Guy Lodge

The more Dayveon attempts to up the dramatic and moral stakes of its narrative, the less persuasive it is as idiosyncratic, indigenous storytelling.

When it reverts to conventional documentary storytelling, then, “Halston” is thrilling stuff for fashion nerds, as well as a poignant character study of a misfit ultimately undone by an excessive hunger to prove himself.

It’s a broader, starrier project than either of Nichols’s previous films, and he handles the transition to the major league with relative confidence.

It’s a furious work of social geography that satisfies slightly less as a character piece: In its ambitious attempt to dramatize the violent anxieties of men on both sides of the law, Les Misérables risks selling some victims a little short.

Though there’s much to savor in the pic’s lavishly distressed visuals and soundscape, its narrative feels increasingly stretched and desultory.

It’s a thin premise that cues much cheery knockabout comedy, with ample scope for impressively whooshy 3D tracking shots.

The film, on balance, is cheery, sherbet-colored stuff, bursting with goodwill for all good people. What you remember from it, however, is each scene in which elder malevolence deliciously spoils the party.

As a summation of her remarkable achievements to date in public life, Nathan Grossman’s film is reasonably thorough, and sometimes rousing, amply showcasing Thunberg’s candid gifts as a truth-to-power speaker. Yet as a portrait of the girl behind the cause, it’s cautious and rarely illuminating, speckled with moments of domestic intimacy that nonetheless feel carefully vetted.

There’s enjoyably smutty comedy to spare... but the film’s bleakest segments are actually its strongest.

Lively as an overview of Cardin’s creative and commercial achievements, House of Cardin is considerably vaguer when it comes to his personal life and legacy.

It’s Roy, having written herself a part for which many actresses would patiently wait, who does the heavy lifting here: Playing a woman who’s either losing her mind or playing dangerously at it, with as much attention paid to body language as befits her character’s artistic calling, she makes a revelatory, slightly otherworldly impression.

Unpretentiously touching on the page, this material feels stretched a bit thin on film, with televisual production values and a samey song score doing little to enrich matters: Still, it’s sweetly hopeful .

Creatively speaking, however, A Ciambra is something of a step sideways for the Italian-American filmmaker, consolidating his considerable formal and observational gifts while fumbling a bit as storytelling.

Crisply made and gutsily performed as it is, this slender 78-minute film too often feels like pointed social allegory in search of a really good cover story.

This cinematic Big Mac entertains abundantly on its own second-hand merits.

Cheery and diverting as The Bad Guys is, it has all the emotional weight of a few crisp, stolen Benjamins.

The results are coldly diverting, with the plot continually ratcheting itself into higher degrees of panic and surprise, though potential for a darker, harder psychological payoff is missed — largely because these characters are so thin.

There are pockets of truth, grace and pain in this portrait of troubled adolescence, and its talented young stars know where to find them; like many a nervous teen, however, the film itself is caught between standing out and fitting in.

Though it mostly resists contrived “opening-out” devices, and preserves the decidedly low-tech visualization of the play’s sci-fi premise, Michael Almereyda’s well-cast film never finds a suitably complex cinematic language for its tangle of intellectual and emotional ideas.

Even when the chips are down, every boy’s adorable beret looks box-fresh. It’s the boys themselves, however, who often cut through the Camembert to deliver a shot of honest, imperilled feeling.

As an experiment in steering a potentially tight thriller entirely by one character’s irrational whims, it’s abrasively compelling, even if the go-go-go plotting doesn’t withstand closest scrutiny.

It’s a commendable departure, even if you can sense the helmer struggling to get the lay of the land at certain intersections in this heartfelt tale of an impoverished brother and sister seeking roundabout justice when she’s imprisoned for attempted murder.

The result is attractive and diverting, as any well-appointed film starring these actors in mouthwatering period finery could hardly fail to be — though for a story about people rebuilding their lives through grievous personal loss and moral torment, it’s hard not to wonder if its vast reserves of enviable knitwear are counting for more than they should.

An enthusiastic but low-fizz romantic farce that gets by principally on the charms of a cast speckled with gifted funnymen (and, more particularly, funnywomen).

While this appropriately brief film unravels its enigma at a tidy clip, it gathers neither enough heat, nor quite enough of a chill, to linger in the bones.

