Guy Lodge

Even when Rafiki irons out its emotions a little too neatly, however, Mugatsia and Munyiva’s relaxed, sparking chemistry quickens its heartbeat.

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.

It’s the high-gloss realization of that world that affords many of the pic’s most delicious pleasures: “Bombay Velvet” is an extravagant canvas for both production designer Sonal Sawant and costume designer Niharika Bhasin Khan, one on which even apparent anachronisms look calculated.

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.

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.

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.

This elegantly wrought oddity appears at the halfway mark to be heading into uncharacteristically hopeful territory for Solondz — until a toe-tapping intermission marks a reassuring plunge into abject despair.

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.

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.

There’s an opacity to this ambitious, conscientious film’s characterization on all fronts that hinders our emotional involvement, even as it holds our interest.

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.

This dynamically acted, unapologetically contrived pic reps the filmmaker’s best chance to date of connecting with a wider audience — one likely to share the helmer’s bristling anger over corruptly maintained class divides in modern-day America.

There’s considerable poignancy in the contrast between this eccentric pair’s mutual sense that their lives are winding down and the vast, still-unshaped futures of their young charges, but Ní Chianáin’s film largely resists sentimentality of the “Greatest Love of All” variety.

The upshot of this loopy masquerade is more predictable than it is progressive, but considerably pleasurable thanks to Morris’s generous supply of pithy one-liners and the resourceful, ribald skills of Bell, as engaging and elastic a comic everywoman here as she was in her impressive directorial debut “In a World … ”

Marc by Sofia isn’t particularly penetrating or eye-opening on Jacobs as an artist, businessman or human being, but it is a pleasant and casually glamorous hang.

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.

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.

At a fleet 91 minutes, Omen could stand a little more character-building. But the larger atmospheric payoff lingers; the film first gets under the skin, then sits in the skeleton like a trapped, restive spirit.

It’s a handsome, sensitive entry in the genre — one that treats its internally bruised characters with the care of a patient, kindly therapist.

While not every tonal downshift here is entirely fluid, this remains a smart, risky one-off, unconcerned with those (and there will be many) who can’t acquire its taste.

Chon’s sophomore feature wavers uncertainly in tone, getting a little too cute for comfort in spots, but is otherwise a lively, auspicious breakthrough.

Crow and fellow up-and-comer Ashleigh Murray make an infectiously spirited duo in director Sydney Freeland’s sophomore feature; exuberant but not obnoxious, their combined energy and ingenuity is enough to steam the film through some off-track script wobbles.

If Considine doesn’t seem to know his characters as intimately as he did in his debut, however, he still knows acting inside out. It’s his unguarded conviction in the lead — and that of a superb Jodie Whittaker as his devoted but devastated wife — that finally lands Journeyman a victory on points, if not quite a knockout blow.

Avranas’ film employs an irony-free meter that certainly distinguishes his work from that of Lanthimos or Athina Rachel Tsangari, and lends the film’s most explicitly severe sequences of domestic and sexual abuse a kind of cumulative numbing power.

Michael Polish’s Big Sur offers an elegantly muted take on the midlife ennui of Kerouac’s autobiographical 1962 novel.

Its autobiographical elements are keenly felt, as Campillo grapples intelligently not just with the blind spots of his personal past, but those of his national heritage.

Agnostic but empathetic, Wilson’s film suggests communing with the dead may just be a roundabout way of reaching the living.

The film is most thoughtful, and sometimes even painful, as a study of the pitfalls (and pitiful rewards) of local celebrity.

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.

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.

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

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.

Oakes’ film may not share its subject’s hard-headed journalistic drive, but as an articulation of grief — directed by a childhood friend, with significant participation from the Foley family — it’s undeniably moving.

Essentially a single interview with Friedkin interspersed with repeatedly revisited clips, Leap of Faith chiefly examines — per its title — the film’s spiritual allusions and illusions, distinguishing it from just any old making-of doc.

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

A fast, fizzy and frenetically entertaining extension of the manic gaming franchise.

Thompson and his appealing young cast enliven the material with authentic, ingenuous feeling; there’s a palpable understanding here of the substantial difficulties involved in growing up under any circumstances, and Thompson’s script never condescends to its teen subjects with dewy-eyed nostalgia for youth.

For all its structural and psychological deficiencies, it’s hard not to enjoy Fifty Shades Darker on its own lusciously limited terms.

Set over the course of a single day on the fringes of some dead American anytown, this at once quiet and talkative two-hander covers no especially new ground, but strides known territory with a keen eye for lonesome landscapes, and an ear for the eternal communicative impasse felt by men who know each other all too well and not at all.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Though what we get is largely exemplary: a simple but urgent objective threaded with needling observations of social imbalance, a camera that gazes with steady intent into story-bearing faces, and an especially riveting example of one in their gifted, toughly tranquil leading lady Adèle Haenel. What’s missing...is any great sense of narrative or emotional surprise.

What’s missing is the unexpected emotional urgency of “Skyfall,” as the film sustains its predecessor’s nostalgia kick with a less sentimental bent.

As is Ott’s wont, California Dreams blurs the line between simulated vérité and authentic observation, making it often impossible to tell whether those on camera are playing themselves, simply being themselves or a combination of the two.

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.

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

Clumsy storytelling decisions, however, can’t entirely get in the way of a good story, and it’s when Suite francaise focuses on the simplest human dynamics of its yarn that it forges a sincere emotional connection.

Vega’s tough, expressive, subtly anguished performance deserves so much more than political praise. It’s a multi-layered, emotionally polymorphous feat of acting, nurtured with pitch-perfect sensitivity by her director, who maintains complete candor on Marina’s condition without pushing her anywhere she wouldn’t herself go.

As appealingly humanized by Collins and Claflin, Rosie and Alex are sufficiently flawed, three-dimensional beings for their continued attachment to each other to convince.

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.

You know exactly what climax is coming in Oliver Laxe’s rustically beautiful rural parable, but its dreamy, mesmeric power lies in the waiting.

If the film weren’t so arresting to look at, it could often be absorbed with eyes closed: If its larger message is elusive, Zi advocates for taking the world in at your own sensory pace.

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

As its central crisis deepens and darkens, Lazraq’s script keeps teasing a gear-shift into mordant farce to which it never quite commits, leaving both the characters and the drama a bit stymied. Still, this is a notably punchy debut, both visceral and confidently cavalier in its depiction of everyday underworld brutality, with a sharp, streetlit sense of place.

The Endless Trench plunges us into a living nightmare with enough atmospheric precision of its own: It needn’t literally spell things out for us.

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.

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.

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is an extended pilot, however, it’s a pleasingly cinematic one: unresolved and ragged with small open wounds, but self-contained in its fevered, filling-to-burst energy.

Florence Foster Jenkins is an audience picture first and foremost: one wholly sympathetic to its eponymous subject’s delusional drive to delight crowds with or without the requisite artistry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Campillo’s original screenplay demands any number of trusting leaps from its audience and characters alike, yet maintains credibility thanks to the studied assurance of its most elaborate setpieces, and the wealth of socioeconomic detail in its portrayal of both Daniel’s aging-yuppie lifestyle and the nervous group dynamic of the immigrants.

Page’s performance isn’t moving merely for whatever parallels it might hold to his life: Rather, it’s a reminder of what a deft and perceptive actor he can be, capable of both naked emotional candor and acidic wit — both assets to a script that sometimes errs on the side of caution.

Even as it dabbles in genre tropes, the film presents an all-too-unremarkable reality for many women.