Guy Lodge

The surprisingly short leap from radical academic study to lurid exploitation is navigated with wit, sensitivity and rueful social awareness in Swedish director Marcus Lindeen’s gripping debut feature The Raft.

Mensore’s film aims chiefly to highlight the typical plight of an American underclass that rarely gets big-screen attention. That it does with honesty and conviction, if not a great deal of inspiration.

A fascinating flip on themes contentiously raised in Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle,” underpinned by a breakout performance of raw candor by Aenne Schwarz, this is grown-up filmmaking of sharp, subtle daring.

Told with straightforward investigative nous and a judicious teardrop of anguished sentimentality, the film makes a virtue of its many clashing participants: journalists, scientists, activists, navy officials and fishermen, each with a slightly different stance on the matter.

Anyone already familiar with Aïnouz’s work will know to expect a florid sensory experience, but even by the Brazilian’s standards, this heartbroken tale of two sisters separated for decades by familial shame and deceit is a waking dream, saturated in sound, music and color to match its depth of feeling.

Triet’s chic, blackly comic psychodrama piles up bad decisions like so many profiteroles in a croquembouche, admiring the teetering spectacle of its chaos as it goes.

Vacuous, almost spitefully monotonous ... A dismaying creative dead end from an abundantly gifted filmmaker, the new film escalates its predecessor’s cheeky protest to a form of acute auteur trolling.

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.

If all the performances here feel lived-in, it’s because they’re literally just that — but even within that context, Alphonsus is an electric find, silently signaling Joy’s clashing moral impulses with a complexity that would defeat many a professional.

When it reverts to conventional documentary storytelling, then, “Halston” is thrilling stuff for fashion nerds, as well as a poignant character study of a misfit ultimately undone by an excessive hunger to prove himself.

It’s a furious work of social geography that satisfies slightly less as a character piece: In its ambitious attempt to dramatize the violent anxieties of men on both sides of the law, Les Misérables risks selling some victims a little short.

Beautifully written and performed by the director and real-life BFF Kyle Marvin, Covino’s film gets precisely the balance of dependency and denial that keeps a bad bromance afloat.

Needless to say, a historical anti-musical that makes [the previous film] “Jeannette” look like “Moulin Rouge!” by comparison is going to win the filmmaker few converts.

It’s conventional, occasionally maudlin docmaking that nonetheless grips the heart exactly when it needs to.

Beats proceeds to give a dying scene its euphoric due, in a dazzling digression from stage-based form.

From its rigid, symmetry-inclined compositions to its heavily worked one-liners, this is cautious, stifling filmmaking in thrall to a reckless, retrograde man, who does little in the course of 90 minutes to merit great fascination or pathos.

Nothing about the film’s coming-of-age narrative, nor the rise and fall of its core romance, is intrinsically new or daring, yet Kechiche’s freewheeling perspective on young desire is uncommon in its emotional maturity.

One wishes the film were a bit more inventive with its dog’s-eye view: the odd ground-level action shot aside, there isn’t much to cinematically suggest how animals see the world differently.

Robert Bahar and Almudena Carracedo’s straightforward but emotionally acute documentary works as both a thorough history lesson and a work of contemporary activism.

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

Superb ... An alternately lyrical and gut-punching coming-of-age study.

Viewers, too, may feel at once cast adrift in the film’s amorphous quests, and languidly seduced by its disorder.

The opening frames of Honeyland are so rustically sumptuous that you wonder, for a second, if they’ve somehow been art-directed.

This is the first stumble in Hansen-Løve’s hitherto impressive filmography — the kind of directorial misstep that at least makes it clear how deft her footwork usually is.

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.

The result is attractive and diverting, as any well-appointed film starring these actors in mouthwatering period finery could hardly fail to be — though for a story about people rebuilding their lives through grievous personal loss and moral torment, it’s hard not to wonder if its vast reserves of enviable knitwear are counting for more than they should.

This strong second feature from Guatemalan talent Jayro Bustamante doesn’t ask new questions, but its sensuous, reverberating atmospherics find fresh, angry ways to answer them.

Slight as a Varda film, but shot through with its maker’s characteristic pluck and whimsy, Varda by Agnès gives her newly recruited fans everything they’ve come to see.

This is a film with a mature, heartbroken understanding of how we hold onto things.

A proficient but unsurprising espionage thriller from Israeli writer-director Yuval Adler that offers another well-fitted showcase for Diane Kruger’s stern resolve as a performer.

