the sex, plus vivid acting. Its weakest link is on the narrative level.

As it explores the limits of human endurance, the pic should suck even landlubbers into a whirlpool of gripping adventure, overblown ambitions and sheer human folly.

This study in weathering adversity and adjusting to what life hands you makes some worthy points about human and institutional callousness.

Undeniably, Sunset is an impressive piece of filmmaking and from a technical point of view it stirs memories of the boldly shot Hungarian cinema revival of the Sixties.

While the exact secret to the film’s high-grossing recipe remains a bit of a mystery, it probably has to do with the good-humored chemistry between the unlikely partners, pushing the limits of censorship in the sexual-innuendo department, and a well-written off-the-wall script that makes audiences laugh out loud.

The buoyant little comedy 12:08 East of Bucharest puts its finger on the problem in the best tradition of East European humor, savvy but concrete, gentle but sharp as a knife.

After a tedious start building up the boys' lives and friendship, feature bow by Elmar Fischer becomes deeply engrossing in its second half, as the viewer learns of the hero's anguish and doubts.

A good old-fashioned British spy thriller.

The film is smart with a cool New York irony that is easy to get into, but it owes its principal fascination to the enigmatic Condola Rashad, the stage actress seen in Showtime’s Billions and Joshua Marston’s recent Come Sunday, and her multi-layered performance as a charismatic but mentally disturbed Iraq war vet.

Funny and always on-topic without going overboard, it’s an engaging film.

Cotillard’s performance is luminous throughout, enriching the willful heroine with the depth of a single obsession.

American Dharma is meant to leave its audience shaken, whatever side they’re on.

[A] forceful presentation of an ever-timely topic.

It’s pretty much a one-woman show for actress Erica Rivas, who brings a sense of fun to a fast-paced comedy about schizophrenia, if that’s what it is.

Those on both sides of the great Cuba divide should find food for thought in these sober, realistic reflections.

Although the story is not easy to follow, the anger behind it is so virulent that it sweeps the narrative along on a wave of rage and repulsion. A downer on this scale will not, clearly, be everyone's cup of tea.

Shot like the grunge version of a '50s noir thriller from France (or Soviet Georgia), the black-and-white 13 (Tzameti) turns into a shocker of Tarantino proportions in protracted sequences of explosive violence that leave viewers quaking.

The film has a winning combo of excitement and topicality.

What The Perfect Candidate lacks in sophistication it makes up for in intuition, entwining the longtime taboos of music (especially the female voice) and women's active participation in political life in a positive storyline.

Building slowly, the story morphs into a thriller, and finally a sort of horror film, though these parts feel more like decent imitations than real genre work.

Though the storyline is dirt simple and not particularly meaningful or involving, the action in this character-driven film is scintillatingly sexy.

The tense triangle among the girl and her two moms unfolds against an interesting backdrop: a stark setting in rural Sardinia, where tall cliffs and dirt roads criss-cross a shrub-infested desert. Its general wildness is underlined in the first scene at a local bronco-busting rodeo.

The whole project is saved largely thanks to the subtext of ethnic discrimination that runs through the film, and two riveting central performances, which overcome a wobbly start to find emotional balance by the final reel.

The sunny, soap-and-water characters and thoroughly upbeat message may not be the stuff great films are made of, but in Jackie & Ryan the modesty of the story, the simple story-telling and honest emotions all come together in a satisfying whole.

It is a strange cross-breed between an old-fashioned WWII epic full of genre cliches and a modern update whose meticulous historical recreation is frighteningly real.

Dan Algrant’s lyrical recreation of a father-son relationship seen over time, through memory and music, has a sense of urgent originality that works even apart from its great Tim Buckley score.

The flurry of characters takes a long time to get straight, and identification is made even harder by the nervous handheld camerawork and rapid-fire editing that makes no concessions. But no matter: the film comes into its element in the imaginative action scenes.

Zoya Akhtar (Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara) directs with flair and passion and, aided by explosive performances from a right-on cast, triumphs over the familiarity of the star-is-born storyline.

