Guy Lodge

This is unabashedly virtuoso, show-off filmmaking, as cocky as the misguided young men at the film’s center, who, at least for a period, saw their lives as a Hollywood romp in itself.

The frustrating nine-year wait for new material from Martel has done nothing to blunt her exquisite, inventive command of sound and image, nor her knack for subtly violent exposure of social and racial prejudice on the upper rungs of the class ladder.

Knowingly incendiary but remarkably cool-headed, and built around yet another of Isabelle Huppert’s staggering psychological dissections, Paul Verhoeven’s long-awaited return to notional genre filmmaking pulls off a breathtaking bait-and-switch: Audiences arriving for a lurid slab of arthouse exploitation will be taken off-guard by the complex, compassionate, often corrosively funny examination of unconventional desires that awaits them.

Nothing about the film’s coming-of-age narrative, nor the rise and fall of its core romance, is intrinsically new or daring, yet Kechiche’s freewheeling perspective on young desire is uncommon in its emotional maturity.

Not merely a story of interspecies hierarchy, then, White God also puts forward a simple but elegant metaphor for racial and class oppression, as the outcast (or even outcaste) masses, sidelined in favor of the elite few, band together to assert their collective strength.

April is loath to explain itself, inviting us instead to watch, listen and feel our way through it — a work marked, like the benevolent but unreachable woman at its center, by immense empathy and isolated, inconsolable despair.

It’s the film’s great, disorienting structural risks, its humoring of human untidiness and confusion, that make it so subtly thrilling and moving.

Part dreamy millennial picaresque, part distorted tapestry of Americana and part exquisitely illustrated iTunes musical, “Honey” daringly commits only to the loosest of narratives across its luxurious 162-minute running time. Yet it’s constantly, engrossingly active, spinning and sparking and exploding in cycles like a Fourth of July Catherine wheel.

This abrasive, exhilarating film is out to candidly say its piece, to identify and evoke the world as Tucker Green sees it, and doesn’t much care if viewers agree or not.

Lithe and volatile and recklessly stylized to the hilt, True History of the Kelly Gang has moves like Jagger, but a head still teeming with language and history.

The result feels closer than any of his previous films to the barbed, intimate lyricism of McDonagh’s work as a playwright, and more deeply, sorrowfully felt to boot.

Kuosmanen’s unassuming yet immaculate command of tone and form here would impress at any stage of his career, but it’s entirely remarkable in a first feature.

Amid all the shifting mirrored surfaces and hazy ambiguities of Olivier Assayas's bewitching, brazenly unconventional ghost story, this much can be said with certainty: Kristen Stewart has become one hell of an actress.

Fearsomely visceral and impeccably performed, it’s a brisk, bracing update, even as it remains exquisitely in period.

Meise’s film is an exquisite marriage of personal, political and sensual storytelling, its narrative and temporal drift tightened by another performance of quietly piercing vulnerability from Franz Rogowski.

The intense abuse captured in Marta Prus’s brilliant, diamond-hard documentary portrait of a Russian rhythmic gymnast’s punishing road to the 2016 Olympics is all too vividly real — just watching it induces veritable stomach cramps, though it’s impossible to turn away from the film’s whipcrack construction and expert manipulation of perspective.

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.

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.

These restlessly independent auteurs have passed the genre-foray test with flying neon colors, at no cost or compromise to their abrasively humane worldview.

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.

Strange, enrapturing, simultaneously vast and minute, Enyedi’s latest spends a lot of time considering how we perceive our surrounding flora — but just as much on how it perceives us, which is where it starts to get a bit special, and even a bit sexy.

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.

A ravishing 70-minute audiovisual essay on human mortality, extinction and legacy — all the more poignant for being its maker’s final creative statement.

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.

Huppert is such a persistently and prolifically rigorous performer that she risks being taken for granted in some of her vehicles, but this is major, many-shaded work even by her lofty standards.

So involving is the raw content of The Look of Silence that some might view its formal elegance as mere luxury, yet the film reveals Oppenheimer to be a documentary stylist of evolving grace and sophistication.

That it’s so artfully and elegantly observed, and packs such a candid wallop of feeling, atop its frontline urgency is testament to the grace and sensitivity of its directorial team, not just their timely savvy.

Simple in concept and shattering in execution, blending hard-headed reportage with unguarded personal testimony, it’s you-are-there cinema of the most literal order.