As drama, Mr. Jones sometimes struggles to get out of its own way, but its message still lands with concrete force.

Too much of the kindness in “Strangers” feels sentimentally story-dictated rather than born of profound human observation, leaving you with mild, woolly good feeling but little to contemplate or chew on.

I Was at Home, But… works as a mood piece in the truest sense of the term: once you stop trying to logically assemble the narrative and submit instead to its clashing, enveloping currents of feeling, they form a persuasive story of their own.

The Golden Glove may not celebrate its subject, but the intimate examination it offers him is itself a privilege — one for which this ugly, unenquiring film scarcely makes a case.

That the film works as stirringly as it does is largely because of that brash, heart-on-sleeve engagement with its characters’ messy, unfinished feelings, not to mention Ozon’s canny knack for playing on French star personae.

[Cronin's] trim, jumpy debut feature rewrites no genre rules, but abounds in bristly calling-card atmospherics. ... Only in the film’s muddy-in-all-senses finale — which leaves a few too many dots unjoined, even by forgiving genre standards — does its grip on proceedings slip a notch.

Achingly well-observed in its study of a young artist inspired, derailed and finally strengthened by a toxic relationship, it is at once the coming-of-age story of many women and a specific creative manifesto for one of modern British cinema’s most singular writer-directors.

For all the complex class politics and bottled-up desires at play in its narrative, Batra’s film is perhaps a shade too timid for its own good; it touches the heart, but hovers just short of the soul.

The new age of Brazilian protest cinema begins here, and “Divine Love” has kicked it off in dancing shoes.

This manga-based cyberpunk origin story is a pretty zappy effects showcase, weighed down by a protracted, soul-challenged Frankenstory that short-circuits every time it gets moving.

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.

Employing a darkly iridescent fusion of oil paint and digital embellishment, it renders a growing dystopia in shifting, seasick colors, distorted into about as much exquisite, Expressionist-inspired nightmare fuel as its family-film remit will allow.

As the film slackens its pace and shifts awkwardly from caper mode to sober moral deliberations, its one-note characters can’t quite carry it.

A wily left turn into narrative filmmaking for celebrated docmaker Mads Brügger (“The Red Chapel”), St. Bernard Syndicate deftly extends the dry satirical streak of his non-fiction work into a more heightened vein of farce; rarefied cult status awaits.

A brash, busy and often bizarre genre mashup from South Korean blockbuster merchant Kang Hyeong-Cheol, this far-fetched tale of an African-American G.I. finding terpsichorean kinship with a group of Asian misfits in a POW camp brings a bit of “Footloose”-style pep to an otherwise bloodily solemn anti-war tragedy.

if They Shall Not Grow Old is head-spinning for its jolting animation of creakily shot battle scenes — tricked out with ingeniously integrated sound editing and seamlessly retimed from 13 frames a second to 24 — its greatest revelation isn’t one of sound and fury. Rather, it’s the film’s faces that stick longest in the mind.

Indeed, from its unpatronizing body-positive messaging to its restrained, tactful faith-based concessions (a given with Parton on board), Dumplin' has been so carefully calculated, it’s a wonder it plays as warmly and sincerely as it does.

Alami and Ingeborg Topsøe’s finely whittled screenplay plays its revelations patiently, putting a lot of early trust in their leading man’s powers of silent implication and the serene foreboding of Sophia Olsson’s charcoal-streaked cinematography.

The result is as despairing as any portrait of close-knit family and dedicated parenthood can be, adeptly blending sensationalism with domestic intimacy, and sincerely eye-opening in its portrayal of inherited Islamist fervor.

This graceful, ruminative fragment of scrap-metal Americana marks a distinguished foray into feature filmmaking for renowned narrative photographer Dweck.

The film’s confidence falters only when it transposes the hapless slapstick of the duo’s screen act to their everyday reality. If a couple of labored gags around hauling luggage don’t fully land, that rather proves how much more art went into Laurel and Hardy’s craft than they ever chose to let on.

it’s as an ambiguous study of parenting a prodigy that the film lingers on the palate, as McGarry’s mother Meg documents and manages his evolution to an obsessive, gradually oppressive degree.

In the close, doting way the camera caresses its stars, Been So Long certainly shows where it chief strengths lie: Coel and Kene may both capably handle their songs, but the film’s real music is in their faces, singing, silent or otherwise.

How illuminating or challenging Caniba proves for viewers will depend on their amenability to Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s amoral stance and literally up-in-your-face technique. Those who aren’t provoked by its ambiguous psychological inquiry, however, may wish for a bigger human picture from this relentlessly close-up exercise.

