Guy Lodge

But it’s Firth’s Sam who finally carries the film’s heart, and exquisitely so, as his fear, anger and mounting insecurity lash out the more he tries to remain undemonstrative. (He also pulls off some able, plaintive piano-playing by his own hand.)

There’s at least something honest about the messiness and occasional superficiality of the documentary, as a ragged, unsynchronized collection of events and ideas — whether personal, trivial or globally resonant — that have passed through Ferrara’s eyes and his mind in the last year.

Gitai’s latest is a murky, largely po-faced affair, in which no character’s story urgently distinguishes itself from, or even within, a general morass of discontent.

A scenic summer-wind romcom that was presumably a good time for everyone involved. Saying the same for the audience would be a stretch, but on the spectrum of late Woody Allen clunkers, it registers on the mild, instantly-evaporating end of the scale, unlikely to change the positions of any loyalists, detractors, ex-fans or distributors with regard to the controversy-tailed filmmaker.

Merely pedestrian at the levels of direction, craft and performance, the film instead makes a grab for attention by peddling an ambiguous line on gun control and eye-for-an-eye morality. Any controversy that ensues, however, won’t disguise the phoniness of this exploitation exercise, which milks the worst fears of millions in pursuit of empty tension.

Mandibles is as brazenly and riotously stupid as it sounds, but with a chill, dopey sweetness that makes it stick.

Limbo sincerely and intelligently finds its own way.

The result is both sober and inspiring: an urban progress report taking into account a plethora of government services, scutinized by Wiseman’s patient but unblinking eye.

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.

The Duke is a romp first and foremost: Michell’s merry direction makes sure of that. But its stars put a small, dignified lump in its throat.

The filmmaking is muscular and immersive, with athletic camerawork and ringing sound design keeping us in the stressed headspace of its young protagonist throughout.

This is filmmaking as attuned to incremental shifts in light and landscape (Romania’s, in fact, gorgeously filling in for undeveloped upstate New York) as the ebb and flow of a character’s interior joy, written in a face unaccustomed to smiling.

The film is a relatively unfamiliar fit for its prolific helmer, given its sharply evoked period milieu and restrained, classical storytelling. He wears it well: After a slowish start, Wife of a Spy unmasks itself as one of his most purely enjoyable, internationally accessible entertainments.

There’s a stranger, spikier, more unnerving film to be pulled from the sleek genre carapace of Ava, a film less interested in what makes a contract killer tick than in the superhuman Swiss-watch regularity of her ticking in the first place.

Tenet is no holy grail, but for all its stern, solemn posing, it’s dizzy, expensive, bang-up entertainment of both the old and new school.

For all its serious-faced surface grit, Chemical Hearts never quite rings true.

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.

The film’s pained, ugly revelations finally carry more weight than any amateur detective work leading up to them: a #MeToo reckoning hidden within a glinting, noir-esque hall of mirrors.

Its tightening tension seeks to push frayed characters to eventually tell on themselves.

Andrea Dorfman’s thoughtful little film arrives at a compromise that feels honest and hard-won — helped along by the infectious, defiantly offbeat presence of erstwhile “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” star Chelsea Peretti.

It quietly but pointedly interrogates the notion of victimhood, while tacitly letting a damning essay on Iranian gender politics and hierarchies emerge through the words of his subjects.

An unostentatious but quietly dazzling meditation on womanhood in the largely patriarchal space race, Alice Winocour’s highly satisfying third feature outdoes many more lavish Hollywood efforts in evoking the otherworldly emotional disconnect that comes with space travel, all without leaving terra firma for the vast bulk of its running time.

If the setup intrigues slightly more than the payoff, this is still a work of original, crystalline beauty, bursting with restless, refracted ideas.

The carnage is the point here, not any of the reasoning behind it, and Borte and Crowe bring it to a suitably frothing, furious head: Some movies just want to watch the world burn, preferably on a very big screen.

Along with Pilon’s striking performance, the film’s sturdy, subdued craftsmanship keeps it from movie-of-the-week territory, even as Roby’s script ticks overly familiar boxes.

Benjamin wrings a lot of warmly perceptive, occasionally acidic humor. The film might be termed a romantic comedy, though the will-they-won’t-they dynamic that usually powers the genre feels beside the point here.

