Farran Smith Nehme

Give director Paul Borghese credit for daring in giving his movie a title that evokes Sergio Leone’s two most famous epics. The trouble with doing that, of course, is that you better be prepared to deliver a movie on the same level.

For those willing to lock into Reygadas’ mad wavelength, the beauty is worth the puzzlement.

The sex is the main thing that makes Kiss of the Damned worthwhile.

The result is no masterpiece, but neither is it a disaster. In its steady great-books way, the film is often truthful and moving.

Morales’ spin on the old ransom plot is fresher and more gripping than most big-budget Hollywood products.

Seidl sternly rejects nuance. All the women are crude and insensitive, all the men are desperate and exploited. Despite copious full-frontal nudity, it’s an unrelievedly puritanical and didactic film.

Bhalla’s advocacy gets its force above all from the oddly similar personalities of the two main subjects — Wallace and Sumell — zealous reformers possessed of astonishing optimism, even as Bhalla closes by noting that there are 80,000 prisoners in solitary in the US.

It’s a sympathetic portrait of an artist whose heart lay more with new work than old glories, right up to the end.

The debut film of Brandon Cronenberg deals out shivers and flinches in little hypodermic jabs.

At age 76, Loach also decided to offer his characters, and audience, some hope — at the bottom of a glass.

There’s a good cinephile heart beating under this fluffy story. But Lellouche, in making her homage to Allen, left out one of his essential qualities: bite. Paris-Manhattan drifts by and never leaves a single toothmark.

The last topic is the hook for audience members not related to Gregory or Kleine, but just as insight appears, back we go to Kleine's tediously selfreferential narration.

The film is built from moving, frank interviews with survivors from two families who hid, speaking over and around extensive re-enactments. Passages from the memoir of one family matriarch, Esther Stermer, in many ways the heroine of the tale, also are used as narration.

This enigma-delivery system from a sharp mind has enthralling moments but becomes a bit enervating in its self-seriousness. By the end, the whole thing feels more academic than mind-bending.

Detour does a fine job of giving drivers yet another reason to stress out, but that anxiety doesn’t extend to its hero’s fate.

Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves is the purest, boldest re-imagining of silent cinema yet.

The biographical bits soon feel like a distraction from the music, performed by Gavilán. It’s heard often, but not often enough. Judging by the movie, Parra’s songs are fiery and haunting, sometimes sensuous, sometimes bleak. When Parra sings, the movie becomes worthwhile.

For a long while, director Benjamin Epps goes for breakneck farce; at its best, this is a batty mixture of family-values editorial and teen spoof.

It’s not a documentary, it isn’t entertainment, and aside from Chung’s intelligent, dignified performance, this sure as heck isn’t art.

The young, novice actors are charming, but they haven’t completely mastered the art of natural-sounding dialogue.

Gould’s lugubrious presence is always welcome, and Rue plays her lovelorn part with verve.

The plot doesn’t entirely escape formula, and the ending is jagged and forced, unable to commit to either hope or gloom. But for at least part of its length, My Brother the Devil brings refreshing changes to a genre badly in need of them.

The bright palette of Reality is an obvious way to underline the hero’s unraveling, but it looks good, and it works.

Toward the end, despite the wintry script and chilly acting, some emotion begins to break through. But it’s never a good sign when the art direction offers more fascination than the sex.

Clip hurts your eyes, but if it’s supposed to hurt your heart, it misses the mark.

It’s a film heavily dependent on tone and atmosphere for its charm, the budding relationship shown through things like a lovely twilight bike ride down a hill to the shops below.

The result is like an hour and a half listening to someone bellyache about her landlord.

What this means is that at times the pace of Beyond the Hills is nerve-wrackingly slow. But Mungiu has his own way of creating suspense, and he has a gift for making a known outcome as shocking as a twist.