Guy Lodge

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.

No one behaves quite like a human being in Eugene Green’s Le Fils de Joseph, yet a soulful sense of humanity emerges from their heightened declamations anyway.

Departing only incidentally from E.L. James’s trashy tome, and making up for any short cuts with extra set dressing, this is brochure cinema of the most profuse order, selling its audience more on a lifestyle than on any of the lives inside it.

Gomis’ latest is far from the miserablist issue drama that synopsis portends, instead weaving a sensual, sometimes hopeful, sometimes disturbing urban tapestry with threads of image, sound, poetry, and song.

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

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

This articulate, formally immaculate portrait proves less compelling in practice than it does in principle: Over-burdened at the outset with extraneous ceremonial detail and starchy speechifying, the film takes a dry, acolytes-only approach before later, more domestically focused chapters raise the body temperature of proceedings.

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

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

[A] winningly sweet-natured, visually transporting adaptation.

Look into Ivor Novello’s haunted, kohl-rimmed eyes in Hitch’s most overtly Hitchcockian silent film – his first of many ‘wrong man’ mysteries – and you can see generations of matinee idols coming full circle.

A slow-burning, increasingly incensed unraveling of a horrific murder case underpinned by colonialist privilege and prejudice, it too demands patience of its viewers — though it rewards them with steadily rising emotional impact and a long view of Latin American history that transcends any true-crime trappings.

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.

Savage’s film thoughtfully and credibly outlines the conflict between a superficially abundant lifestyle and overwhelming internal lack. It’s on less sure footing with the morally fraught wish-fulfilment of its second half, though Arterton’s quiet, consistent emotional conviction pulls matters through.

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.

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.

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.

Its trick is to generate considerable suspense while withholding nothing from the audience. Its pleasures are not profound ones, but there’s enough dimensionality up on the screen to compensate. [2013 3D Release]

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.

Greene encourages our curiosity (and even a hint of caution) about documentary perspectives and techniques that other films prefer viewers to take as given.

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.

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.

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.

Part loopily queer sci-fi thriller, part faux-naive political rallying cry, glued together with candyfloss clouds of romantic reverie, it’s a film best seen with as little forewarning as possible: To go in blind is to be carried along by its irrational tumble of events as blissfully and buoyantly as its empty-headed soccer-star protagonist.

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.

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

Porcelain War thrives on contrast, much of it poignant.

Berg’s film is no stylistic innovator itself, but it’s the satisfying feature-length overview that Joplin’s brief, fiercely brilliant career has long merited.