Guy Lodge

Aftersun thus works elegantly as a kind of dual coming-of-age study, perfectly served by Mescal’s signature brand of softboi gentleness — here shown maturing and creasing into more hardened, troubled masculinity — and the vitality of Corio, whose deft, lovely performance braids both authentic exuberance and a girlishness that feels more performed, as if for the benefit of her dad.

It knows the fragility of quiet, which is sometimes the sound of inner peace, and sometimes, per that Prévert poem, the echoing unrest of an empty space.

In this witty, windblown modern fable, man, nature and machine get to take turns being the enemy and the savior.

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.

Some might wonder what Anaïs in Love really has to say for itself; the film, perhaps, objects to the idea of young women like its cheerfully confused heroine having to explain themselves at all. Either way, this zephyr-blown dandelion of a movie isn’t going to break a sweat to get its message across.

It’s when the film’s natural and metatextual components overlap and disrupt each other that The Earth Is Blue as an Orange is most arresting.

Amid its textured, occasionally conflict-scarred portrait of female community, La Mami is rife with sharp, tacit socioeconomic criticism of an unequal, patriarchal society in which making joyless business out of pleasure is the best hope many women have.

Pierre Pinaud’s short but unhurried film benefits immensely from the warmly flinty presence of Catherine Frot (“Marguerite”) in the lead, lending a sense of purpose and personality to a character without much color on the page.

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

Steeped in local folklore, it lets mythic and mind-based terrors exist side by side, allowing the viewer to interpret and believe what they will. This leeway comes at no cost, however, to its effective atmospherics, which sink into the bones like an unexpected twilight chill.

Smart, humane and gripping even as it rakes over events all too fresh in our memories, How to Survive a Pandemic ends with plenty yet to be discussed and explored: It provides a road map to survival, but doesn’t suggest we’ve all made it just yet.

Blending the oddball sensibility of McDowell and regular co-writer Justin Lader with the nastier genre smarts of “Se7en” scribe Andrew Kevin Walker, this low-key Netflix holds to its intriguing promise for a crisp 90 minutes, though even its climax is muted by design.

As a lone drifter guarding a precious quarry in deadly desert conditions in a faintly futuristic nowhereland, [Efron's] good, as anyone’s who been paying attention should expect. Beyond that, it’s a somewhat arid exercise.

Spare and pared-back in all respects ranging from performance to its clean, airily-lensed aesthetic, After Love carries bulky baggage with an elegant lightness, leaving its audience with further unpacking to do.

The Guits’ provocation is about as amiable as something so abjectly appalling can be, though it’s perhaps a few jaw-dropping shocks (or a few uproarious belly-laughs) short of the cult status it seeks.

Servants is briskly shaped at just under 80 minutes, yet its alien-historical world-building is effective enough that you emerge from it feeling both out of time and out of breath: Any longer, and all humanity would bleed out of this earthly-but-ethereal conspiracy drama entirely.

This is about as valiantly unflattering as vanity projects get. The bad news is that the wispily tragic character of “Cole,” his alienated, self-destructive but wildly popular alter ego, hardly seems worth Baker’s extensive efforts.

Ultimately, The Novelist’s Film defends the idea of drift and hiatus, of time spent idling to hear your own thoughts, in their own sweet time.

The film balances a bristling political conscience against its tenderly observed domestic drama.

Moonlighting as a broad bedroom farce, this heavily plotted but oddly low-energy film winds up too distracted and diluted to score as a vital political satire.

Denis’ latest sees her applying her usual rigorous form and psychological curiosity to material that tends to inspire more generic directorial treatment, teasing out a rich, nuanced exploration of female desire from the fault lines of an ostensibly simple narrative.

This well-dressed midcentury period piece keeps teasing a darker, more perverse take on a familiar story of cross-generational creative mentorship. Yet despite a performance of unnerving severity by Birthe Neumann as the rancorous Blixen, the film remains too polite and light on incident to deliver on that promise.

Procession is, in its own elegant and uneasy way, an inspiring film, idealistically invested in cinema itself as a medium for confession, confrontation and self-expression, not least when Greene hands over the camera to other filmmakers in need of its power.

Nostalgia may be the strongest emotion engendered by this breeze-blown dandelion seed of a film, which nods to the bittersweet complexities of growing up and confronting adulthood, but never gets as far as fully dramatizing them.

