Guy Lodge

The film's chief pleasures are those of practiced professionals doing their job, and doing it well. None of the stars here is slacking, and their combined, easily resumed chemistry ensures that this sequel, for good long stretches, feels like old times — even if it's hard to imagine fans of its predecessor cherishing repeat viewings to quite the same extent.

By turns tenderly observed, improbably dark and perkily sitcom-esque, it’s certainly erratic, and uncertainly much else.

Brashly violent, clattery and pleasingly untied to any direct predecessor, the result is more generic than its braggy auteur claims might promise, but there’s a lot here for gorehounds to feast on.

A mostly pretty innocuous affair — give or take some par-for-the-course ethnic stereotyping and at least one close-up involving a prosthetic glans — it’s neither good nor bad to any memorable degree, not as riotous as it could have been but not devoid of low-hanging laughs either.

A generally brittle, distant affair, Outcome largely saps Reeves of his genial, unaffected charisma, leaving him to play the carapace of a man who’s lost any real sense of who he is when not in character.

You, Me & Tuscany passes the time painlessly enough, but it’s never quite the escape it wants to be: It’s packaged so familiarly and so cautiously, we hardly believe its celebration of free, restlessly wandering impulse.

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

Rosebush Pruning makes its anti-capitalist points tartly enough in such moments, but the twistier things get, the sillier they get too — while any social commentary begins to feel like a thin cover for so much luridly gross, glossy spectacle. Still, there’s pleasure in the film’s excesses, mainly because Aïnouz and his team present them with such febrile, iridescent beauty.

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.

Faith, “David” has in spades; soul, not so much.

There’s a lot of acting here, little of it peak-form for the talent involved, though the ensemble lifts and colors Anders’ sometimes heavy-handed dialogue.

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.

Ultimately, this odd, wicked little amorality tale winds up siding with no one: The children are indeed the future, we’re left to conclude, but will they make it any better than the present?

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.

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

The push-pull kinetics keeping these increasingly raddled lovers together and apart eventually turn from manic to strenuous, not least because viewers are likely to be less invested than the film is in their final formation.

Porcelain War thrives on contrast, much of it poignant.

Broad in tone and narrow in scope, the film is in thrall to the idea of creating art outside mainstream financial and aesthetic models, though its structure and outlook are not unfamiliar.

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

The result isn’t as formally or tonally characterful as the previous films, just as the script, more than before, feels bound to a well-worn template.

In Her Place — Chile’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar this year — finally resembles a nifty short-film premise wrapped around an untapped subject for a full-scale documentary or biopic

Saying something freshly substantive about female desire while honoring the film’s defining spirit of vapid, diaphanous horniness is a tricky, potentially unworkable brief; Audrey Diwan‘s inert, frequently frigid new film opts to do neither.

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.

Where the the writing is wan, the filmmaking compensates with emphatic braggadocio. Augustin Barbaroux’s cinematography is all humidly saturated tones and rolling, kinetic movement.

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.

Beating Hearts never bores, least of all when François Civil and the ever-electric Adèle Exarchopoulos take over as the young lovers’ adult (but far from grown-up) incarnations, while the consistent, cartwheeling kineticism with which Lellouche and DP Laurent Tangy shoot the whole thing is an ongoing rush.

Marcello Mio winds up saying very little about industry power structures, or even about the barbed nature of celebrity.

For all its cool, compelling proficiency, there’s little about the film that feels idiosyncratic, either stylistically or in its surface-level human portraiture.