Deborah Young

Few Iranian films have tried to realistically depict both the urban middle and lower classes, and fewer still with the complexity of story telling and depth of characterization in Asghar Farhadi’s impressive third feature, Fireworks Wednesday.

While there are implicit references to the horrors of the Soviet and post-Soviet state and to the 20th century in general, this monstrously overflowing film seems to aim even higher.

Takes the refined work of Iranian helmer Abbas Kiarostami up another notch to ever more metaphoric ground.

Its bursts of lightning-fast swordplay interrupt long, still stretches of misty moonlit landscapes and follow a pure literary style more than current genre expectations.

Elusive and elliptical as it is, this is one of the most accessible films in Oliveira's recent repetoire.

Takes the viewer on a mysterious and sporadically fascinating trip into the darkness of the human heart and Thai legend.

Expectations are fully met in Park Chan-wook’s exquisitely filmed The Handmaiden (Agassi), an amusingly kinky erotic thriller and love story that brims with delicious surprises, making its two-and-a-half hours fly by.

This enjoyable French pic welds together drama, melodrama and comedy.

An extraordinary ride through Bollywood’s spectacular, over-the-top filmmaking, Gangs of Wasseypur puts Tarantino in a corner with its cool command of cinematically-inspired and referenced violence, ironic characters and breathless pace.

A tightly plotted and paced thriller whose not-so-hidden agenda is to expose the bad conscience of the world's haves toward its have-nots, "Hidden" is one of Austrian helmer Michael Haneke's most watchable and pungent works.

Seems destined to go down in film history as a technical tour de force.

The beauty of the feature lies in its ability to stir the imagination with eerie, resonant hand-drawn animation.

A film whose lightness of touch rides a wave of family conflict to perfectly balance smiles and tears.

A mystifying film that holds the audience in suspense over where it's going and what it might mean for almost its entire running time.

A very honest film from a great Japanese artist.

Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi pursues his exploration of guilt, choice and responsibility in a superbly written, directed and acted drama that commands attention every step of the way.

Madeline’s Madeline is both heady and head-scratching. Anyone who has ever taken an acting class and witnessed the psychodramas brewed there will relate to this bubbling kettle of raw, unleashed emotions stirred up in shifting power grabs.

Magnificent in its simplicity and its relentless honesty about old age, illness and dying, Michael Haneke's Amour is a deliberately torturous watch.

What comes out of this unlikely comparison between astronomy and history is a totally new perspective, something broader, with glimpses into deeper meanings.

A film destined to divide Manoel de Oliveira's fans but also to win him new ones, A Talking Picture is his simplest, most linear story in memory.

Never talking down to his audience, he rather pulls them up to an intellectual level where other filmmakers fear to go.

Running the gamut from social comedy to actioner to war movie, Clash is an original, often quite disturbing experience to watch.

This thought-provoking drama is long but well-paced, full of incident but at the same time intimate — though shocking violence occurs just offscreen. Illuminated by deeply nuanced performances and characters to care about, it positions itself somewhere between the loving but messed-up families of Edward Yang and Ken Loach.

If there is a missing ingredient in this otherwise extremely impressive opus, however, it is emotion. The contemplation of greatness, vastness and infinity doesn't lend itself to simple feelings and the succession of fantastic natural imagery begins to tire.

Maoz doesn't seem to worry about losing some puzzled viewers along the way with comprehension issues. For those who reach the end, the story makes perfect sense.

The toll the disease takes on the life of a brilliant linguistics professor is superbly detailed by Julianne Moore in a career-high performance, driving straight to the terror of the disease and its power to wipe out personal certainties and identity.

A riveting Argentine thriller spiked with witty dialogue and poignant love stories.

A taut, involving drama centered around the mysterious disappearance of a young woman, About Elly confirms director Asghar Farhadi as a major talent in Iranian cinema whose ability to chronicle the middle-class malaise of his society is practically unrivaled.