There’s an unforced authenticity to its portrait of ruptured early childhood that isn’t matched by its later, more melodramatic depiction of father-daughter warfare — even if its tear-jerking tactics are undeniably effective. That it’s affecting in both registers comes down to a performance of quiet, good-humored grace by Scoot McNairy.

Characterization and emotional investment, however, are in disappointingly short supply, while crucial tension is permitted to dissipate in an anti-climactic final third.

The final result is a curiosity, sure, but a cute, quick-witted one, with much (maybe too much) on its mind.

Peter Cattaneo‘s amiable film adaptation matches the book’s feathery whimsy while reaching for a little more political import. Almost inevitably, it’s best when it’s about the bird.

[A] sensitive, deliberate debut feature.

The light and shade here is all in Peter Simonite’s splendid, inky-shadowed monochrome lensing; Huston’s visual sense outweighs his screenwriting.

The film, modest and often maudlin on its own storytelling terms, runs on a current of beyond-the-screen devotion that makes it compelling. Without that unquantifiable x-factor presence in the frame, it’s hard to say what reason this Netflix release would really have for being.

With its tricksy timeline and waifish subplots, the film feels unduly stretched even to reach its modest length, while our dramaturgy-fixated protagonist is slow to stumble into a compelling arc of her own.

[An] appealingly absurd thriller.

An arrestingly nihilistic Depression melodrama, marked by courageous performances and exquisite production values... The result is both problematic and fascinating, an unsympathetic spiral of human tragedy that plays a little like a hand-me-down folk ballad put to film.

It’s left to Stone to prop up the whole scented-tissue affair, and that she cheerfully does, with a calm, centered force of personality that lends credibility even to the most raggedly developed aspects of her character.

Julia offers us glimpses of a complex, brittle personality beneath the robust persona, but is either too cautious or too genuinely besotted with the latter to pry it out.

The Commuter’s breakneck incoherence — not to mention a generally dour demeanor, shorter on incidental humor than most of the helmer’s work — makes it a notch less fun than those previous ex-trash-aganzas.

As a portrait of sisterly trust, obligation and estrangement, and the difficulty of carrying familial dependencies into adulthood and beyond, the film is measured and thoughtful, lifted by performances of characteristic sensitivity by Alison Pill and Sarah Gadon.

The thrills and the effects are cheap, but this is in hard-driving, good-humoured command of its own silliness.

A tasteful grieving-family weepie, it's conceived and performed with utmost sincerity, yet lacks the intemperate human authenticity, the sense of profound strangeness in the everyday, that made Trier's ‘Reprise’ and ‘Oslo, August 31st’ so hard to shake.

Arnaud Desplechin’s Deception is a strange, stifling but frequently intriguing attempt to find a cinematic match for the literary voice of Philip Roth, from his autofictional 1990 novel of the same name.

What Hyena lacks in invention, however, it makes up for in technical bravado and geographical specificity.

Against the film’s own boisterous inclinations, Pace gives it something like a heart, albeit a closed, melancholic one: that’s some acting, and it’s maybe more than these agreeably derivative proceedings deserve. Like its less interesting chancer of a protagonist, however, Driven will take what brushes with greatness it can get.

Televisually presented and arduously overlong at 127 minutes, 150 Milligrams can’t always separate the compelling personal stakes of its narrative from its surfeit of informational minutiae.

Expect no surprises in Falling for Figaro, a corny, cute-enough carpe diem comedy, in which it’s a lovable ensemble — led by Danielle Macdonald, and spiked by a deliciously imperious Joanna Lumley — that brings the grace notes to a pretty standard-issue script.

Just as An itself seems on the verge of flying away, however, Kawase rewards her audience with an unapologetically contrived but effectively eye-moistening surge of feeling.

While shot through with pointed jabs at chauvinism and mainstream homophobia in Mexican society, The Untamed never quite exceeds the sum of its intriguingly opposed parts.

Sicario occasionally seems a little too impressed by its own nihilism. Still, this is an involving, grown-up film from a director whose muscular technique continues to impress: one might call it pulp in the same manner one would a plate of minced meat.

Hill of Freedom, its noble implications lending outward grandeur to a romantic triangle that reps a cream puff even by Hong’s trifling standards. Cream puffs have their merits, though — principally the aerated, uncomplicated sweetness that characterizes this barely feature-length distraction, the light emotional foibles and regrettably careless cinematic construction of which are of a piece with the helmer’s swiftly produced recent work.

