Elena Lazic

Through its complex structure, formed of different timelines and split realities, uncanny dreams and blurred memories, “Alpha” viscerally teases out the binds of love and trauma.

While Mirrors No.3 does not put a foot wrong, it does not display the narrative and formal intricacy we have come to expect from the director either. After the film elegantly sets its mechanisms in motion, we are left to watch the cogs turn without a hitch, but also without much surprise.

The director’s ingenuity lies in the telling. Hitting all the beats of the police procedural, Moll, with a simple but effective sleight of hand, turns the genre inside out, and points to a much bigger offscreen enemy: Emmanuel Macron.

More conventional than any of Aster’s previous work, Eddington is also more rigorous and explicit in its political engagement — the work of a maturing filmmaker eager to make it clear that his dark and scathing sense of humor is anything but an empty provocation.

For all its sprawling ambition, Schilinski’s sophomore feature is most effective and moving on a human scale. A dissociative film, it recreates the febrile sensation of a mind splintered by too many painful truths, which continue to linger in the body long after they’ve vanished from memory.

Day of the Fight does not break the mold of the boxing movie, but it does not set out to do so. An homage to a kind of cinema that isn’t made much anymore, it signals a director who understands that a filmmaker does not need a huge budget or a complicated story to make a good film.

It’s a playful vision that allows for many contradictions — the superficial and the profound, the boring and the thrilling, the ugly and the beautiful — and for an endlessly creative vision of art and cinema.

Like “Cruising” and “To Live and Die in L.A.,” to cite two of my favorite works by Friedkin, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial does not stop playing with our heads when the credits start to roll.

A handsome historical drama featuring plenty of gorgeous gowns, powdered wigs, and bored aristocrats, the film is, however, an unusually earthy proposition where nature, in its most unmanicured and unwieldy form, plays a major role.

Hit Man finds both comedy and refuge in the elusive nature of identity and acts as a balm in our confusingly performative, deeply unsexy times.

To call Aggro Dr1ft stupid or silly isn’t wrong, but it is missing the point. The dialogue is incredibly banal and hilariously repetitive, the story a thin assemblage of clichés. But the images!

Through subtle detail, a degree of convenient biopic irreality, and a pace that encourages viewers to think beyond first impressions, the film shows a relationship with elements of abuse that is much more complex than the label often suggests.

Like style, one expects an endearing earnestness from a Mann film, and watching emotionally stunted men discuss love or beauty, like Enzo does during the motor discussion with his son, is always delightful. But all this beauty and sincerity gets undermined by strangely unfocused, dispassionate storytelling. And coming from a filmmaker like Mann, that’s a big surprise.

Breillat’s film is devastating because it exposes at the heart of a seemingly normal family a black hole where empathy should be.

It is refreshing and endearing to watch as Gondry lets his protagonist, a version of himself, go to the end of his thoughts, even if they apparently lead nowhere.

The couple’s pursuit of true, deep, sincere beauty in all things — in body and mind — despite these obstacles is infinitely touching.

The use of body horror allegories in cinema to address the physical, physiological, and mental changes brought on by puberty could hardly be called original. However, by delightfully and intelligently remixing symbols and metaphors Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu refreshes the concept in her zesty debut feature Tiger Stripes.

At its best moments, the extremely straightforward construction of Cédric Kahn’s The Goldman Case allows for fascinating dynamics and images to occur apparently unforced, as if by themselves, for the viewer to seize on their own.

Triet’s breathtakingly intelligent and subtly perverse masterpiece takes the long way through the cold and the snow to address, in nuanced but never ambiguous terms, the ineffable and irreducible mystery at the heart of deep relationships — between two partners, between parents and their children, between words and the world.

Garrel here delivers a witty and elegantly constructed film that joyfully draws parallels between acting and lying, being and pretending, while remaining breezy, fun, eminently accessible and even welcoming.

Although Smoking Causes Coughing isn’t as substantial or funny as some of his other films, it remains a breath of fresh air and contains enough moments of invention and flawless comedy to amuse and charm, particularly at a festival that has sorely lacked laughs so far.

Panahi does not paint himself and his practice in a kind or perfectly innocent light here. However, his ability to still clearly identify who the real culprits are is an inspiring testament to his clear-mindedness and his unshaken ability to imagine a better, more just world.

A busy web of interpersonal dynamics, Love Life often feels more concerned about its characters’ storylines and the way they all fit into each other than about what the audience might be getting out of watching it all play out.

Rather misjudged dips into the realm of fantasy likewise fail to lift up proceedings, but Rodeo is at its best when it stays down to earth, close to the pavement.

The film’s very long takes feel extremely rich with meaning and texture even as they often show a whole lot of nothing.

It is a moving healing journey, but one that feels almost too smooth, a best-case scenario with few bumps in the road and, more significantly, very few surprises.

The Five Devils feels like the inevitable encounter of indestructible drives, which send sparks flying both when they are satisfied and when they are denied.

The film ends on a slightly too simplistic, almost crass note regarding that point, but it cannot take away from its overall highly sensitive and formally rigorous exploration of nostalgia and of the other, different relationships people can afford to have with their past.