Guy Lodge

Heavy on benevolent feeling and shy of outright human conflict, the film floats and sprawls and spirals like the creature to which it’s glowingly in thrall, but a bit of spine wouldn’t go amiss.

Blue Film is an unabashed provocation, but not a hollow one. Its dual protagonists — one a convicted pedophile, one a hyper-macho fetish camboy — don’t invite uncomplicated sympathy, so it’s just as well Tuttle is more interested in understanding them, exposing their respective damage in articulate detail, and letting the audience take things from there.

The film's chief pleasures are those of practiced professionals doing their job, and doing it well. None of the stars here is slacking, and their combined, easily resumed chemistry ensures that this sequel, for good long stretches, feels like old times — even if it's hard to imagine fans of its predecessor cherishing repeat viewings to quite the same extent.

The melodrama begins at such a high pitch in Desplechin’s latest, you might think it has nowhere to go but down, yet this earnestly inflamed tale of art, grief, betrayal and all-consuming amour on steroids keeps finding new, hysterical ways to surprise.

The filmmakers have lightened and brightened their source material to a kid-friendly degree — even the English countryside, as glisteningly shot by George Steel, has never looked less overcast. Yet there’s wisdom amid the silliness, as the story gently makes a case for the necessity of grief, mindfulness and mortal awareness, even in a life otherwise unburdened by adult human responsibility.

Kormákur’s film doesn’t trade in surprises, but offers more than enough heart-in-mouth action spectacle to compensate.

By turns tenderly observed, improbably dark and perkily sitcom-esque, it’s certainly erratic, and uncertainly much else.

Brashly violent, clattery and pleasingly untied to any direct predecessor, the result is more generic than its braggy auteur claims might promise, but there’s a lot here for gorehounds to feast on.

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.

A generally brittle, distant affair, Outcome largely saps Reeves of his genial, unaffected charisma, leaving him to play the carapace of a man who’s lost any real sense of who he is when not in character.

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.

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.

Pizza Movie is disposable, practically by design, but it may have happened upon a comic duo worth reteaming.

Marc by Sofia isn’t particularly penetrating or eye-opening on Jacobs as an artist, businessman or human being, but it is a pleasant and casually glamorous hang.

"The Immortal Man” serves as a handsome reminder of what always felt quite cinematic about the series — both in its beefy-but-pulpy storytelling and its robust, well-patinated production values.

Edler and editor Barbara Bascou maintain a sense of urgency in this two-hour film by foregrounding human convictions and frailties amid a surfeit of increasingly ugly rhetoric.

In its cool, propulsive procedural tracking of ward activity, Late Shift quite sufficiently makes its point regarding the monumental challenge and value of Floria’s work, and that of thousands like her.

At once armored, guarded and intensely vulnerable, Hüller’s performance is the human factor here — a volatile, unpredictable element, but one nonetheless attuned to the film’s meticulous shaping and mise-en-scène.

Rosebush Pruning makes its anti-capitalist points tartly enough in such moments, but the twistier things get, the sillier they get too — while any social commentary begins to feel like a thin cover for so much luridly gross, glossy spectacle. Still, there’s pleasure in the film’s excesses, mainly because Aïnouz and his team present them with such febrile, iridescent beauty.

Striking and often unpredictably moving — before an ungainly third act that frays into a profusion of endings — Søimer Guttormsen’s film places a lot of trust in its leads, erstwhile “Worst Person in the World” co-stars Renate Reinsve and Helene Bjørneby, to sell its wild swerves in mood and perspective. Both are up to the task.

It’s a script and a production tightly built around its performers, both superb individually, but most importantly, warmly attentive to each other on screen, and capable of sharing a silence.

If her filmmaking style is relatively straightforward, it’s a rich, raw sense of place that gives this Sundance entry — premiering in world dramatic competition — vitality and danger.

Like its eminently problematic anti-hero, The Musical says its piece with conviction to spare, and a welcome streak of cat-among-the-pigeons danger rarely found in contemporary American comedy.

This long-game project gives remarkable dimension and particularity to the kind of migrant story often only told in journalistic generalities — showing, year on year, how time heals some wounds, opens others, and creates plenty of its own.

Saccharine proves James’ gifts are better served by more independent means, even if it falls short of the emotional and dramatic heft that gave “Relic” equal genre and arthouse appeal.

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.

Substantial ideas underpin all the flippant historical cosplay, as Bezinović — himself a Croatian — ponders D’Annunzio’s reputation on either side of the Italo-Croatian border, and in turn the long-term societal effects of failed despots being either romanticized or forgotten entirely.

The spirit of slow cinema is alive and languid in this stunningly mounted, politically rigorous work, which confronts any viewers hoping for a sweeping biographical romp with a frank post-colonial perspective, thoroughly and violently dismantling any romanticized legacy trailing the eponymous Portuguese navigator.