Guy Lodge

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.

The duly playful, freeform result occasionally skirts preciousness but is mostly rather affecting, bound by a palpable sense of female friendship and a perceptive interest in the dynamics thereof.

Even when the director pushes too far...the film’s formal severity feels appropriately claustrophobic — another form of authority closing in on the light.

This is an impressively rigorous exercise, in which the director’s sober formalism finds a kindred spirit in his leading lady’s studied, secretive restraint.

Right Now, Wrong Then is a film of minute observations rather than grand revelations, less concerned with butterfly-effect consequentiality than the variable human foibles that can turn a bad day into a good one.

My Octopus Teacher never loses our goodwill: If we wind up wishing it had a little less man and a little more beast, that only serves its cause.

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.

Directed with even-keeled intelligence by James Marsh, and buoyed by a performance of customary reserve and resolve from Colin Firth, The Mercy tells its story...about as well as it can be told. Yet there’s no denying it’s a muted, disconsolate affair, one that by necessity shrinks before viewers’ eyes into something less rousing and noble than what they were initially promised.

Not a major work but a bright, pleasurable one, with its director on more limber form than in his recent narrative features “Deception” and “Brother and Sister,” “Filmlovers!” is formed of two halves, nimbly interleaved by editor Laurence Briaud.

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.

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.

Saccharine proves James’ gifts are better served by more independent means, even if it falls short of the emotional and dramatic heft that gave “Relic” equal genre and arthouse appeal.

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.

Morley marries a quasi-Victorian premise with a modernist technique that feels drawn from her film’s own milieu.

In Warwick Thornton’s thoughtful magical-realist fable The New Boy, spiritual differences aren’t treated with violence, but echo bloody territorial conflict just the same.

Pat Collins’ echoing, elegiac evocation of the spirit of Irish sean nós singer Joe Heaney is most interested in his haunted vocal gift, letting the troubled life that weathered it show through only in glimmers between the gorgeous songs.

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.

It’s the performances that punch through the illusion, as Grainger and Shawkat’s dynamic turns on a dime from raucous, debauched complicity to savage mutual confrontation — the kind of close, cold truth-telling that, where best friends are involved, results more often than not in hurtful lies being told.

The directorial energy being channelled here is closer to that of early Pedro Almodóvar, as Merlant piles up saturated, hot-hued melodrama, garrulous female bonding and cheerful lashings of blood and sex.

It’s the most prominent and devoted leading showcase Maura has had in years, and one she carries with her invaluable brand of internally illuminated, can’t-be-taught charisma.

The film has a knowingly conflicted engagement with millennial-generation feminism that freshens its outlook even as it unevenly rejigs many of its predecessor’s gags. Still, while a subtly clawed Chloë Grace Moretz proves a worthy new foil, it’s Zac Efron’s tragicomic anatomy of a dudebro that remains this series’ sharpest asset.

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.

Tempering the strong medicine of its social-justice protestations with a streak of outlandish melodrama, this “Monster” may not have quite as many facets as its title implies, but Pla’s formally deft manipulation of perspective keeps the pic both urgent and even-handed.

“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.

This Is Home gestures toward a more detailed, heterogeneous understanding of these war victims as human beings, characterizing its four chosen families in detailed, individual terms, and listening attentively to their varied expressions of ambition and concern for their new future.

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.

Belén might never regain the vivid rage and terror of its opening minutes, but Fonzi’s film ends up carrying viewers on its own wave of pride and upright conviction, ultimately delivering the hope its promises

Watching these two fine actresses circle each other in a kind of watchful alligator’s tango, each waiting for the other to blink first, is the chief pleasure on offer in Moka.

Nominally focused on the celebrated filmmaker’s lesser-known dabblings in fine art, The Art Life emerges as a more expansive study of Lynch’s creative impulses and preoccupations, as he relates first-hand the formative experiences that spurred and shaped a most unusual imagination.

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.

Bekmambetov’s cumulatively hysterical film begins as a study of terror before lurching into something closer to horror.

Like its eminently problematic anti-hero, The Musical says its piece with conviction to spare, and a welcome streak of cat-among-the-pigeons danger rarely found in contemporary American comedy.

Luxuriously conversational in structure, it would make an outstanding stage play, and the two stars play it with chamber-piece rigor.

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.

Notionally rooted in historical fact, but embellished with storybook romance and flouncing cartoon villainy, this roundly enjoyable Venice competition entry finally owes all its residual gravitas (and at least half its considerable handsomeness) to the expressive woodcut visage of one Mads Mikkelsen.

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.

