Ed Frankl

Steered by Sarr in a spellbinding performance, this is a mesmerizing watch for the most part, running the gamut of positive idealism at the film’s opening to clinging on to the vestiges of hope at the finale.

The provocativeness in Sparta is not necessarily in Ewald’s actions, but in the sympathetic, or at least non-judgmental, view that the film shows toward its main character. The film’s villains instead are more plainly the children’s absent, abusive fathers or the system that neglects these youngsters to the extent that they fall willingly into the arms of a would-be predator.

The archival footage gives a time capsule—not just of the sound and styles of the ’60s and ’70s, but a whole society dragged out of Italy’s countryside and into the rapidly industrialized cities.

For all its social-realist tendencies, A Chiara is told in a wonderfully fluid and poetic fashion.

Yet despite a lo-fi, handheld-camera cragginess, it still has something of the lyricism that marks so much of her work, going back to the Oscar-winning short Wasp.

Folman is best in the family-entertainment mode when he’s breathing visual life into Anne’s flights of imagination.

Xavier Beauvois has made a film that contemplates trauma of one’s own making, a perceptive work that grapples with guilt and grief.

It would be churlish not to report that there are some laughs and profound moments to be discovered here.

Not since A Short Film About Killing has a filmmaker produced such a thrilling case against capital punishment, an enraging, enthralling, enduring testament to the oppressed.

It’s a film that carries emotional power more in its moments of natural reflexiveness than the weepie genre’s more conventional emotional beats, anchored by two focused lead performances that thankfully don’t succumb to melodrama.

This is Jóhannsson’s first and last film, and its hard not to recognize that this is a director who arrived fully formed as a visual artist. His dreamy combination of sound and images, the editing and pacing, and his use of Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s grainy 16mm cinematography combine with strange potency.

All the Dead Ones is an accomplished film by directing duo Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra, rich in the nation’s poetry and music, daring in highlighting women’s voices while commenting on Brazil’s history of inequality of wealth, class, and race.

Sorry We Missed You is, simply, one of his best films that links the personal and the political.

The final third, especially, is by-the-numbers plotting. It’s a pity, as the film starts off promising some interesting overarching themes, especially Sibyl’s underhand ethics of mining her psychological examinations for fiction. As a metaphor for artistic invention, it’s an interesting, but unsuccessful one.

This is a straightforward coming-of-age story from France, a country for whom this is almost a national cliché, but elevated by a key eye for gender roles of its protagonists and an up-to-date message for a teenage generation growing up in a #MeToo world.

A sterile arthouse drama that rather muddles its conceit. ... Hausner and co-writer Géraldine Bajard never really get to grips with the potential for psychological terror at the center of what remains a genuinely intriguing premise.

This is an especially personal work, anchored by the director’s on-off muse Antonio Banderas in perhaps his greatest performance and sweeps through the Spanish maestro’s recurrent themes: high melodrama and kitsch comedy, piety and carnal lust, sex and death, human pain and transcendent glory.

As an exercise in depicting the disjointed link between national and personal identity, Synonyms is dazzling. As a portrait of displacement in a world becoming both more globalized and more nationalistic, it is a testament.

This is a film that stages itself in non-linear narratives, in severe, clinical long takes, in metaphorical observations, and even extended sequences of Shakespearean re-enactment–a film whose aesthetics may be intensely controlled and yet whose narrative is sprawling with meanings and readings.

Director Adler has made a very talky film, full of interior scenes and far flung from the hard-edged spy thrillers of Bond or Bourne.

Akin has made the true story of a repulsive, grotesque serial killer into a repulsive, grotesque movie, a calamitous misfire for a critical darling of recent German cinema.

Here is a film littered with off-piste humor and featuring a memorable, warm-hearted ending that argues being open to serendipitous new experiences beats comforting certainties in life.

Zhao’s combination of the visual palette of Terrence Malick, the social backbone of Kelly Reichardt, and the spontaneity of John Cassavetes creates cinema verité in the American plains.

Garrel has the touch of a wiser man not taking judgment on his characters’ youthful foibles, where setbacks are to be embraced and learned from rather than experiences discarded from memory.

This is a strangely believable dystopia, and all the more brilliant for it.

There’s much to interest the Lynch fan here, but it also might be an unparalleled assessment of the artistic learning of a great American filmmaker.

Set in the picturesque Portuguese city of the title, the film demonstrates first-time fiction director Gabe Klinger’s eye for visual storytelling, but his script, co-written by Larry Gross, feels undeveloped for anything further than glib, Instagram-like testaments to cherished moments in time.

It’s a spiritual, ambiguously plotted journey through the Atlas Mountains, and those willing to give in to its mystical embrace and gorgeous visuals should find it a sensual, engrossing watch.

This is a formally complex work, too long perhaps and occasionally opaque in its meaning, but a daring ride to those wanting to glimpse the best of African cinema.

While Kateb is a fine presence, Colmar (a co-writer of the far superior Of Gods and Men) directs with none of his protagonist’s thrilling pizazz, and his and Salatko’s script plods without any of jazz’s syncopated rhythms

Timely issues of transgender rights both in Latin and North America help make A Fantastic Woman a bolder, brasher film, fiery in comparison with Gloria’s relatively tenderness, but anchored once more by a stellar central performance

It’s a generational drama anchored by three great performances, but it feels rather distinctly average — and it’s hard to make Isabelle Huppert look average.

Boyle’s verve as a director means there’s still plenty of vibrant imagery, alongside a script that, although lacking any of the electricity of the original’s state-of-the-nation wisecracks (“Scotland is a nation colonized by wankers”), is funny and disarmingly melancholic.

