Ed Frankl

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.