If her filmmaking style is relatively straightforward, it’s a rich, raw sense of place that gives this Sundance entry — premiering in world dramatic competition — vitality and danger.

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

Above all else, Berger’s film delights in the kind of eccentric, incidental sights and sounds from which dreams — human, animal or android — can spring.

A blockbuster melange of Motown, metal, hip-hop, world and gospel influences, bound by trailblazing production, "Bad" has stood in its predecessor's shadow too long, and Spike Lee convincingly makes the case for reassessment with this exhaustive and entertaining if less-than-penetrating documentary on its creation.

U – July 22 is designed to be as immersive as it is exhausting, and largely succeeds.

That We Are What We Are steers just shy of silliness even at its most outrageous is in large part thanks to a committed cast of non-disposable character actors.

If the story’s political and personal nuances have been a bit flattened in Balaker’s script, keeping proceedings in a movie-of-the-week register, this Little Pink House nonetheless retains what property developers would call good bones.

It’s intelligently stern, storm-gray filmmaking, as we’ve come to expect from Greengrass; if it feels a bit mechanical as well, perhaps this is a near-impossible story to film with both tact and soul.

There are some raw, stirring interludes here...but the film’s sheer mass of similar material rather reduces their impact.

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.

Winocour hurtles into a violent, heart-in-mouth third act rife with look-behind-you peril. It’s a silly but robustly effective escalation of the latent suspense already conjured in the impressive, snakily extended party sequence.

The film’s tone and outlook is changeable throughout — down to a striking, only semi-successful framing device of docu-style testimonies that hover deliberately between worlds.

Some of these vignettes are more arresting than others; all are pleasurable in the patchwork impression they form of a lively and eccentric way of life. Anthropological excavation isn’t the objective here; Dweck and Kershaw are more than happy to buy into the community’s self-mythologizing, to absorb the hand-me-down stories and macho iconography that keep the romance of the gaucho alive.

At a whopping 158 minutes, “Concrete’s” sleek, languorous anatomy of a heist represents the filmmaker’s most extreme exercise yet in painstaking genre deceleration, sparked as ever by the tangy movie-movie vernacular of his writing, the crunchy metal-on-asphalt dynamism of his craftsmanship, and the back-from-the-brink reanimation of his stars.

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.

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

Viva appealingly makes up for a coy approach with gutsy, grabby follow-through on the high notes.

Neither as striking nor as fundamentally scary as its predecessor, this pumped-up, robustly crafted pic is still quite a ride.

A straightforward account of the show’s journey from conception to rehearsal to Great White Way triumph, it effectively doubles as a traditional let’s-put-on-a-show musical in its own right, albeit one with heavier guitars.

A sly, insidious and intermittently hilarious domestic thriller.

This is quick, nippy entertainment that raises plenty of sociopolitical talking points without digging too deep into any of them.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, not unlike Hitchcock, is the kind of tireless genre craftsman who seems to approach every feature as a test of his own proficiency: Serpent’s Path, a brisk, harsh and, yes, clinically professional update of his own 1998 thriller of the same title, passes said test without a moment’s strain.

Cinematically, Pin Cushion goes all in on a heightened, macramé-and-macaroons aesthetic that occasionally smothers the rawer nerves of its storytelling.

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

Alluring if not especially illuminating.

Soul music’s alleged redemptive powers are fully at work in this jumbled, sketchily written but vastly appealing true-life musical comedy.

It’s hard to deny that the small screen may be the most natural fit for Batra’s film, given its pleasantly mollified storytelling and blandly unassuming visual style.

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.

Large as its historical canvas is, the film is most artful as an interior evocation of a preemptively grieving state of mind.

Julian Jarrold’s brightly performed exercise in speculative history scores as a frothier, more feminine bookend to “The King’s Speech” — though it’s no less engaging or accomplished.

That current of feeling and conviction is what powers the doc through some uneven construction.

It feels at once younger and older, sweeter and more seasoned, than Dolan’s last few films.... [It's] not out to scout new stylistic territory, but confident in the turf it covers, often gorgeously so.

Widow Clicquot certainly makes a virtue of its milieu and rolling landscape, richly shot throughout in dusky earth tones, and more substantively, of the rather romantic lore surrounding the widow in question.

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.

"The Immortal Man” serves as a handsome reminder of what always felt quite cinematic about the series — both in its beefy-but-pulpy storytelling and its robust, well-patinated production values.

The resulting film is so delicately wrought and exquisitely visualized that the harsher, eerier details of Ailhaud’s account stand out all the more strikingly, like a shot of vinegar in a pristine crème caramel.