Images and metaphors whimsicially combine in a fine, fast-flowing documentary introducing the Baha'i faith.

Its most valuable asset is actor Pierfrancesco Favino.

More uneven but ultimately more effective than filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi’s previous anti-war film.

With a compassionate eye for the downtrodden that has characterized all Gianfranco Rosi’s work, Notturno brings three years of shooting in Middle East war zones to the screen in an impressionistic collage of ordinary people caught up in conflict.

The multiple targets and multiple threads which weave in and out of Fahrenheit 11/9 make it feel jumpy at times.... Nonetheless, there is much food for thought in the film, shot with the director’s characteristic passion, flair, wicked sense of humor and willingness to push the envelope.

A sober, thought-provoking response to a tragedy of worldwide import and a much better film than one might expect from the pre-release publicity.

Young leads Shota Sometani and Fumi Nikaidou – both experienced film actors – grow in stature as the film progresses to the achingly real final scene, where they are extraordinarily intense and effective.

Its bow in Cannes in the Special Screenings sidebar is amply justified by two whimsical exercises in art house cinema directed by Jafar Panahi and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The other tales are quirky but mixed in impact.

There is really much to enjoy in this paradoxical but grippingly paced film.

Emilio Estevez's Bobby is a passionate outcry for peace and justice in America that becomes deeply involving by the final climactic scene.

The imagery is epic and dreamlike at the same time, the battleground covered in mist, grain stubble, snow.

As dark and pessimistic as the rest of South Korean thrill-master Na Hong Jin’s work, The Wailing (Goksung, a.k.a. The Strangers in France) is long and involving, permeated by a tense, sickening sense of foreboding, yet finally registers on a slightly lower key than the director’s acclaimed genre films The Chaser (2008) and The Yellow Sea (2010).

Bilal is a grand-scale, fast-paced animated adaptation that is both empowering and inspiring in its call for social justice and equality.

A fine cast brings the believable, sometimes humorous characters to life and gradually draws the viewer into a well-crafted, well-paced story.

Argento seems to have learned from the experience of her overwrought first features, or maybe from life itself, that there is more to childhood than Gothic horror, and the mischievous moments of being a kid captured in Misunderstood show a filmmaker who is maturing in the direction of audience appeal.

Friedkin Uncut is at its most gripping when it discusses two early hits, The French Connection and The Exorcist, in which the theme of goodness struggling with the dark side explodes.

Gripping drama.

Along with the continual build-up of tension and threatened (more than shown) violence, pic is notable for its brutal depiction of the sex industry.

This cannily edited selection of rare archive footage reveals the peak of the people’s mind-born terror, and it is the beginning of the end.

Even admitting that films like Cache (Hidden), The White Ribbon and Amour have raised the bar higher and higher, Happy End feels like it’s pulling its punches and not in their league. For one thing, it’s hard to pin down the theme of the piece.

The film has its resonant moments, notably a wedding and a funeral. But it is by no means the jewel in the crown of a series that most recently has included electrifying docs like At Berkeley, In Jackson Heights and Ex Libris: The New York Public Library.

The last sequence takes the esoterism one step farther, in a beautiful ending that seems to link European wealth to those long-ago events in Latin America.

It would be hard to find two more contrasting actresses than Otto and Pires, but Barreto plays off their differences in culture and personality.

Fresh and offbeat tale of vendetta.

Ricky Tognazzi's La Scorta topped the Italian box office charts for weeks, thanks to its skill in capturing the country's current political climate in an entertaining action film format. (Review of Original Release)

The subject of Francofonia is art as the spoils of war, and the example he gives is the period when the Louvre – called at one point “the capital of the world” – came under Nazi control. Making the barest hint about the destruction of historic artworks in Syria at the hands of ISIS, Sokurov gently reminds the viewer why all this is terribly relevant today.

The central performances by Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff hold the film together with the intensity of their brotherly affection and support.

A somber, beautifully acted reflection on the barbarity of war and the bestiality of man.