Guy Lodge

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.