Guy Lodge

If nothing here is exactly new, it’s the sheer, breathless precision and momentum of Calibre’s assembly that keeps it startling.

The Student is a film that never stops to think; it thinks (and speaks, and shouts) while prodigiously on the move.

The Guest is not new, exactly, but Wingard knows just which buttons to push, and he pushes them with gusto. Stevens, meanwhile, has never been better.

The quiet humanity of McCarthy’s filmmaking meshes oddly with the material’s zanier demands, finally reaching an anodyne middle ground.

Employing a darkly iridescent fusion of oil paint and digital embellishment, it renders a growing dystopia in shifting, seasick colors, distorted into about as much exquisite, Expressionist-inspired nightmare fuel as its family-film remit will allow.

This strong second feature from Guatemalan talent Jayro Bustamante doesn’t ask new questions, but its sensuous, reverberating atmospherics find fresh, angry ways to answer them.

Even in its more generic stretches, Martone’s latest feels both inviting and convincingly inhabited, a siren song to the past that confronts us with a violent, unromantic present, paved under with the same old, blood-washed cobblestones.

That Tsangari resists escalating the conflict, counting on subtle political insinuations to emerge as these perplexing social Olympics wear on, will leave as many viewers enervated as amused, but it’s an expertly executed tease.

This is impressively composed, searching high-art cinema, elevated by its meticulous, silkily textured formal construction

There’s a fine, even invisible, line between dignity and denial in “El Planeta,” a fine-grained portrait of everyday poverty amid the lingering wreckage of the global financial crisis. Yet this pithy, distinctive debut feature from artist-turned-filmmaker Amalia Ulman eschews kitchen-sink realism for a deadpan vein of black comedy somewhere on the very wide spectrum between Lena Dunham and early Pedro Almodóvar.

It’s a broader, starrier project than either of Nichols’s previous films, and he handles the transition to the major league with relative confidence.

Wise and lyrical and strange, The Love That Remains thrives on its profound understanding of each family’s individual oddness, and the incremental confusion with which growing children regard their parents, as their elders grow smaller and more flawed by the day.

This deceptively artless, journal-style film has no need for any carefully sculpted twists; rather, it’s the sheer unpredictable perversity of human nature that takes the breath away at key points in Fassaert’s unsettling, perhaps unsolvable, inquiry.

A modestly scaled, intimately observed domestic drama that doesn’t reinvent any wheels in its portrayal of family frictions, midlife ennui and the anguish of terminal illness, but handles all this potentially sticky material with clear-eyed (and finally, when required, somewhat moist-eyed) grace.

As a contemporary study of the violent struggle between the hamstrung Congolese national army and M23 rebel forces in the North Kivu region, the film is often blisteringly effective, venturing to the frontline in pursuit of raw war footage likely to open many an outside viewer’s eyes — or, at its harshest interludes, prompt them to squeeze tightly shut.

There are fleeting moments of wit, bliss and even tenderness amid the gritty severity, as Vidal-Naquet perceptively portrays not just the lonely, drug-fueled rigors of the hustler lifestyle, but the simultaneously competitive and supportive fraternal community that sustains it.

Pacifiction is a film in many ways about floating, through life and water and power, inviting the viewer to idly drift right along with it.

The film’s confidence falters only when it transposes the hapless slapstick of the duo’s screen act to their everyday reality. If a couple of labored gags around hauling luggage don’t fully land, that rather proves how much more art went into Laurel and Hardy’s craft than they ever chose to let on.

It has the escalating, claustrophobic structure of the darkest farce, but humor doesn’t pile up in Under the Tree so much as it bleeds out.