Stephen Frears is in full possession of his filmmaking talent in Philomena, one of his most pulled-together dramas in years.

Tensely action-packed and muscularly directed by Kathryn Bigelow, this tale of an elite U.S. army bomb disposal unit in Baghdad is a familiar story in new clothes, targeted at the young male demographic.

After watching Maysaloun Hamoud’s sparkling, taboo-breaking first feature In Between (Bar Bahar), audiences will have to seriously update their ideas about the lifestyle of Palestinian women in Israel.

It's hard to walk away unaffected from this heartfelt, well-researched, feature-length documentary.

The Look of Silence is perhaps even more riveting for focusing on one man’s personal search for answers as he bravely confronts his brother’s killers.

Though not every moment is fascinating to watch, most moments are, and adult audiences should find its frank presentation of the diversity of intimacy thought-provoking and possibly therapeutic.

Singh shows a confident hand as he works with the material on multiple levels of narrative and symbolism, keeping it interesting and in focus throughout. His greatest strength, however, is Randhawa’s powerful portrayal of the shepherdess, a role that could launch a career.

The intriguingly elliptical narrative and the use of highly aestheticized cinematography and music draw the viewer into a web of genocide and a series of shocking events

In Drug War, Hong Kong genre master Johnnie To gives a superlative lesson on how to give an updated, thoroughly engrossing twist to the classic cops-and-robbers chase.

Blurring the confines between documentary and fiction, it takes the empathetic viewer on an incredible journey that can be almost as painful to follow vicariously from a theater seat as it must have been on the pilgrims.

Refusing to offer easy answers or perspectives, Dormant Beauty is directed in such a way it doesn’t need to take a clear-cut position on the question, because like all the director’s work it has no concern with convincing people of anything, but a great deal of interest in illuminating contemporary Italian society.

A spellbinding love letter to Hong Kong and the movies.

Though it has far less outright violence than Gomorrah, whose oppressive criminal atmosphere it shares, Matteo Garrone's Dogman is just as intense a viewing experience, one that will have audiences gripping their armrests with its frighteningly real portrayal of a good man tempted by the devil.

This small film is a thoughtful addition to his parables about happy and unhappy families (Nobody Knows, After the Storm), studded with memorable characters and believable performances that quietly lead the viewer to reflect on societal values.

Saad has an absolutely sure hand in directing Badhon and guiding her into higher octaves of the role as the drama grows and grows.

It is irresistibly laugh-out-loud and feel-good.

An acid portrait of contemporary Austria (and by extension, the whole middle class) as unspeakably dull, violent and stupid. The film itself, miraculously, is just the opposite: vibrantly inventive, aesthetically rigorous, sardonic and occasionally quite brilliant.

The subject is horrifying but the screen is hard to look away from, as the situation becomes a powder keg of tension.

In Collective, Nanau's observational style of filmmaking reaches emotional depths.

The fast-moving story goes deeper than a pure thriller, as Wang Jing focuses on the faces of his characters in all their anxiety and human dignity.

Scorsese's heartfelt love letter to Italian movies up to 1961.

A remarkable first feature from director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, The Town is a strikingly original, vibrantly sensitive look at an extended family living in a remote Turkish village.

Perhaps the most ambitious film to date by Japanese animator Mamoru Hosoda.

An extraordinary feeling for nature and the seasons of life pervades Out Stealing Horses (Ut Og Stjaele Hester), an ambitious reflection on our responsibility to others from Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland.

Kidnapped (Rapito) is one of Marco Bellocchio’s most successful films, both as a taut thriller that will capture audiences with his terribly human drama, and as a masterful reflection on the themes that the Italian director has worried and revisited over a lifetime of filmmaking: the Catholic church as an anti-liberal indoctrinating machine that steals children’s souls, the frailty of personal identity, and the struggle for liberation on an individual and societal level.

A funny-moving story enjoyably retold with classic British understatement and just the right twist at the end.