In sticking to the facts, it remains plenty rousing.

This short, sharply crafted Sundance premiere makes an impact with both its bleak, blunt messaging and its muscular formal construction, as the turf war in question takes on the heated urgency of a thriller.

I Didn’t See You There is affecting even when it shuts us out, coming across as the sincere, frustrated expression of someone who’s tired of explaining himself and his position even to a sympathetic audience.

Kevin James is at once the film’s most obvious brand signifier and its most surprising asset: As a heavily fictionalized Payton, his surly hangdog energy gives this corndog of a movie what flavor it has.

Gerbase’s thoughtful, precise little film would have marked an impressive enough arrival under normal circumstances. As it is, it might endure as more era-evocative than many of the intentional pandemic dramas to come.

Immersively crafted but never emotionally involving.

This elegant, unusual documentary shifts the role of the game-spotter from that of non-violent hunter — in pursuit of one prized target — to passive but duly wide-eyed observer, accepting but also appreciating the limits of our access.

All Yogi’s actors work in subtle, effective deference to his natural command of atmosphere and place: This is a film where Hawaiian rainfall has as prominent and evocative a voice as any human presence, and where the growth of a tree marks time as clearly as the deepening crevices in a character’s face.

Beans is a thoughtful, stirring reflection by someone who survived it all, quietly demanding acknowledgement not just of her land, but of her life.

Rather than taking a detached anthropological tour of the community, Bolognesi lets the Yanomami present themselves in their own words and on their own terms, thus enlivening everything from their mealtimes to their mythology.

The jokes write themselves, though in The Phantom of the Open, screenwriter Simon Farnaby and director Craig Roberts make them sweeter and spryer than they could have been, while a wide-eyed, bucket-hatted Mark Rylance plays Flitcroft with abundant generosity of spirit.

Whether wholly performed or partially authentic, The Tsugua Diaries wittily evokes the volatile mood swings of lockdown — how concentrated time with the same people can yield either irritation or intensified closeness from day to day, particularly in a sticky-hot summer haze.

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.

Ambitious but tediously precious, sincerely conceived but derivatively realized, The Blazing World throws an ornate heap of production design at an anemically scripted psychological metaphor, and counts on a combination of fairy dust and sheer determined nerve to make the whole contraption fly.

An honest, affecting slab of working-class portraiture, altogether bracing with its thorny labor politics and salty sea air.

Meise’s film is an exquisite marriage of personal, political and sensual storytelling, its narrative and temporal drift tightened by another performance of quietly piercing vulnerability from Franz Rogowski.

A brash, gutsy, morbidly funny first feature from actor-filmmaker-podcaster Dasha Nekrasova, it runs on a premise that could have been written as a dare, or a prank.

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.

It might do writer-director Harry Wootliff a disservice to call her mature, thoughtfully conceived debut feature Only You one of the latter, but the tinderbox connection between stars Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor is what elevates this grown-up relationship study from respectable to lovable.

Harry Wootliff’s jaggedly grown-up psychological drama True Things thrives on the hot, tense chemistry between its two excellent leads: It’s what pulls the audience through an obstacle course of potentially implausible scenarios that instead ring stingingly true.

Cruz is quite obviously having a ball sending up the ivory-tower vanities and mannerisms of the prodigious auteurs she’s worked with over the years. It’s a performance of fizzy, frenzied, physically elastic inventiveness, though she doesn’t render Lola a complete cartoon.

Superb ... 'The Box' may see [Vigas] relocating to Mexico, but it’s otherwise wholly of a piece with his debut in its terse, cut-to-the-quick refinement, its loaded, exquisitely composed images, and its fixation on shifting, complex man-versus-boy dynamics.

Sébastien Lifshitz’s lovely, clear-eyed documentary thoughtfully articulates the disorientation of gender dysphoria not from the inside out — Sasha is never less than calmly convinced of who she is — but from the outside in, as her transitioning identity sparks confusion and resistance in an uninformed community, causing her anxiety in turn.

In this hard, unblinking film, even a moral victory feels like defeat.

America Latina may frequently look and sound terrific, but a Ferrari spinning its wheels is spinning its wheels just the same.

