Guy Lodge

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.

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.

The richest, most enduring pleasures here are formal ones, beginning with the exacting still-life compositions and oily, vehement primary hues of Jenkins’ 16mm lensing, which can make a painterly subject of a maritime squall or a mustard-yellow wading boot.

The extremity of suffering on display here makes for difficult viewing, scarcely leavened by the expressionistic beauty of its presentation. But von Horn’s film never plays as empty miserablism, in large part thanks to its grave understanding of the moral and spiritual reasoning behind unimaginable acts of violence.

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.

Without undue manipulation or sentimentality, Black Box Diaries pulls viewers’ emotions in sharp extremes that mirror the peaks and valleys of this hard-fought five-year case.

It’s Murphy’s exquisitely pained performance, unclenching by fine degrees into something like grace, that gives Small Things Like These its eventual, fist-in-the-gut power, even as the film evades melodramatic confrontation to the last, ending elegantly at a point where many other stories might choose to begin.

The film backs away from the overtly personal narration of its predecessor, in pursuit of a bigger picture.

Though it mostly resists contrived “opening-out” devices, and preserves the decidedly low-tech visualization of the play’s sci-fi premise, Michael Almereyda’s well-cast film never finds a suitably complex cinematic language for its tangle of intellectual and emotional ideas.

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.

If mounds of garbage aren’t quite what viewers have come to associate with Planet Wes, the slight scuzziness of Isle of Dogs is its great surprise: From the occasional eye-watering blurriness of its fast tracking shots to the loopy, laissez-faire nature of its storytelling, the whole enterprise might just be as messy as the director lets himself get.

As with Reichardt’s more streamlined miniatures, regional detail accounts for much of the film’s lingering resonance, as her characters are molded by (and, in some cases, rail against) the landscape they inhabit.

It’s Quillévéré’s soaring visual and sonic acumen (with an assist from composer Alexandre Desplat, here in matchless form) that suffuses a potentially familiar hospital weeper with true grace.

Night Comes On is, true to its title, blanketed in a dim, crepuscular state of waiting. Fishback, her film career unfurling clearly before her from scene to scene, blazes a way out of it.

Beautifully written and performed by the director and real-life BFF Kyle Marvin, Covino’s film gets precisely the balance of dependency and denial that keeps a bad bromance afloat.

Sicario occasionally seems a little too impressed by its own nihilism. Still, this is an involving, grown-up film from a director whose muscular technique continues to impress: one might call it pulp in the same manner one would a plate of minced meat.

My Octopus Teacher never loses our goodwill: If we wind up wishing it had a little less man and a little more beast, that only serves its cause.

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.

A love story hinging on human chemistry as a disruptive force would fall to pieces if its stars didn’t have that very unquantifiable quiver of static between them. But Buckley and Ahmed play off each other exquisitely, gradually reflecting each other in motion and mien, each looking at the other with the kind of facially centered full-body want that no amount of dialogue can convey on its own.

Spare and pared-back in all respects ranging from performance to its clean, airily-lensed aesthetic, After Love carries bulky baggage with an elegant lightness, leaving its audience with further unpacking to do.

Though realized on a more modest scale than other Aardman features, the film is still an absolute delight in terms of set and character design, with sophisticated blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detailing to counterbalance the franchise’s cruder visual trademarks.

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.

Eschewing standard biopic form at every turn, this brilliantly constructed, diamond-hard character study observes the exhausted, conflicted Jackie as she attempts to disentangle her own perspective, her own legacy, and, perhaps hardest of all, her own grief from a tragedy shared by millions.

Beginning is not a derivative work. Its slow-cinema trappings aren’t merely plucked from the films that have taught its maker along the way, but prove a rhythmically apt, intuitive way into the headspace of its protagonist, a woman who feels her very life has been put on pause.

This is a striking statement of intent from its Slovenian writer-director — there’s an airy delicacy here that invites comparisons to early Céline Sciamma, but with its own raw, restless edge.

Muna’s plan won’t leave only misery behind, which is what gives Saudi Runaway its emotional heft and depth as it revs up to a finale of unalloyed, skin-prickling suspense.

It etches a sweet, sad and solemnly fatalistic love story between feeding times.

The Edge of Democracy makes no claims to objectivity. This is documentary cinema in which facts tangle compellingly with feeling, while passages of solemn, stately mood-building split the difference.