On his third feature after "Tower" and "How Heavy This Hammer," Radwanski hits his quiet stride here, and the directing matches Campbell’s intuitive approach. Ajla Odobasic’s delicate, fast-moving editing reflects Anne’s uncertain hold on reality, while the open ending lets the viewer decide whether Anne or reality wins in the end.

It is the director’s extraordinary intuition about the synchronicity of history, geography and the physical universe – a mysterious relationship that has nothing to do with cause and effect – that gives the film and its predecessor their undeniable power.

A rare example of indie filmmaking produced outside the Thai studio system, Blissfully Yours takes the good-humored nonsense of director Apichatpong Weeasethakul's first feature, "Mysterious Object at Noon," several steps further into the realm of non-communicative minimalism.

In this fast-moving, densely plotted black dramedy, a faux scandal raised by an ambitious web TV editor comes close to destroying a number of lives, offering a masterful panorama on urban, middle class China.

The film’s minimalist aesthetic makes little concession to the usual forms of cinematic expression and extends to the set design: living spaces devoid of furniture, the nondescript hotel room, the typical street scenes. The two actors are similarly inexpressive, their faces blank as though personal interaction was a major risk.

Typical of Hong’s work, the laid-back anti-storytelling lets daily life flow slowly by without incident, until a revelatory twist in the last act gives the film its meaning. It will certainly appeal to his festival fan base but neophytes beware: It takes patience to get to hidden truths, and even so they are about as clear as a Zen koan.

The sheer purity of the imagery is entrancing and puts it among his finest, most uplifting works.

Amazingly, Panahi turns the utterly simple, economical format of a camera inside a car into something relevant to his own artistic state and full of eye-opening insights into Iranian society.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s intriguingly titled Wife of a Spy (Spy no Tsuma) bookends the Second World War in an absorbing, exotic, well-paced thriller with moments of disconcerting realism and horror.

Though different in feeling from the Japanese writer-director's perceptive family tales like After the Storm, it has the same clarity of thought and precision of image as his very best work.

It is a searing and topical indictment of racial prejudice and hatred in America that makes for uneasy viewing and is not easily forgotten.

Tautly shot and edited by a top-flight technical crew and notably scored by Peyman Yazdanian, Just 6.5 is more than a thrilling watch. It is a sobering reflection on the inability of the law to stem the tide of drug addiction through round-ups, arrests and executions. Or perhaps it’s society that needs adjusting?

This bittersweet peek into the human comedy has a more subtle charm than flashier films like the director’s child-swapping fable Like Father, Like Son, but the filmmaking is so exquisite and the acting so calibrated it sticks with you.

Sorrentino somehow makes it work in a film that is truly a sensual pleasure to watch.

It is a smart and warm-hearted documentary that never tries to separate the superstar at its center from the political and cultural context, or to split John from the woman he loved and admired — and never deliberately cast shade on. It is also one of the finest portraits of these artists on film.

Re-shuffling footage from films he has shot over the last 23 years, Jia Zhang-ke places his awe-inspiring cinematic mastery on full display in Caught by the Tides, though its ravishing poetic beauty tends to obscure the story.

Steering away from exaggerated drama and concentrating most of the scenes on the little girl and her mother Ane (emerging Spanish actress Patricia Lopez Arnalz), 20,000 Species of Bees (20.000 especies de abejas) opens audiences up to a new understanding of trans kids, especially the idea that it is not the child who needs to transition, it’s the family and society who need to change their perceptions.

An atypically told, but typically big-issue film from revered Spanish maestro Victor Erice, Close Your Eyes is a passionate and engaging reflection on art, memory, identity and recapturing time past.

“Mexico for me is a state of mind,” Iñárritu has said, and Bardo is his own idiosyncratic vision of it. It is a handsomely produced creation in which the director has clearly exercised great control and his stamp is to be found on almost every credit.

The film is a mirror and a warning.

Fortunately, Harvest recounts this pre-historical fall from grace not as dry socio-economic history, but as a sort of universal myth.