Suffice it to say that The Starling’s emotional arcs are as narratively complete as they are psychologically dashed-off.

Happening is filmed and performed in such a delicate, skin-soft register, meanwhile, that the escalating terror of Anne’s situation is all the more pronounced, eventually pivoting into a realm of wholly realism-based body horror.

7 Prisoners’ unfolds satisfyingly, precisely by not offering us complete satisfaction or certainty. The question hovers of whether Mateus can ever escape his prison altogether, or merely into one with more comfortable furniture.

A frenzied vocal tone and wild, untethered physicality connects all the performances, with every character seemingly eager to burst out of their own body, and by extension, the life in which it’s stranded.

There’s a barreling momentum to the filmmaking that feels true to the cut and thrust of restaurant life, regardless of the script’s digressions.

Its portrait of an easy-target industry goes soft just when it needs a little added spine, while the film’s abrupt tonal transitions from jaunty comedy to cross-generational weepie occasionally come at the expense of the characters’ own credibility. But it’s the overarching niceness of “Best Sellers” that sees it through.

Wright’s particular affections for B-movies, British Invasion pop and a fast-fading pocket of urban London may be written all over the film, but they aren’t compellingly written into it, ultimately swamping the thin supernatural sleuth story at its heart.

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.

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.

There’s no obvious release or relief here, however: Ducharme’s is an untidy reckoning, as solemn and reticent as the film surrounding her.

Who You Think I Am is a surprise package that plays its trump cards with shrugging insouciance, yielding giggles and gasps in equal measure, sometimes at once.

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.

Without trivializing the matters at hand, The Seer and the Unseen tempers complex national interests with droll human ones.

Mosquito State gradually allows its mise-en-scène to swamp its human narrative, not that the latter offers us much to care about anyway. As far as we’re concerned, the mosquitoes can have it all.

Carol Reed’s “Oliver!,” now 53 years old, feels more authentically youthful and vibrant than this try-hard “how do you do, fellow kids” exercise.

Frizzell tackles the period portion of the saga with some directorial verve, committing to its saturated, hyper-styled romanticism and shameless storytelling contrivance to a degree that is all but irresistible — and unfortunately leaves the remainder of the film feeling anonymous and less involving by comparison.

Dramatically stilted, cinematically drab and morally dubious at multiple turns, this soapy lather of assorted crises concerning the residents of a single Roman apartment block may come as a crashing disappointment to fans who have been waiting six years for a new Moretti feature.

Through its heady stew of impulses and influences, however, Petrov’s Flu is cinema to the breathless last, riding the camera like a bucking horse as single shots carry us between locations, eras and states of mind — the thrilling, messy work of a man released.

Blue Bayou holds little back as it rails against the cruelties and hypocrisies of American immigration law to stirring effect — though this emotional pile-driver of a film could stand to trust more in the undeniable power of its core story.

A filmmaker infectiously attuned to movement, Arnold finds a horrible, hypnotic rhythm in these gruelingly looped procedures, though she doesn’t shoot them with any surplus beauty.

Telling a story that advocates living boldly over not living at all, Husson has followed suit, opening up exciting new possibilities for her career in the process.

Lingui may return its maker to a familiar milieu, but it’s an exciting departure in other respects. This is Haroun’s first film focused expressly on women: Perhaps it’s a coincidence that it’s less stentorian in its melodrama than some of his previous work, though given the shift, it feels apt that the film listens as much as it speaks. Its surprises extend to its choices of emphasis and protagonist.

This elegantly written, persuasively performed drama finds the ever-unpredictable Ozon in his plainest, most pragmatic gear as a filmmaker.

Hamaguchi’s filmmaking, always accomplished, reaches new heights of refinement and sensory richness here, principally via Shinomiya’s immaculate, opaline lensing.

Though fully distinct in its thematic and aesthetic fixations, The Souvenir Part II abuts its predecessor to form one of the medium’s most intimate, expressive portraits of the artist as a young woman — a mirror tilted just enough away from the filmmaker that the audience, too, can catch itself in the glass.

n the ranks of cinematic journeys to Mars, Settlers ranks among the less fancifully and lavishly invented, yet it’s all the more effective for its earthly restraint: You can change the planet, Rockefeller suggests, but humanity stays pretty much the same.