Misbehaviour says good riddance to a bad era in the brightest, politest way possible: too politely, perhaps, if you’re seeking a feminist comedy that actually lives up to the raucous promise of its title.

An amusing, extravagantly implausible farce that nonetheless makes a pointed argument about the perceived marginalization of childless women in modern society.

Quite what we gain from the experience is uncertain, with most viewers likely to leave the film understanding little more of the Unabomber than they did two hours before. Still, Ted K is impressive and oppressive in equal measure.

This study of adolescent desire and alienation across class lines takes its time nurturing a tensely ambiguous relationship between its two young female leads — alertly played by newcomers Lauren McQueen and Brogan Ellis — only to squander a measure of that intrigue on a blunt third-act twist.

Thompson elevates and enervates every scene she’s in.

The two characters at the center of Amit Rai’s screenplay are superficially defined beyond their all-consuming devotion, and that lack of nuance and texture makes for some flat stretches across a leisurely 134-minute runtime — though a shattering finale, staged with brilliant formalist rigor, leaves the most lasting impression.

Even at its shakiest, however, “The Kitchen” gets by on the steam of its own fury, and on its tender depiction of a trampled underclass staving off defeat through small, everyday acts of care and empathy.

Don’t tell Liam Neeson, but someone had the gall to make a violent Euro-thriller about a rampaging American dad without him. And not a bad one either.

A proficient but personality-free policer that demands little of either its audience or its enviable best-of-British cast, this simplistic urban morality tale miscasts the appealing James McAvoy as one good cop whose dogged pursuit of Mark Strong’s alpha criminal only uncovers the rot within police ranks.

It’s Watkins’ lean, keen instinct for choreographing and cutting action set pieces that keeps Bastille Day afloat.

Approach the film with managed genre expectations, however, and there’s much to admire (and duly shiver over) in its formidable, stormcloud-hued atmospherics, low-simmer storytelling and a particularly fine, unaffected breakout performance by teenage actress Eleanor Worthington-Cox in the testing title role.

It comes as little surprise that Howard, a nimble and proficient storyteller in non-fiction and fiction like, hasn’t a natural documentarian’s drive for information: This diverting, brightly assembled boomer nostalgia trip won’t open the eyes of any existing Fab Four fans, however much it pleases their ears.

Tsai here seems to be stripping his ornately eccentric style down to formal fundamentals. A certain pictorial grace remains; his sense of humor, sadly, appears to have been largely tossed out with the bathwater.

For Vinterberg, this uneven but nonetheless absorbing pic at least marks a return to characteristically bristly territory.

At just 78 minutes, this bustling, absorbing doc hasn’t quite enough time to entirely draw us into the lives and perspectives of its likable human subjects: We’re given sketched-in backgrounds and familial food histories, but their personalities remain somewhat elusive.

Setting up a number of promising kinks in the now-standard found-footage formula, as the seemingly spooked forest begins to close in its hapless victims, Blair Witch disappointingly casts most of them aside for a finale that does little to advance the series’ existing mythos.

For its first half, 7500 is briskly effective in a cold-sweat sort of way, carrying its audience from a smooth takeoff to the first signs of disturbance to swiftly cranked all-out terror with the kind of nervy efficiency you can admire without exactly taking pleasure in it. In more ways than one, however, Vollrath’s technically adroit film has trouble sticking the landing.

Koji Fukada’s Love Life unabashedly embraces melodramatic contrivance in its examination of modern middle-class love tested as much by social prejudices as by personal demons; it just does so with such pallid, polite reserve that its sentimentality never becomes transcendently moving.

It’s busier than it is funny, more frenetic than dynamic, but watchable enough.

It’s uneven practically by design, with a tone that slides all the way from kooky farce to anguished psychological study, just about held together by Mackenzie Davis’s lively, spiky turn in the lead.

The film is undeniably overlong, and far more engaging in its first half, which covers Ferragamo’s hard-up Neapolitan beginnings and lively career as a shoemaker to the stars in 1920s Tinseltown with a mixture of romantic evocation and chewy historical expertise.

Charlie McDowell makes an equally respectful and respectable stab at the task, capturing some of the wistful, soft-sun warmth of Jansson’s writing — though not quite matching its unassuming poetic depths.

Mellow, digestibly sweet and embellished with lovely folk tunes, this modest bit of Americana reveals pleasing new sides of both leads.

Immersively crafted but never emotionally involving.