Chris Gerolmo’s script isn’t at great pains to find the human factor here, and Phillip Noyce’s direction coats the whole unhappy affair in cold blue steel.

The sleek result, like the scientist’s hi-tech Frankenstein creation, impressively looks and sounds the part, without quite having a soul of its own. That’s enough to make Archive a compelling calling card for the British freshman, with the promise of more advanced models to come.

Weisse’s gripping, cool-blooded drama upends all manner of inspirational-educator clichés.

Muna’s plan won’t leave only misery behind, which is what gives Saudi Runaway its emotional heft and depth as it revs up to a finale of unalloyed, skin-prickling suspense.

This bouncily entertaining doc may boast only a notch more formal ambition than a very well-assembled “Behind the Music” special, but is no less essential than Lee’s first MJ opus, the excellent “Bad 25.”

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.

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.

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.

Taken as a celebration, however, both of the woman herself and the food to which she has dedicated her life, “Nothing Fancy” is cinematic comfort food of the first order.

No community is as straightforward as it seems in Zhuk and Landauer’s irony-rich, tone-switching script: What begins as a kookily comic quest is complicated by the emergence of human tragedy, prejudice and sexual threat.

A wise, graceful but viciously felt study of middle-school best friends whose bond becomes a burden the further they recede into adulthood, it resorts neither to buddy-movie cliché nor melodramatic angst in portraying the ways we outgrow our friends, and they us.

Sudden surges of emotion seem to guide its shuffling of symbols, techniques and points of view.

There’s a floridly sentimental heart fluttering beneath its tastefully solemn surface, but at times, you can’t help wishing the film would give in to its more expressive impulses.

Mina Mileva and Vesela Kazakova’s smart, bristly film makes some room for oblique everyday poetry in its depiction of immigrants asserting their ground in an unstable country, but is angry enough not to bury its rhetoric in artifice and niceties: Shot through with intimate love-hate knowledge of its South London turf, this is a funny, frustrated yell from a demographic tired of being talked over.

What begins as seemingly another lurid Netflix true-crime excavation emerges as a considerably more affecting testament to the damage wrought by generation upon generation of sexual abuse.

At once a misty-eyed romance and a harsh depiction of the practical and emotional challenges of giving up independent living, A Secret Love isn’t subtle in its Kleenex-clutching tactics — as you’d expect from a project bearing the imprint of TV titan Ryan Murphy — but it’s certainly effective.

“Careful what you wish for” may have been the essential moral takeaway from the source books, but that wasn’t to discourage wishing for anything at all: In all respects, this serviceable but anodyne programmer could dream a bit bigger.

A ravishing 70-minute audiovisual essay on human mortality, extinction and legacy — all the more poignant for being its maker’s final creative statement.

Francis Annan’s film works effectively as a straight-up jailbreak thriller, well-oiled in greasy B-movie tradition. It’s when it shoots for more historical import that it falls somewhat short.

It’s an exercise only for the most forgiving of Garrel acolytes — who should revel in its warm, tactile black-and-white lensing and throwback air of mournful romanticism, but would still be hard pressed to describe the whole as essential.

As a study of a rugged individualist looking back on long-withered connections — to others, to the mainstream world, and indeed to himself — it feels personally invested both as a star vehicle and an auteur piece. If it isn’t, the joke’s on us, and still pretty funny.

The result, though intermittently stirring and often luminously shot, represents something of a chore for all but the most ardent Jia completists — and even some of them may be left adrift by the literary scope of a film that does surprisingly little to contextualize its subjects for viewers unfamiliar with their work.

Caught between a respectful tribute to Mikolášek’s medical achievements and a more salacious examination of his moral transgressions — with a tender if speculative gay romance propped somewhere in between — it’s an ambitious portrait of human imperfection that doesn’t strain to arouse much affection for its subject in the audience.

A modestly scaled, intimately observed domestic drama that doesn’t reinvent any wheels in its portrayal of family frictions, midlife ennui and the anguish of terminal illness, but handles all this potentially sticky material with clear-eyed (and finally, when required, somewhat moist-eyed) grace.

Outside of Ahmed’s seething, spitting, can’t-look-away performance, Mogul Mowgli is a sparsely scripted but scratchily atmospheric culture-clash drama that runs on some quite traditional father-son melodramatics. But considering the film outside the performance would be a mistake.