The chemistry between these two men is inescapable, their relationship growing almost imperceptibly, composed expertly in a nuanced script by Lee and unfussily filmed by director of photography Joshua James Richards (Songs My Brothers Taught Me).

A luscious, strangely enchanting watch and terrific fun for those who'll launch themselves into it.

Its child’s viewpoint and pastel-colored animation belies a cruel melancholy at the heart of My Life as a Courgette, as all its children lust for a life that is different from their own.

Mifune: The Last Samurai, the well-assembled documentary on the life of actor Toshirô Mifune, the long-time Akira Kurosawa collaborator, should be a worthy introduction to one of Japanese cinema’s greatest icons, if a little light on more revelatory findings.

Øvredal gives us B-movie thrills better than most of his peers, creating a campy, nasty, tremendously fun horror experience in which death proves not the ending we might expect.

Guatemala’s first-ever entry for the foreign language Oscar is an absorbing, beautifully-shot drama of cultural ritual and the drive of one young woman to escape a rudimentary social system.

The final sequences about loss, and art as a “cure” (in Jodorowsky’s own words), are heart-wrenchingly powerful.

Equity is more nuanced, if not as ferociously confidant as that 1987 Oliver Stone film, here focusing on the nitty gritty of a market launch of a social media-style security company.

Many will find the film’s final twist hard to take, especially after an unnecessary coda, but Remember remains a thought-provoking revenge drama that questions the ethics of violence so many years later, when memory, let alone hatred and guilt, has long gone.

The film’s pitfalls lie in the style-over-substance route that has befallen many films that have such an annoyingly gimmicky framing device at its center.

Kelly’s earnest, reportedly auto-biographical film has a lot of laughs and is best when it’s most deeply personal.

It’s only frustrating that however funny Fundamentals is, the dynamic is something we’ve seen many times before.

Carried by two accomplished performance, and despite a tight 87-minute running time, this is a rich saga, bathed in atmosphere that disturbs as much as it engrosses.

Asbæk is towering as Claus, never less than believable as the leader of his platoon, and standout as he comes to terms with the cracks in his own story.

Quemada-Díez filmed The Golden Dream chronologically using natural light and real locations, utilising Super 16 film to give his first feature a documentary shimmer. He also worked as a camera operator on Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams (2003), with whom he shares his penchant for opulent landscapes and narratives, and a sense of beauty amidst unforgiving reality.

It feels more that Gemma Bovery goes through the motions of the novel, restricted by its own pretensions to meet high-brow literature.

Its stately pace doesn't preclude Mr. Holmes (2015) from being a delightful romp all the same.

The dark heart of In the Courtyard makes its comedy ever more piquant, while Deneuve and Kervern are exceptional as two lonely souls finding solace in each other's company during the twilight years of their lives.

Gerard Johnson's sophomore feature might look on the outset like the type of London crime thriller usually populated by Jason Statham, but it's more emotionally complex than its outset gives it credit for.

While the first half has a brisk, upfront approach, the final hour is gobsmackingly dull - with emphasis on the smacking.

At 82 minutes, this is a brisk but hugely powerful work that is cinema of the oppressed par excellence.

Little Accidents may be a little too sober, lacking the occasional spark that would make it more than just a film about moral decision points - but it's a likable small-town drama all the same.

Sachs and Love Is Strange co-writer Mauricio Zacharias craft an intergenerational love story believably told and immaculately acted.

This is a film of ideas, but it's a comedy first, and its boldness is that it doesn't aim to address a pro-choice or pro-life stance - it's about Donna just getting on with it all the same.

Its narrative might reach cliché towards the end, but powerful performances carry this fine fable of the American Dream lost in heartbreak.

When you're pining for Bill Paxton and the relative emotional realism of Twister, you know you're in trouble.

The film is both a biography of Cave's life and a beguiling vision of a musician considering the meaning of his own art.

When push comes to shove, A Walk Among the Tombstones carries its B-movie thrills with aplomb.

Even if Murdoch's directorial style is at times off-putting - the dance routines oscillating wildly from charming to naff - it's hard not to be taken in by trips into Glasgow's backstreet gig venues and the type of Victorian splendour seen on screen too rarely.

For the most part, Dinosaur 13 is highly absorbing - some of the decisions that come against Larson are truly shocking - but it does lack in places as a piece of documentary journalism.

Does Michael Bay fit the criteria of an auteur? He certainly has his own line of distinctive tropes: the migraine-inducing noise, the fetishistic gloss, the playground-bully characters elevated to hero status and a fervently male gaze.

So much is thrown at the wall that some of it's got to stick - comedy for comedy's sake, if you will - and while that doesn't make for a great film necessarily, it certainly doesn't make for a bad one.

In his signature style, without talking heads, narration or explanatory context, Wiseman takes us straight into the London gallery itself and the inhabitants inside - both human and paint-form.

Nothing quite competes with the blistering opening scene, but The Salvation's cast of characters mean it's never less than a fun watch.

This is a richly rewarding film, packed with ideas and riddles, that will surely benefit from repeat viewings.

This grueling, pulsating, in-your-face film–almost to a fault–has ferocious power, but it’s going to divide like a fissure.

The film’s opening quirky comedy routines give way to something much richer––a startlingly observant, sharp, romantic, provocative, and poignant view of millennial culture and how life comes at you fast.

Bispuri challenges us to do away with conventional notions of what a perfect mother should be.

The surprise winner of the Berlinale’s Golden Bear is a film not easily summed up in an elevator pitch. It is, however, a studious, intelligent, if flawed and scattershot, work with an open mind about modern sexuality and intimacy. That open mind will need to be replicated in the audience too.