Guy Lodge

Gazing upon great art often clears our minds, sharpens our thinking and invites new ideas in; in Apolonia, Apolonia, tracing the long-term push-pull of someone else’s artistic process appears to do the same for the woman behind the camera.

Hostage thrillers are all-too-often shrill affairs, with clock-watching screenwriters wringing maximum melodrama from spiraling disorder. Not so Tobias Lindholm’s superb A Hijacking, which actually grows more chillingly subdued as its nightmare scenario unfolds.

Blue Film is an unabashed provocation, but not a hollow one. Its dual protagonists — one a convicted pedophile, one a hyper-macho fetish camboy — don’t invite uncomplicated sympathy, so it’s just as well Tuttle is more interested in understanding them, exposing their respective damage in articulate detail, and letting the audience take things from there.

It’s up to the individual whether to see this story as a miracle or a tragedy, Numa says in voiceover; Bayona’s film, for all its forceful feeling, doesn’t decide for us.

This elegantly written, persuasively performed drama finds the ever-unpredictable Ozon in his plainest, most pragmatic gear as a filmmaker.

Without advertising itself as such, Western could be viewed as a wry reflection of the European Union’s sometimes fractious present-day state — though much of its character conflict hinges on a more universal fear of the other.

Ex Machina turns out to be far wittier and more sensual than its coolly unblemished exterior implies; it’s a trick that mirrors Ava’s own apparent Turing-test-defying evolution.

Upgrading a sleeping-with-the-enemy premise familiar from countless B-thrillers with a faintly mythic aura and cool psychosexual shading, Beast also sustains a fresh, frank feminine perspective through Jessie Buckley’s remarkable lead performance.

This beguiling film may trade in the tranquil security of routine, but makes an occasional, heart-quickening case for the unexpected.

It’s a cool, hard trip, icy in the fullest glare of the afternoon sun, in which even the pallid, expensively tacky interior of the villa — hats off to production designer Josephine Farsø — invites tension and judgment.

Though Tuza-Ritter somewhat overeggs the urgent genre stylings: The human story she unfolds is nerve-rattling enough before it’s cranked up to quite this extent.

Lingui may return its maker to a familiar milieu, but it’s an exciting departure in other respects. This is Haroun’s first film focused expressly on women: Perhaps it’s a coincidence that it’s less stentorian in its melodrama than some of his previous work, though given the shift, it feels apt that the film listens as much as it speaks. Its surprises extend to its choices of emphasis and protagonist.

Steeped in local folklore, it lets mythic and mind-based terrors exist side by side, allowing the viewer to interpret and believe what they will. This leeway comes at no cost, however, to its effective atmospherics, which sink into the bones like an unexpected twilight chill.

Ultimately story is secondary to Russell’s delicious detailing of character and milieu.

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.

A frenzied vocal tone and wild, untethered physicality connects all the performances, with every character seemingly eager to burst out of their own body, and by extension, the life in which it’s stranded.

Over the course of several years, Anabel Rodriguez Rios’ unsentimentally elegiac documentary Once Upon a Time in Venezuela quietly observes Congo Mirador being brought to its knees, to progressively powerful and enraging effect.

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.

A measured, moving account of a brief period in the later life of the troubled sculptress, could hardly be the work of anyone else, with its sparseness of technique and persistent spiritual curiosity.

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.

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.

Slight and self-contained, it won’t go down in cinema history as anything but, perhaps, the most purely fun film ever made by peculiar British experimentalist Sally Potter.

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

It’s a loving showcase for its star’s most finely wrought powers of expression, but equally beguiling as a display of its first-time helmers’ gentle observational acuity and surprisingly inventive visual storytelling.

Distinguished by exquisite performances from Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric as a bourgeois couple unsure when to call time on their marriage, the pic initially follows the dry, droll template set by so many tasteful French relationship dramedies, before venturing into less comforting emotional territory for its final act.

[An] engaging, elegiac portrait of a legend in the making.

Its visual and sonic verve more than compensate for some overworked symbolism.

Kahn’s crafty, compelling portrait gives Goldman the floor, but his walls remain fixed around him.