Oddly, Funny Face feels more like a promising but overreaching debut than any of his earlier films, particularly at the level of its slender script, heavy as it is on banal, minimalist dialogue that doesn’t fuel the flickering chemistry between leads Cosmo Jarvis (“Lady Macbeth”) and appealing newcomer Dela Meskienyar as best it could.

The State Against Mandela and the Others outlines a complex network of motives and tensions underpinning this single sensational trial: Nothing here is exactly revelatory to those with a working knowledge of apartheid history, but few documentaries have gathered the stakes involved in the trial quite so deftly.

The quiet humanity of McCarthy’s filmmaking meshes oddly with the material’s zanier demands, finally reaching an anodyne middle ground.

The ironically inviting title only hints at part of the story in this wholly devastating documentary: The crisis, it turns out, is all around us.

At once a celebration and a lament, simultaneously jubilant and ineffably sad, it’s a film worth sticking around to see.

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 a cheap, unloving death march of a movie — scarcely made more intriguing by the half-cooked theory it posits as to who (or how many) did the deed.

The film — in tandem with Lacoste’s lovely, unguarded performance — works as a magnified study in coping, charting the stages of his jumpstarted growing-up alongside the more meandering course of his grief.

Tsemel’s hard demands on her family and co-workers alike are kept in view: “Advocate” isn’t a bland hagiography, but a textured nonfiction character study of complicated heroism. You can’t challenge the system, after all, without being a bit challenging yourself.

For all The Informer lacks in surface style — shot and scored as it is in functional, straight-to-VOD fashion — it remains a surprisingly well-oiled genre machine.

The great pleasure of these films’ bright, largely wordless slapstick is that it plays universally whilst accommodating all manner of obsessive, idiosyncratic detailing at the edges.

The actors, splendidly kitted out in autumnal suiting and knitwear by costume designer Michael Wilkinson, have what fun they can with such thin, dated material, but everyone here deserves better.

The film grabs at so many thematic strands — further including toxic female friendship, urban alienation and abusive sexual manipulation — that it can’t substantially sort through them all. Still, the attempt is audacious and stimulating.

When Lambs Become Lions thoughtfully and provocatively articulates a collision of social and environmental crises in which man is both victor and victim: a circle of life that stalls us all.

Not quite a fleshed-out personal study, nor fully a meditation on what Battaglia’s camera sees, this intriguing but frustrating film finally makes the case for letting the photographer’s pictures tell their story.

This easily digestible “Feast” is unlikely to join the holiday viewing canon, but the particularity of its focus on the eponymous, American-fried immigrant tradition is welcome: Any Christmas film that teaches us how to correctly soak baccala is more useful than most.

This easy-to-take film’s pleasures, then, lie chiefly in its relaxed evocation of place and time. Set in 1993, though it could just as easily work in a contemporary setting, Angelfish wisely doesn’t go all in on period kitsch, though music and costuming are both deployed to evoke a pre-internet, arguably gentler era of youth.

It’s as creatively anemic and blandly calculated as, say, this summer’s billion-grossing “The Lion King.”

The disappointment of Mrs. Lowry & Son is that it finds neither of its star attractions at the peak of their powers: Both Spall and Redgrave feel stifled and stiff-jointed, hemmed in by a thin, shallow-focus script that betrays its origins as a radio play all too easily.

In a conversation piece pitched halfway between the delicate Sirkian tragedy and Adrian Lyne at his most sensational, it’s the overridingly controlled nature of proceedings — from performance to production design — that keeps “Queen of Hearts” from sliding into the hysterical silliness that its provocations invite.

Authoritative and dense — though never dull — at over two hours, Citizen K is the prolific docmaker’s most rewarding feature in several years, attaching his typically methodical research to a cheerfully slippery, charismatic human subject who, even on the side of right, is cagey in the face of investigation.

Nourry isn’t the most self-effacing of artists, and Serendipity could stand to reveal more of her artistic process, rather than gazing upon the often formidable finished product. Still, on the occasions it stops self-curating and gives us a glimpse into Nourry’s frightened, still-restless soul, this is a stirring, imposing self-portrait.

Populist politics can turn all too easily to popcorn ones; On the President’s Orders vividly captures the tipping point.

The reliably charismatic work of its players, notably ringleader Mathieu Amalric, keeps this somewhat soggy macaron diverting.

