Guy Lodge

Unassuming and meanderingly character-oriented, the film doesn’t assert itself as an issue drama — in large part because, as Solaguren presents her eight-year-old protagonist’s gradual steps toward self-realization, her film doesn’t see much of an issue to begin with.

Everything in L’Immensità is beautiful even when everything wasn’t: Crialese’s odd, affecting memory piece layers the world as it was, is and could be in the same gilded frame.

This abrasive, exhilarating film is out to candidly say its piece, to identify and evoke the world as Tucker Green sees it, and doesn’t much care if viewers agree or not.

This flamenco-inspired Carmen is often strangely shy about its terpsichorean impulses, with dance sequences functioning as isolated, somewhat haphazard setpieces rather than as a consistent storytelling medium.

Sidestepping thornier questions of optics and ownership, Wild Life ultimately takes the side of nature over politics, and most viewers will follow suit.

The Pope’s Exorcist still exerts a lurid B-movie pull, in part because Australian genre stylist Avery demonstrates some command of fire-and-brimstone theatrics, but mostly thanks to Russell Crowe: As the film’s version of Father Amorth by way of Damien Karras, the slumming Oscar champ props up proceedings with just the right balance of gruff, paternalistic credibility and wry, self-mocking irony.

Celebrating youthful experimentation and midlife renewal alike, Judy Blume Forever strips its subject’s work of any dated aura of danger, inviting everyone to the party.

Short, sweet and sparky, Raine Allen-Miller's immensely likable debut doesn't reinvent the wheel, but instant chemistry between stars Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson keeps it spinning.

As strenuously as the film professes to give arranged marriages a fair shake, its whole cornball narrative is rigged against the very concept: “Love Contractually” may be the pitch, but “Love Actually” is the preferred outcome.

On the Adamant is most moving when it stands back, letting its most disenfranchised subjects talk, or shout, or sing.

Outside those charged moments of hands-on connection, however, Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything is something of a slog, hampered by escalating dramatic obviousness and thin characterization

Too often, the film’s well-meaning reportage is muddled with needless vanity sequences of the actor-director as an on-the-ground trailblazer, as the film fashions the impression that Penn himself — as much as any news agency — is a vital courier of the horrific events around him to Western audiences.

Limbo joins a long line of fine Australian films taking to the desert to disinter racial trauma, to rebury the bones with more care and awareness, but also enduring fury.

It’s the film’s great, disorienting structural risks, its humoring of human untidiness and confusion, that make it so subtly thrilling and moving.

It’s a film of fragmentary but funny rewards — funnier still, most likely, if accompanied by smoking of a different kind.

“In Viaggio” captures the Pope, and by extension the whole Church, in an uncomfortable limbo state between defensiveness and progressiveness, though it keeps its own critique tacit and un-narrated, hinging on what the viewer brings to its hand-picked footage.

A pair of sensational performances by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (“Candyman”) and George MacKay (“1917”), locked in a nervy duet as two men with virtually nothing in common but their sexuality, represents the chief selling point for this stylish, commendably uncompromising fusion of genre fireworks and measured, thoughtful character study.

Examining the unique ties that bind farming families, where everyone’s welfare hangs on the same unkind elements, this exquisitely textured film observes how children’s lives echo those of their parents, repeating for generations on the same constantly inconstant land, until somebody breaks the pattern.

Even when Disco Boy threatens to be too much or too little, however, Rogowski’s strange, sparse, plaintive performance keeps its soul intact, and its most poignant query afloat above all the flash and dazzle and neon lights: just how much of themselves people will sacrifice for a paper identity.

The Adults is most moving in its understanding of the trivial quips, asides and slight, splintered anecdotes that are sometimes all that remains between adult relatives who once shared richer connective tissue.

Evocative and appropriately aggravating as Baby Ruby is in its portrayal of mental breakdown following traumatic childbirth, however, its parlaying of this condition into full-blown genre tensions and terrors yields mixed rewards.

Director Shô Miyake’s measured, unsentimental adaptation of a memoir by Keiko Ogasawara — who turned professional despite the difficulties of lifelong deafness — turns out to be somewhat aptly described by its own title, though none of those adjectives quite conveys its rare and delicate grace.

As a pure adrenaline-rush experience, however, The Deepest Breath is hard to argue with, coming closer than might seem possible to conveying the exhilaration and/or terror of descending further than the length of a football field into infinite aqua.

Courtesy of source material by offbeat fantasy maestro Terry Pratchett, it’s genuinely eccentric enough — with its sly talking cat, intrepid band of gold-hearted rats and chronic aversion to keeping the fourth wall intact — to come off as charming rather than smarmy.

This is a farce of stasis, not frenzied activity. By holding his characters literally captive — as the village is held, absurdly but violently, under siege — Kolirin forges an actual microcosm through which to examine the social and political status of Israel’s Arab community.

Regan’s debut rehashes a host of familiar elements from assorted kitchen-sink dramas and dysfunctional parent-child stories, painting them colorfully enough that audiences won’t mind the odd bit of rust.

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.

