Giovanni Marchini Camia

Bong is perhaps the contemporary master of entertaining, intelligent and resolutely political cinema. In our age of assembly line blockbusters, he’s a veritable treasure.

Credit where credit’s due, as Bacurau owes a considerable debt to Carpenter–while also taking ample cues from another half-dozen genre auteurs–but in terms of complexity and ambition, this furious political allegory co-written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles (the production designer on Mendonça Filho’s previous features) is very much a case of the students outclassing the master.

As a viewing experience, it is relentlessly harrowing, bordering on the traumatizing. Yet while Son of Saul dares to delve even further into the horror than the majority of Holocaust films, never once does it so much as threaten to slip into exploitative territory.

In strict terms of craft, Donbass is an impressive achievement, but its heavy-handedness nevertheless feels inordinate.

Although Long Day’s Journey is a far more polished work than Kaili Blues, it also feels a lot more calculated, often sacrificing emotional impact for ostentation.

As with the several other slight departures from realism, the artifice added to the story proves distracting. Without being successfully integrated, such choices fail to bestow the narrative with depth and pathos as intended, but only draw attention to the flimsiness of the its construction.

The plot’s construction might be derivative, but its serpentine execution is flawless, providing enough crazy turns and zany characters to sustain an escalating momentum for Silver Lake‘s nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime.

Whether there’s any worth to be found in The House That Jack Built will depend on the viewer’s interest in delving deep into von Trier’s tortured psyche. It’s unlikely anyone will empathize with him and it’s certain many will find the film execrable, but those willing to indulge his excess are offered a wealth of fascinating material.

The director’s characteristic humanism and rejection of easy judgments suffuses the film with sincere empathy – refreshingly, he acknowledges his own role in the entrenched patriarchal culture he’s critiquing, both as a man and film director. As such, when 3 Faces closes on a bittersweet note, the hopeful gesture of its closing image feels neither cheap nor unearned.

It’s all insane and intoxicating, and what’s perhaps most remarkable is that, ultimately, the ugliness and excess is legitimized by being in the service of an elaborate and ecstatically realized celebration of dancing as an art form.

The meticulous script by Lafosse and his three co-writers prompts the viewer to parse each of their sentences for underlying meaning and backstory, maintaining a necessary level of ambiguity that constantly shifts the perception of who’s in the right and who’s to blame.

Desplechin has frequently acknowledged his debt to psychoanalysis in general and Lacan specifically, but never had he dared plunge as deeply into the mysteries of the psyche as he does here. [Cannes Version]

On the level of montage, You Were Never Really Here is an expressionistic tour de force.

A major issue is that the characterizations don’t reach very deep and in the absence of a robust context or involving narrative, it’s actually the references to Haneke’s previous films that flesh out what is otherwise a rather perfunctory condemnation of the bourgeoisie equipped with the usual symbolic connotations.

Huppert and Kim are clearly having fun riffing off one another, each speaking in lightly broken English and conveying the pleasures of ephemeral encounters in low-stakes liminal spaces such as the one represented by the festival.

Though not as successful as its predecessor, Loznitsa’s latest nonetheless confirms the director’s place of honor amongst cinema’s most vociferous critics of Putin’s kingdom.

Not only is Mija’s mission genuinely involving, but Bong and his co-writer, the author Jon Ronson, also get great comic mileage out of satirizing the Mirando corporation, rendering it a hilarious amalgamation of all of capitalism’s evils, as well as the A.L.F. and their oxymoronic credo of non-violent terrorism.

Although the film is ultimately a celebration of Bell’s numerous achievements, which are inseparable from her sex considering the time and place, it’s nonetheless regrettable that her love life should serve as the narrative thread, especially since this thread is formed through an absence of relationships.

It delivers a constant, exhilarating stream of elaborate and exquisitely photographed thrills that ends up largely compensating for the would-be profundity.

Together with the camera’s constantly creeping pans and dollies — as well as the bilious green tinge that permeates each frame — the film thus generates a sense of unease that intensifies very gradually and unremittingly, reaching an extreme pitch by the time of its denouement.

An extraordinarily rich, initially exasperating, yet eventually marvelous postmodern epic.

Lacking the earlier stylistic exuberance, Dog Eat Dog loses all momentum, taking forever to come to a conclusion both foregone and deeply dissatisfying.

What Zero Days lacks in subtlety and formal innovation, however, it compensates for in breadth and lucidity.

It’s a moving portrait, but it’s also a very familiar and transparently constructed one, preventing the narrative from generating the urgency necessary to endow its moral implications with genuine vigor.

Elle would be unimaginable without Huppert, who delivers a performance of such virtuosity that she turns what is essentially a raving sociopath into one of the most alluring protagonists in recent memory.

Apart from a middle stretch during which the narrative loses momentum and Staying Vertical feels temporarily aimless – something that Guiraudie soon rectifies by amping up the weirdness – the film is as engaging and consistently uproarious as it is perplexing.

Sieranevada’s mise-en-scène is one of suffocation, making for a dense and demanding viewing experience. However, Puiu’s exceptional script – both in terms of the quality of the dialogue and the painstakingly progressive characterizations – foments a burning wish to figure out all the character configurations, conflicts and backstories, ensuring that Sieranevada remains consistently, intensely engaging.

Uncharacteristically inert, the film plods its way to a strained finale that erodes much of the strength of its potentially compelling themes.