An unabashed wish-fulfilment fantasy that sweetly checks off every conceivable follow-your-heart cliché.

Art counts for a lot more than patriotism to Guthrie, and the happy surprise of Nicholas Hytner‘s film — despite its twee, veddy English trappings — is that it largely takes his side.

While the severity of the film’s environment convinces, the specifics of Amy Fox’s screenplay — tangled up in tech IPOs, post-Snowden security paranoia and venal investment banking practice — are less consistently persuasive.

Earnest issue drama and pulpy B-thriller mechanics make awkward but not uncompelling bedfellows in Honour.

At two hours, rather intricately stuffed with subplots ranging from frivolous to grimly consequential, “The Good Boss” struggles to pick up the pace when required: The laughs are there, but more spaced out than they could be.

This articulate, formally immaculate portrait proves less compelling in practice than it does in principle: Over-burdened at the outset with extraneous ceremonial detail and starchy speechifying, the film takes a dry, acolytes-only approach before later, more domestically focused chapters raise the body temperature of proceedings.

It’s as handsomely shot as any film about an ace shutterbug ought to be, and Binoche infuses familiar internal crises with palpable pain and urgency.

If the material feels inadequate for a freestanding doc, that’s no fault of Nichols, who’s on playful, perspicacious form.

The rare prestige pic that could actually stand to be longer.

Pizza Movie is disposable, practically by design, but it may have happened upon a comic duo worth reteaming.

Its repetitive qualities are beyond reproach. Every bit as amiable and disposable as its predecessor, it recycles everything from slapstick gags to its own voice cast.

Laden with enticing ideas and images that never quite activate each other, “The Beast” instead coagulates into a thick 146-minute triptych of general, fidgeting malaise, and strands a hard-working Léa Seydoux and George MacKay in a cross-time, cross-purposes relationship that keeps shape-shifting without getting us terribly involved.

The consistently celebratory stance of “Kink” is commendable, but also feels somewhat limiting.

The film holds back from showing us Touda’s soul in its chaotic, capricious entirety — her life as a single mother, in particular, is rather sketchily drawn — and remains most fixated on her in performance mode, where’s she’s fully in her power.

Balagov, however, remains the star attraction of “Butterfly Jam,” his fluent, adventurous command of sound and image keeping the film interesting even when not much is happening on screen, and tangibly atmospheric when the narrative pendulum swings too far in the other direction.

Coetzee’s novel, with its measured, interiorized voice and sparse, incrementally devastating narrative, was never an obvious fit for film treatment. After a stiffly mannered, overwritten first act, however, Waiting for the Barbarians gradually gains in poetry and power, while Mark Rylance’s lead performance, as a liberal-minded colonial official undermined and overwhelmed by his tyrannical superiors, gives proceedings a quiet but firm moral core.

As a final, permanent showcase for a role Everett was born to play, then, The Happy Prince does the job. For all its passion-project hallmarks, however, it makes a shakier case for him being the filmmaker to bring it to screen.

The cruelties of the French immigration system lend a bitter back note to Petit’s otherwise upbeat heartwarmer — a mostly palatable affair that can’t wholly sidestep white-savior cliché in a rushed final course.

How illuminating or challenging Caniba proves for viewers will depend on their amenability to Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s amoral stance and literally up-in-your-face technique. Those who aren’t provoked by its ambiguous psychological inquiry, however, may wish for a bigger human picture from this relentlessly close-up exercise.

Via a blend of free narrative speculation and exacting musical presentation, Petr Vaclav’s stately, sumptuous biopic Il Boemo seeks to restore a degree of iconic status to a talent latterly overshadowed by relative 18th-century contemporaries, albeit not with much swagger or modernity of its own: This is costume drama of a traditional, ornately brocaded stripe, a classical music lesson for classicists.

What keeps things diverting, and sometimes even interesting, is the genuine but necessarily tentative chemistry between its stars, one staging an all-out charm offensive and the other projecting a flintier allure.

Mensore’s film aims chiefly to highlight the typical plight of an American underclass that rarely gets big-screen attention. That it does with honesty and conviction, if not a great deal of inspiration.

There are gentle rewards to be gained from the initially brittle, gradually tender rapport between two actors of contrasting greatness.

The film is easier to admire than it is to invest in emotionally, though its pulse quickens with a dramatic, and boldly untelegraphed, feminist twist in the rural-set final reel.