Giovanni Marchini Camia

By the time Suleiman’s character finishes his world trip and returns home, all he leaves us with is the reassurance that the Palestinian people are resilient and, eventually, will be free as well. That’s a terribly lazy note to end on. Some might even call it trivializing.

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.

Garrone’s prowess as a director is still undeniable, and as far as nasty, gripping brutality goes, Dogman certainly delivers. If you’re looking for pulpy violence, you won’t be disappointed. Just don’t expend too much thought over what it’s all supposed to mean.

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.

Overwriting has been the constant weakness in Farhadi’s filmmaking, but here the writer-director — who should really consider passing scriptwriting duties on to someone else for a change — truly outdoes himself.

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.

Polanski sleepwalks his way through the film, manifesting precious little of the skill and invention that fueled the slow-burn suspense and sinister atmospheres of superficially similar works such as Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion.

Although the animation effect is for the most part quite well-rendered and the animals are brought to life with impressive fluidity, there always remains a slightly jarring artificiality that prevents the viewer from fully sinking into the focused and contemplative spectatorship mode he’d intended.

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.

Although Leviathan, Zvyagintsev’s previous and far-superior effort, was hardly a masterclass in nuance, a palpable sense of empathy and flashes of humor largely compensated for its lack of subtlety. These are sorely lacking in Loveless.

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.

Even the most generous of viewers couldn’t come up with a legitimate reason for the vileness on show here, other than pure and simple sadism.

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.

Shedding little light on the circumstances of Elser’s failed attempt and even less on the broader history that surrounds it, 13 Minutes presents a redundant historical “what if” that leaves itself open to charges of relativization.

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.

Ends up probing largely universal quandaries to lackluster results.

Had the story been more focused rather than trying to encompass all four sisters as protagonists as well as integrate a number of redundant secondary characters, it likely could have yielded more satisfying results.

While Rosi certainly manages to jolt the viewer out of complacency, his strategy towards this end is so ethically dubious as to border on repellent.

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.

Disappointingly, the film feels like someone trying very hard to imitate Li’l Quinquin, pulling off but a pallid counterfeit.

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.

Poitras takes very little advantage of her direct access to Assange to offer up any other information that isn’t already common knowledge.

Like the best poetry, Paterson keeps its meticulous construction hidden, letting its impact sneak up on you unawares. When the final image cuts to black, it triggers an overwhelming surge of emotions that’ll make you want to remain seated in the dark until long after the credits have finished rolling, basking in this marvelous film’s afterglow.

As radical a reinvention of the biopic as Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, Neruda is Larraín’s most conceptual and also his most demanding film yet. Like Haynes, Larraín attempts to create a hybrid between his subject’s art and biography, and, like Haynes’ film, Larraín’s is generally more fascinating than it is enjoyable.

Those familiar with Park’s earlier work will know that he’s hardly the most subtle of filmmakers, and his approach to gender politics here is risible, even self-contradictory. His customary prowess as a stylist and knack for constructing and navigating intricate plots, on the other hand, is once again put to good use.

Jarmusch’s film is a strictly conventional affair that resembles any number of TV documentaries.

Clara is the film’s heroine and Braga deserves high praise for her phenomenal performance. Stately, headstrong, and all-too-recognizably human, she’s a delight to watch from start to finish, keeping the viewer mesmerized by her charisma and intensely rooting for her victory.

While he does, to an extent, stifle some of his more adolescent instincts in comparison to earlier films (e.g. Laurence Anyways and Mommy), Dolan generally appears to have mistaken maturity for joylessness.

As per Assayas’ custom, the film is chock-full of fascinating themes and ideas and his indisputable flair as a director makes it compulsively watchable.

The director has set out to make the most repellently misogynistic film imaginable, yet he’s disguised it as a postmodern feminist satire. By shattering every possible taboo, the film is supposed to be an attack against the very thing it represents. Really, though, any semblance of commentary is simply a posture for Winding Refn to cover his ass.

Even the cinematography by the Dardennes’ long-time collaborator Alain Marcoen, usually so instrumental in ensnaring the viewer within their films’ ethical quandaries, is surprisingly flat this time around.

Toni Erdmann is one of the most stirring cinematic experiences to come around in a long time.

Café Society is a quintessential later-period Woody Allen film. That is to say, it’s utterly mediocre.

While Green Room features a number of ingeniously crafted set pieces, it quickly winds up as an excessive, borderline pornographic revelry in extreme violence.

Much like the film’s clinical cinematography, which is dominated by consistently striking yet lifeless tableaux, Côté’s theorem is closed in on itself, failing to produce interesting results.

The lack of characterization is Cups‘ biggest flaw.... The constant Malick-ian voice-overs – fragmented, hushed, magniloquent – largely replacing dialogue don’t offer much by way of compensation.

While Hansen-Løve certainly deserves credit for writing such a compelling character, it’s difficult to imagine anyone realizing Nathalie as consummately as Huppert, who, even by her exceptionally high standards, pulls off a superlative performance.

The Lobster, takes on the rigid preconceptions surrounding relationships.