It’s a simple but stirring tale, lent character by the boys’ endearingly eager telling and atmospheric texture by Coker’s inspired visual interpretation.

The intense abuse captured in Marta Prus’s brilliant, diamond-hard documentary portrait of a Russian rhythmic gymnast’s punishing road to the 2016 Olympics is all too vividly real — just watching it induces veritable stomach cramps, though it’s impossible to turn away from the film’s whipcrack construction and expert manipulation of perspective.

A wholly delightful talkathon.

Between its minimal setup and frantic denouement, the middle stretch of this pleasingly multilingual movie sags shapelessly, as the hostages and even their captors gradually bond across cultural and linguistic barriers, with music — of course — as the language that binds them.

Kent’s elemental revenge tale attains a near-mythic grandeur over the course of its arduous, ravishing trek. Some stricter editing wouldn’t go amiss, particularly in a needlessly baggy, to-and-fro finale, but it’s a pretty magnificent mass of movie.

Having dipped a toe into bigger-name casting with his previous feature “Entertainment,” Alverson experiments intriguingly with performance style here, submitting his otherwise rigorously controlled filmmaking to the whims of unpredictably idiosyncratic thesps like Lavant, Goldblum and Udo Kier. It’s a calculated clash that perhaps reflects the film’s own theme of agitated minds at odds with the stoic status quo.

Its methodical gathering of material never quite brings us to a more stirring understanding of the lives under its lens.

As a forlorn kind of hangout movie, then, Hotel by the Sea proceeds at a pleasing shuffle, spiked with bittersweet humor and even a gentle, surprising hint of sentimentality.

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.

Powered in its second half by a riveting performance of fiercely mannered bravado by Natalie Portman, as a kamikaze electropop diva running her Faustian fame off and under the rails, Vox Lux paints a sharp, shellacked portrait of a ghost in the celebrity machine.

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.

Ray & Liz is formally arresting and rigorous, though not at the expense of its direct emotional force.

When Peterloo’s unaligned fingers form a fist, for a punching, unyielding, robustly choreographed finale of rage against the right-wing machine, the film makes good on its most taxing demands.

The final result is a curiosity, sure, but a cute, quick-witted one, with much (maybe too much) on its mind.

Wilson’s extraordinary performance rules the film, weaving a lifetime of accumulating disappointment into a single arched eyebrow.

It’s a film as compellingly all over the shop as its subject, even if it doesn’t quite have her beat on stylistic verve and risk.

This is a frustratingly patchy adaptation, in which some of Fitzgerald’s shrewdest observations on the savage politics and politesse of supposedly tranquil English village life get a little bit lost in the Europudding. A fine, sensitive leading turn from Emily Mortimer helps shore up these quiet, lightly dust-covered proceedings, but can’t quite put The Bookshop in the black.

Murray Cummings’ film is a cautiously peppy, unrevealing affair, showing little of the trial and tension that goes into artistic creation — just the finger-snapping moments when it all comes together.

An honest, urgent two-hander, tracking a struggling single father and his wayward son on the run from more than one undefined enemy, Córdova’s film brings little that’s new to its stylistic school of observational realism — but hits the Caracas sidewalks hard and purposefully enough to compensate.

Snapshots wallows a little too readily in cliché to be quite as stirring as its story — one drawn from Corran’s own family history — sounds on paper.

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

The rewards here are ones of fine, subtle sensory detail, be it the shimmering visualization of falling snow on a forest floor, the convincing, characterful nature of the animal sound effects, and the grand, graceful design and movement of the wolfdogs themselves — as expressive and adorable as any Disney critter.

Economically deployed effects lend the gathering storm a genuine sense of anxious bluster, but tension and terror are harder to conjure in a narrative this sparse and emotionally one-note.

If nothing here is exactly new, it’s the sheer, breathless precision and momentum of Calibre’s assembly that keeps it startling.

As a contemporary study of the violent struggle between the hamstrung Congolese national army and M23 rebel forces in the North Kivu region, the film is often blisteringly effective, venturing to the frontline in pursuit of raw war footage likely to open many an outside viewer’s eyes — or, at its harshest interludes, prompt them to squeeze tightly shut.

It’s uneven practically by design, with a tone that slides all the way from kooky farce to anguished psychological study, just about held together by Mackenzie Davis’s lively, spiky turn in the lead.

Hepburn’s film eschews the expected emotional progression of a grief drama by focusing as much on continuing pain as sudden mourning.

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.