In My Room presents and accepts its partial apocalypse with unquestioning calm — an extreme contrivance that merely enables an elegant, exacting character study.

Skirting easy cynicism to view fire, brimstone and occasional grace through Maud’s awestruck eyes, this is finally as much a sympathetic character study, a mental heath mind-map, as it is any kind of chiller. Whatever the case, it’s one hell of a debut for Rose Glass.

Notwithstanding any comparisons, there’s more assured personality here than there was in her last feature, the bright, proficient but somewhat synthetic big-studio teen romance “Everything, Everything.” Much of that film took place, by narrative necessity, in hermetically sealed rooms; here, the fresh autumn air agrees with everyone involved.

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.

Lithe and volatile and recklessly stylized to the hilt, True History of the Kelly Gang has moves like Jagger, but a head still teeming with language and history.

At once overplotted and under-reasoned, hysterical and stiffly earnest, Guest of Honour is finally one of those strenuously diagrammatic mysteries in which everything notionally connects, which isn’t quite the same as everything making even marginal emotional sense.

Watching The Burnt Orange Heresy, you may find yourself wishing one of two things: that Claes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki had been around to make elegant little mystery capers with Alfred Hitchcock in his prime, or that Hitch were around today to direct this one, a marble-cool art-fraud thriller that begins lithely and sexily before, somewhat mystifyingly, it takes a terminal turn for the dour.

Babyteeth works best as an abrasive four-hander, though Murphy’s limber, sensually electric direction leaves the film with little clear evidence of its theatrical origins.

If we’ve been here before, the immaculate, somehow tender-hearted execution of About Endlessness ensures this is not a complaint.

The film’s sheer unblinking stamina is as impressive as its pristine formal composure, though it has to be said that at nearly three hours — somewhat surprising, considering the novel’s brevity — its blunt-instrument force doesn’t yield much fresh perspective on oft-dramatized atrocities.

Both ambitious and overwhelmed, this sophomore feature from British-Indian director Rowan Athale — whose festival-traveled debut “Wasteland” had lively promise and similarly hinky storytelling — can’t quite decide what kind of weird it wants to be: a loopy B-movie corkscrew ride, or an “American Beauty”-style suburban burlesque with Something To Say.

Many will be left bewildered by the sheer, deranged obsessiveness of Yonfan’s nostalgia head-trip — indeed, there were whistles and walkouts at its first Venice press screening — but accustomed Yon-fans and patient adventurers will fall madly for its madness.

Director Rupert Goold and resurgent star Renée Zellweger have pulled off something unusual and affecting in Judy: a biographical portrait in which performer and subject meet halfway, illuminating something of each other in the process.

Every time it threatens to truly pierce the psyche of its subject, played with typically intriguing, elusory intelligence by Kristen Stewart, the more ordinary mechanics of the movie she’s serving get in the way.

Steve Kelly’s lightweight film spins allegedly true events into the stuff of pure sitcom: affable enough, but so glibly inauthentic as to make “Bend It Like Beckham” look like cinéma vérité by comparison. It’s curious how the world’s most popular sport maintains such a thin roster of truly classic movies in its honor; that is unchanged here.

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.

A feast of HD imagery so crisp as to be almost disorienting, this is immersive experiential cinema with no firm storytelling trajectory, though viewers can read what environmental warnings they may into its rushing spectacle.

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.

An attempt to do for the smiling, claw-handed Playmobil collective what “The Lego Movie” did for the humble plastic brick — but without that blockbuster’s dizzy, self-aware wit and visual invention — Lino DiSalvo’s hyperactive film never transcends its blatant product-flogging purpose.

Lesage’s filmmaking, with its unhurried editing and eerily echoing music cues, is in expert sympathy with his hovering, out-of-time protagonists.

Van Orman, Emmy-nominated creator of the quirky, cult-inspiring kids’ cartoon series “The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack,” brings just the right level of dippy zeal to the project, committing to extended, farcical routines that, at their most immaculately choreographed and paced, channel the pure, physical hilarity of vintage Chaplin or Sellers.

Simple in concept and shattering in execution, blending hard-headed reportage with unguarded personal testimony, it’s you-are-there cinema of the most literal order.

Equal parts angry and anxious, Boundaoui’s smart, unsettling documentary functions both as a real-world conspiracy thriller and a personal reflection on the psychological strain of being made to feel an outsider in one’s own home.