Guy Lodge

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.

A wickedly funny protest against societal preference for nuclear coupledom that escalates, by its own sly logic, into a love story of profound tenderness and originality.

There’s typical grace and good humour in Kore-eda’s handling of this all-but-impossible situation. But the film’s critical lack of dramatic nuance undercuts its emotional resonance.

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

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.

Hill of Freedom, its noble implications lending outward grandeur to a romantic triangle that reps a cream puff even by Hong’s trifling standards. Cream puffs have their merits, though — principally the aerated, uncomplicated sweetness that characterizes this barely feature-length distraction, the light emotional foibles and regrettably careless cinematic construction of which are of a piece with the helmer’s swiftly produced recent work.

This is filmmaking as attuned to incremental shifts in light and landscape (Romania’s, in fact, gorgeously filling in for undeveloped upstate New York) as the ebb and flow of a character’s interior joy, written in a face unaccustomed to smiling.

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.

But it’s Firth’s Sam who finally carries the film’s heart, and exquisitely so, as his fear, anger and mounting insecurity lash out the more he tries to remain undemonstrative. (He also pulls off some able, plaintive piano-playing by his own hand.)

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.

Populist politics can turn all too easily to popcorn ones; On the President’s Orders vividly captures the tipping point.

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.

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.

Some might wonder what Anaïs in Love really has to say for itself; the film, perhaps, objects to the idea of young women like its cheerfully confused heroine having to explain themselves at all. Either way, this zephyr-blown dandelion of a movie isn’t going to break a sweat to get its message across.

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

There’s a barreling momentum to the filmmaking that feels true to the cut and thrust of restaurant life, regardless of the script’s digressions.

The push-pull kinetics keeping these increasingly raddled lovers together and apart eventually turn from manic to strenuous, not least because viewers are likely to be less invested than the film is in their final formation.

There’s an unforced authenticity to its portrait of ruptured early childhood that isn’t matched by its later, more melodramatic depiction of father-daughter warfare — even if its tear-jerking tactics are undeniably effective. That it’s affecting in both registers comes down to a performance of quiet, good-humored grace by Scoot McNairy.

For all Hardy’s expressive detail and physical creativity, Helgeland’s chewy, incident-packed script offers little insight into what made either of these contrasting psychopaths tick, or finally explode.

Denis’ latest sees her applying her usual rigorous form and psychological curiosity to material that tends to inspire more generic directorial treatment, teasing out a rich, nuanced exploration of female desire from the fault lines of an ostensibly simple narrative.

The Girl With a Bracelet comments intelligently on our culture’s propensity to sex-shame and emotionally instruct young women in particular — points which stand regardless of whether shedunnit or not.

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.

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

Softie clearly sees a beam of long-term hope for Kenya’s future in Mwangi and his political allies — including his no-bull, vinegar-tongued campaign manager Khadija, as delicious a documentary scene-stealer as we’ve seen this year. Yet Soko doesn’t go in for easy, crowd-pleasing uplift.

While this appropriately brief film unravels its enigma at a tidy clip, it gathers neither enough heat, nor quite enough of a chill, to linger in the bones.

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.

Rampantly horny and unapologetically silly, Will-o’-the-Wisp appeals to more primal desires and thought processes in its audience, even as it repurposes a Greta Thunberg speech or references the racially charged work of 18th-century Portuguese painter José Conrado Roza.