In Bird Andrea Arnold once again shows she has the magic keys – in this case Franz Rogowski’s piercingly tender bird-man, and Barry Keoghan’s manically affectionate drug-dealer dad -- to extract drama, fantasy and authentic emotion from characters living on the lowest rungs of English society.

The clever and effective Late Shift depicts nursing as a permanent emergency that finds its equivalent in a breathless, anxious rhythm designed to jangle the staunchest nerves. For audiences who are into job-horror with a stranglehold, it qualifies as one of the most engrossing films in the festival.

Although at first sight this dramatization of a 1962 strike at a factory in the U.S.S.R. may seem a long way from the interests of contemporary audiences, it is surprising how much resonance the film has with the political struggles of our own time.

There are no heroes in Final Account, no one to empathize with. What makes it uniquely worth watching is its cast of octogenarians and nonagenarians who were eyewitnesses and in some cases active participants in the horrors of the concentration camps.

As in the book, the shock effect of coldly detailed incest, bestiality and sexual abuse, beatings, killings and mutilation is furiously nonstop in a film of nearly three hours. Rather than numbing the viewer, however, the parade of evil is presented in a dismaying crescendo of horror that offers no escape.

It’s a remarkable film experience in several ways.

Von Trotta seems to borrow some of her subject’s haughty disdain for compromise in a serviceable script that does the job of telling us who Hannah Arendt was like a good pair of solid, gray walking shoes; there’s nothing fancy or modern to distract from the portrait of one of the most important thinkers of the century.

The film is more than just a chic thriller. Alongside its clear -- at times overly so -- depiction the pain and vanity of social inequality, Virzi and the fine cast explore the unhappiness of rich and poor alike in a society that measures a person’s value in terms of euros.

Shot in 23 countries, the film has an amazing breadth and a relentless moral drive that will make it a reference point for this subject, whatever the audience response may be.

Dispensing with heavyhanded symbolism, Farhadi tells the tale engrossingly and with a lot of physicality through the two main actors.

The film’s methods are boldly unorthodox and its constantly alternating moods and shifts in tone from drama to humor, joy to tragedy can be disconcerting. It’s not a film for all audiences, but despite its eccentricities it is always watchable, thanks to strongly drawn characters and the soul-stirring poetry of its imagery.

This is far from a dull, academic work and the fast-paced talk is matched by swiftly changing scenes full of vibrant visuals. Life bubbles out of each frame in a grungy, foul-smelling rush.

Among other things, the film is an extremely dense fusion of elements that make up our sense of time and memories, including collages of hundreds of old photos, grainy super 8 footage, notebooks, songs and music, sound bites and newspaper articles.

As a tyro auteur, Tanovich has a heavy-handed way of delineating characters and situations that makes this well-meaning film awfully familiar at times.

An unforgettable journey through hell under the earth, where Satan is worshipped as king. Straight-as-an-arrow filmmaking raises this docu above the crowd.

In and of itself, it is a mournfully intelligent, poetic documentary that once more seeks to link the vastness, grandeur and indifference of nature with the human horrors that Chileans have lived through. The search for meaning is so personal here (Guzman narrates most of the film in the first person) and so difficult that it is often heart-rending.

A self-contained master class on cinema.

Though the story is fictional, the imagery is grounded in a powerful documentary reality.

[A] dark yet humanly luminous story.

If the feature film reached for, and often failed to achieve, great emotions to match its imagery, the non-contemplative Imax Experience seems even farther from this goal. Vastness and infinity are all fine and good, but the beauty of the universe tends to feel monstrous and inhuman without an element of human chaos to counterbalance it.

Charmingly setting aside glamour for a turn at pure acting, Nicole Kidman zings up the already zingy script of Birthday Girl.

Result is a weird hodgepodge that has the audience doing mental somersaults in an attempt to keep up with this highly original festival head-scratcher.

Salma Hayek makes the character an icon of female independence, courage and nonconformity, forecasting special appeal for women viewers.