With her eerily flawless image and pathological narcissism, it would be all too easy to make Sylwia a monstrous figure of fun — yet the more circumstances turn against her, the more nuance and moral curiosity von Horn and Koleśnik find beneath her hyper-contoured surface.

Gaia’s resourceful visuals, however, aren’t matched by equivalent nimbleness in the writing; after a time, the storytelling feels more anemic than enigmatic.

Williams’ effortless, near-otherworldly presence gives Akilla’s Escape all the grace and mystique it requires; the film strains a little too hard for its own.

From Daniella Nowitz’s muted, intimately lit lensing to the plaintive, judiciously used piano strains of Karni Postel’s score, every formal element of Asia serves to illustrate and enrich the tricky, evolving relationship at its center — brushing, rather than milking, the viewer’s tear ducts along the way.

There’s an interesting film to be made about women cracking the drag scene, shuffling through complex layers of gender identity and identification, but this innocuous feel-good trifle hasn’t exactly found it.

There’s solemn respect here for the fragile interior peace of others: This restrained, humane film seems most interested in how that serenity is reflected back into the world.

What begins as a wry tale of a maturing family in bittersweet flux spirals unpredictably into a study of living with extreme mental illness, as experienced by both the afflicted and their gradually alienated nearest and dearest.

Mc Carthy serves up a generically foreboding premise and pulls off several efficiently traditional jump scares in this variation on a haunted-house formula, but it’s the shape-shifting mind games of his own narrative that most unnerve the viewer, as seemingly fixed plot points of who is under threat — and when, and why, and so on — keep darting out of sight.

Julio Quintana’s likable family film misses nary a cornball trick in Hollywood’s underdog-drama playbook, and just about pulls it off.

In this bright, engaging film, Kerr’s story is faithfully and lovingly preserved, though its tougher, quirkier details are mollified by a layer of palatable movie gloss.

Faya Dayi is predominantly a mood piece that seeks to evoke the leaf’s own perception-altering properties.

A haunted, unsentimental paean to land and its physical containment of community and ancestry — all endangered by nominally progressive infrastructure — this arresting third feature from Lesotho-born writer-director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is as classical in theme as it is adventurous in presentation.

If anything, the film’s cross-pollination with faith-based cinema is detrimental to its already minimal tension.

Despite a fine Continental cast and gleaming production values, Czech helmer Julius Ševčík has made a muddled, maudlin hash of what ought to have been a sure thing.

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.

Beginning is not a derivative work. Its slow-cinema trappings aren’t merely plucked from the films that have taught its maker along the way, but prove a rhythmically apt, intuitive way into the headspace of its protagonist, a woman who feels her very life has been put on pause.

There’s a fine, even invisible, line between dignity and denial in “El Planeta,” a fine-grained portrait of everyday poverty amid the lingering wreckage of the global financial crisis. Yet this pithy, distinctive debut feature from artist-turned-filmmaker Amalia Ulman eschews kitchen-sink realism for a deadpan vein of black comedy somewhere on the very wide spectrum between Lena Dunham and early Pedro Almodóvar.

Rachel Fleit’s film Introducing, Selma Blair is eye-opening and empathetic — but it’s also intensely moving as a documentary in its own right, enriched by a human subject who appears to learn as much about herself in the course of filming as we do.

Indeed, there’s such an abundance of labored-over beauty in Bombay Rose that it feels almost churlish to say its storytelling is less enrapturing: Rao, who animated, edited and wrote the film on her own, seems to be least assured on the last of those tasks.

The film’s games of genre-shuffling and celebrity self-satire can’t override the essential tedium of its core conflict.

Films explicitly about the formation of friendships are rare, and Morales and Duplass have fashioned rather a perceptive one, adapting the push-pull dynamics of a romantic comedy to more delicate psychological terrain.

Taking inspiration from a short story by German writer Emma Braslavsky, Schrader and co-writer Jan Schomburg serve up a rich panoply of questions, answers and stray ideas. Rarely are these assembled into neat combinations, even if the script veers too far into thematic explication in the final third.

Dowds’ harrowed, haunted performance as a boy overwhelmed not just by the wolves to which he has been thrown, but the ones he claims have unconsciously emerged within him, gives the film its anxious emotional center.