Guy Lodge

The great pleasure of these films’ bright, largely wordless slapstick is that it plays universally whilst accommodating all manner of obsessive, idiosyncratic detailing at the edges.

An altogether smashing sequel to 2011′s better-than-expected “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” this vivid, violent extension of humanoid ape Caesar’s troubled quest for independence bests its predecessor in nearly every technical and conceptual department.

Perfectly small rather than slight, and radiantly carried by Juliette Binoche — in a light-touch tour de force to be filed alongside her work in Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy” — this turns out to be a subtler departure than it outwardly appears for Denis, most evoking her other Parisienne drifting-hearts study, “Friday Night,” in its bittersweet tone.

With its tricksy timeline and waifish subplots, the film feels unduly stretched even to reach its modest length, while our dramaturgy-fixated protagonist is slow to stumble into a compelling arc of her own.

The truest and most tearduct-tugging relationship here is that between Conor and his lank-haired college-dropout brother, played with spaced-out warmth and wistful good humor by the ever-likeable Reynor.

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.

The film is most enlightening and affecting when it settles into a perceptive, finely detailed examination of everyday domesticity lived under the weight of rushing mortality.

It’s a furious work of social geography that satisfies slightly less as a character piece: In its ambitious attempt to dramatize the violent anxieties of men on both sides of the law, Les Misérables risks selling some victims a little short.

An honest, affecting slab of working-class portraiture, altogether bracing with its thorny labor politics and salty sea air.

A mostly pretty innocuous affair — give or take some par-for-the-course ethnic stereotyping and at least one close-up involving a prosthetic glans — it’s neither good nor bad to any memorable degree, not as riotous as it could have been but not devoid of low-hanging laughs either.

For all its structural and psychological deficiencies, it’s hard not to enjoy Fifty Shades Darker on its own lusciously limited terms.

A New Kind of Wilderness still honors the ideals of its late subject, particularly in the camera crew’s organic, pine-fresh appreciation of the surrounding environment. But its tender observation of an evolving family shows there’s value in society too, in living across a wider corner of the world.

Servants is briskly shaped at just under 80 minutes, yet its alien-historical world-building is effective enough that you emerge from it feeling both out of time and out of breath: Any longer, and all humanity would bleed out of this earthly-but-ethereal conspiracy drama entirely.

This 86-minute puzzle piece isn’t one of the director’s major works, but is distinguished by his trademark pleasures of texture and tone — and pushes his ongoing collaboration with star Paula Beer into ever more enigmatic territory.

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.

Taking inspiration from a short story by German writer Emma Braslavsky, Schrader and co-writer Jan Schomburg serve up a rich panoply of questions, answers and stray ideas. Rarely are these assembled into neat combinations, even if the script veers too far into thematic explication in the final third.

This elegant, unusual documentary shifts the role of the game-spotter from that of non-violent hunter — in pursuit of one prized target — to passive but duly wide-eyed observer, accepting but also appreciating the limits of our access.

It’s when the film’s natural and metatextual components overlap and disrupt each other that The Earth Is Blue as an Orange is most arresting.

Writer-director Eliza Hittman has a sensitive ear for the way adolescents reveal themselves through evasion: It’s a tension crucial to this anxious, tactile, profoundly sad study of a young man’s journey of sexual self-discovery and self-betrayal.

Alami and Ingeborg Topsøe’s finely whittled screenplay plays its revelations patiently, putting a lot of early trust in their leading man’s powers of silent implication and the serene foreboding of Sophia Olsson’s charcoal-streaked cinematography.

It might do writer-director Harry Wootliff a disservice to call her mature, thoughtfully conceived debut feature Only You one of the latter, but the tinderbox connection between stars Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor is what elevates this grown-up relationship study from respectable to lovable.

Limbo joins a long line of fine Australian films taking to the desert to disinter racial trauma, to rebury the bones with more care and awareness, but also enduring fury.

Not a major work but a bright, pleasurable one, with its director on more limber form than in his recent narrative features “Deception” and “Brother and Sister,” “Filmlovers!” is formed of two halves, nimbly interleaved by editor Laurence Briaud.

You, Me & Tuscany passes the time painlessly enough, but it’s never quite the escape it wants to be: It’s packaged so familiarly and so cautiously, we hardly believe its celebration of free, restlessly wandering impulse.

[Davies'] most mannered and least fulfilling work to date, A Quiet Passion boasts meticulous craft and ornate verbiage in abundance, but confines Cynthia Nixon’s melancholia-stricken performance as arguably America’s greatest poet in an emotional straitjacket of variously arch storytelling tones.

At once a misty-eyed romance and a harsh depiction of the practical and emotional challenges of giving up independent living, A Secret Love isn’t subtle in its Kleenex-clutching tactics — as you’d expect from a project bearing the imprint of TV titan Ryan Murphy — but it’s certainly effective.

From Daniella Nowitz’s muted, intimately lit lensing to the plaintive, judiciously used piano strains of Karni Postel’s score, every formal element of Asia serves to illustrate and enrich the tricky, evolving relationship at its center — brushing, rather than milking, the viewer’s tear ducts along the way.

If Pity doesn’t quite have the shock of the new on its side, then, its sharpest passages nonetheless exert the bracing, mouth-shuddering tang of neat ouzo: You know how it’s going to taste, but it leaves you wincing anyway.