When it sticks to the trivial stuff, Shotgun Wedding is at least capably mediocre, coasting on its coastal scenery — actually the Dominican Republic, and brightly shot by David Lynch collaborator Peter Deming, not that you’d ever guess — and Lopez’s reliably sparky screen presence. It’s intermittently stolen, however, by everyone’s favorite Jennifer of the moment, Coolidge, as the gaffe-prone mother of the groom.

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.

It’s an auspicious arrival for first-time feature director Diem, who handles delicate subject matter (not to mention vulnerable human subjects) with a frankness that stops short of button-pushing. That tact is crucial in a film operating as both close-quarters character study and wider ethnographic portrait, offering a rare, dedicated view of Vietnam’s little-represented Hmong population.

This is a predominantly observational affair, marked by unusual tenderness and human interest, shot with a camera that feels all but invisible to its subjects — belying the director’s delicate, precise approach to light and framing.

Tartly funny and plungingly sad in equal measure, this is nuanced, humane queer filmmaking, more concerned with the textures and particulars of its own intimate story than with grander social statements — even if, as a tale of transgender desire in a Muslim country, its very premise makes it a boundary-breaker.

The film is too emotionally blunt not to wring tears (or at least a solid lump in the throat) where required, though they don’t always feel artfully earned. Either way, at over two hours, it’s a long trudge toward an inevitable end.

The film’s intimate scenes of mother-son discord are remarkable, played with raw, nerve-pushing testiness by two first-time actors.

[A] winningly sweet-natured, visually transporting adaptation.

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.

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.

A phony, flimsy attempt at vintage noir.

The Girl With a Bracelet comments intelligently on our culture’s propensity to sex-shame and emotionally instruct young women in particular — points which stand regardless of whether shedunnit or not.

Zlotowski’s deft, perceptive original screenplay is keenly attuned to the cutting emotional impact of a passing remark or overheard jab, and the unintended microaggressions that parents occasionally toss at their child-free peers.

Master Gardener is all fingers and thumbs for much of its running time, kept sporadically in order only by the stern, trusty presence of Edgerton himself.

It didactically calls out governmental hypocrisy while exposing corrupt elements and inefficiencies within the precious institution itself. It hedges its bets politically between nostalgic keening for a kinder, fairer Britain of old and advocating for a top-down socialist makeover. It wavers tonally between cozy comedy and head-on polemic.

Layering one wild formal flourish over another — from macabre stop-motion animation to elaborately choreographed musical fantasies — to channel the inner lives of two young women who communicated only with each other, keeping the rest of the world outside their circle, it’s a swing for the fences that sometimes, almost by design, spins out of control.

The film demonstrates its director’s characteristic nose for strong material and knack for gripping, straightforward storytelling.

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.

The result feels closer than any of his previous films to the barbed, intimate lyricism of McDonagh’s work as a playwright, and more deeply, sorrowfully felt to boot.

That Argentina, 1985 managed to toggle between such emotionally raw material and more amped-up, tension-driven subplots — as Strassera and his family weather death threats and cars explode in public squares — without seeming callous or dramatically opportunistic is a credit to Mitre, whose grasp on his story is high-key and emotionally immediate, but never glib.

The final film is elegant and empathetic, but never quite emotionally involving: For all its rich, heightened articulation of a woman’s distress and unrest, the sense of a life being academically magnified under glass never quite leaves the endeavor.

Faith is as disciplined and intriguingly opaque as the men and women it studies, attempting to unlock the nature of the group through mesmeric observation of routine and ritual.

For anyone who’s forgotten the extent of van Houten’s skill set, actress-turned-filmmaker Halina Reijn’s impressive, icily disciplined debut feature Instinct provides a fearsome reminder.

Joyride needs some deft actors driving it, and it has lucked out: An up-for-anything Olivia Colman and scrappy newcomer Charlie Reid make for an unlikely but appealing buddy duo.

This glossy but gloopy Netflix original is primarily out to serve its leading lady’s legions of fans, some of them perhaps young enough not to have seen it all before.

Effectively piling nostalgia upon nostalgia upon nostalgia into a triple-layered Victorian sponge of particularly English sweetness, this good-natured, resolutely old-fashioned film will likely make any adults who grew up on Jeffries’ original a little misty-eyed.

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.

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.

A quiet, tightly wound horror film, Bass’ fourth and most briskly accomplished feature might flirt with the supernatural, but finds terror aplenty in social dynamics that, to many a South African, are perfectly ordinary.

Braiding the reflections of nine variously affected individuals on the subject, David Henry Gerson’s film successfully keeps the big picture and the smaller canvas in conscientious balance, disrupting overwhelming tragedy with more hopeful flashes of invention and inspiration.

It’s a modest film with a heart very much on its torn sleeve, given force and ballast by another fine dramatic turn from the hard-working Virginie Efira.

The film’s formal flourishes are modest, centering the actors ahead of all else.

Pacifiction is a film in many ways about floating, through life and water and power, inviting the viewer to idly drift right along with it.

Inspired by the life and roots of her children’s father, Serraille’s original screenplay embeds tacit, national-scale socioeconomic commentary in its intimate domestic story, though smartly avoids making blunt symbols of its sharp, specific characters.

Even in its more generic stretches, Martone’s latest feels both inviting and convincingly inhabited, a siren song to the past that confronts us with a violent, unromantic present, paved under with the same old, blood-washed cobblestones.