There’s the phantom of a psychothriller for the ages inside “Ghost Stories” that never quite fights its way out of the film’s tightly structured creepshow homage, but the goosebumps it raises are real, and honestly earned.

Redundancy remains a problem, but this overlong superhero sequel gets by on sound, fury and star chemistry.

Sometimes bloody good fun is enough. It’s as good a reason as any for making this sunny, silly rallying cry for irresponsibility, and a better one still for watching it.

Clearly inspired by cases like that of Shamima Begum, the London teen who traveled in secret to Syria to become an ISIS bride, Nadia Fall‘s debut feature seems on the surface like a hot-button provocation, but it’s surprisingly humane and good-humored in its attempt to understand the individual lives behind a sensational headline issue.

Grabby and grubby in equal measure, this meticulously composed trawl through the contents of several middle-class Austrians’ cellars (a space, according to Seidl, that his countrymen traditionally give over to their most personal hobbies) yields more than a few startling discoveries.

There’s a elastic, enjoyable restlessness to all this behind-closed-court-doors bustle and bitchery, recalling less the sparse, close-up character interrogation of “Corsage” than the snippy gamesmanship of “The Favourite,” buoyed by the itchy friction between Hüller’s anxious, aspirational energy and Wolff’s cool, complacent hauteur.

Even as harder realities hit home, The Rider is in complete sympathy with its protagonist’s wild, wistful yen.

True to its title, Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist is chiefly out to gild a remarkable, independent legacy. As the film unrolls its rousing, “Bolero”-scored closing montage of the stunning catwalk visions Westwood has given the fashion world over four decades, you can hardly say it’s undeserved.

It’s a less playful enterprise than the original, but meets the era’s darker demands for action reboots with machine-tooled efficiency and a hint of soul.

Utilitarian in construction but personally invested, it’s a duly humble career overview that doesn’t risk much individual interpretation of such rich, essential films as “Black Girl,” “Xala” and “Moolaade” — though it should leave viewers eager to make (or regain) their acquaintance.

Affectionately honoring the everyday quirks of Bond’s stories, while subtly updating their middle-class London milieu, King’s film may divide loyal Paddingtophiles with its high-stakes caper plot, but their enraptured kids won’t care a whit.

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.

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.

A sweat-slicked, exhausting but glibly entertaining escapade on its own terms, American Made is more interesting as a showcase for the dateless elasticity of Cruise’s star power. It feels, for better or worse, like a film he could have made at almost any point in the last 30 years.

Whether scenes tilt toward very mordant farce or gut-stabbing trauma, there’s a compelling sense — crafted or otherwise — that the actors are driving the tone from scene to scene, with Silver and his incisive editor Stephen Gurewitz determining the emotional transitions between them.

[A] good, middlebrow adaptation — which, despite being scripted by Banville himself, sacrifices much of the novel’s structural intricacy for Masterpiece-style emotional accessibility.

The film backs away from the overtly personal narration of its predecessor, in pursuit of a bigger picture.

The film, effective on its own unassuming terms, seems to cut out with some distance left to run.

The melodrama begins at such a high pitch in Desplechin’s latest, you might think it has nowhere to go but down, yet this earnestly inflamed tale of art, grief, betrayal and all-consuming amour on steroids keeps finding new, hysterical ways to surprise.

Unexpectedly but effectively cast in a role that plays to his sullen strengths, Pitt has a palpable, playful rapport with Arianda, a Tony-winning Broadway ingenue whose warm, expressive features and tinderbox comic timing recalls the young Marisa Tomei.

If Pity doesn’t quite have the shock of the new on its side, then, its sharpest passages nonetheless exert the bracing, mouth-shuddering tang of neat ouzo: You know how it’s going to taste, but it leaves you wincing anyway.

This potentially lurid material is lent considerable ballast and believability by the excellent work of its trio of child actors.

Sensitive and empathetic but a little timid in storytelling and style, The Little Sister rests considerably on its lead performance by first-time actor Nadia Melliti.

Turkish writer-director Mehmet Can Mertoğlu’s substantial debut feature can’t suppress a sneer at the very 21st-century practice of exhaustive yet evasively filtered self-documentation. That’s hardly the only modern malady under fire in this elegantly opaque social satire, which touches on bureaucratic ineptitude, class conflict and very questionable parenting.

It’s the stars who have to work hardest to sell this kind of egg-white confection, and so they do. Having both charmed individually in previous vehicles, Deutch and Powell combine to winkingly wholesome effect, bringing just enough human self-awareness to their tidy back-and-forth banter to make it palatable.