Guy Lodge

Remake is extraordinarily clear-eyed for a work so broken-hearted: at once a home movie, an intimate diary and an expansive study of the filmmaker’s purpose, constantly disrupting its own conclusions with expressions of anger, amusement and still-unresolved confusion.

There’s a lot of acting here, little of it peak-form for the talent involved, though the ensemble lifts and colors Anders’ sometimes heavy-handed dialogue.

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.

Belén might never regain the vivid rage and terror of its opening minutes, but Fonzi’s film ends up carrying viewers on its own wave of pride and upright conviction, ultimately delivering the hope its promises

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

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.

Art counts for a lot more than patriotism to Guthrie, and the happy surprise of Nicholas Hytner‘s film — despite its twee, veddy English trappings — is that it largely takes his side.

A slow-burning, increasingly incensed unraveling of a horrific murder case underpinned by colonialist privilege and prejudice, it too demands patience of its viewers — though it rewards them with steadily rising emotional impact and a long view of Latin American history that transcends any true-crime trappings.

Ultimately, this odd, wicked little amorality tale winds up siding with no one: The children are indeed the future, we’re left to conclude, but will they make it any better than the present?

Many things are simple in The Fence, an unusually sharp-cornered and rhetorical work from this typically elliptical and sensuous filmmaker, but the rage swelling beneath its still, mannered surface is not.

Clearly inspired by cases like that of Shamima Begum, the London teen who traveled in secret to Syria to become an ISIS bride, Nadia Fall‘s debut feature seems on the surface like a hot-button provocation, but it’s surprisingly humane and good-humored in its attempt to understand the individual lives behind a sensational headline issue.

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.

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.

It’s the most prominent and devoted leading showcase Maura has had in years, and one she carries with her invaluable brand of internally illuminated, can’t-be-taught charisma.

It bristles with testy economic politics, though they largely itch beneath the surface of an unassuming, intimately observed character portrait.

While among his warmest works, rich in pleasures of place and weather and human motion, it’s no empty travelogue, notwithstanding the sometimes glistening beauty of Rosi’s black-and-white cinematography.

If The Voice of Hind Rajab opens one hitherto blinkered eye, or ear, to the atrocities in Gaza, it will have done its job. But it’s a blunt and discomfiting instrument.

Sophy Romvari‘s graceful, singularly heartsore debut feature has a sharp understanding of how memories form and age: Often it’s the incidental, ambient details you recall as vividly as the more significant events at hand.

The Testament of Ann Lee is rich in agnostic questioning and bemused human interest, but at such radiant peaks, Fastvold makes believers of us all.

Charlie McDowell makes an equally respectful and respectable stab at the task, capturing some of the wistful, soft-sun warmth of Jansson’s writing — though not quite matching its unassuming poetic depths.

Bulk is a stunt that makes even earlier oddball Wheatley works like “A Field in England” look quite conventional by comparison — but there’s more energy and wit in this hybrid of conspiracy thriller, time-bending sci-fi and goofy genre parody than we’ve seen from the director in a while.

Though the film is mostly scripted fiction, its leads are two non-professional actors undergoing hair transplant surgery themselves, and the procedures and transformations depicted on screen are their own. That lends proceedings a bracing, candid authenticity, as well as unusually heightened human stakes — the anxieties shown at all stages of the process here are real.

The duly playful, freeform result occasionally skirts preciousness but is mostly rather affecting, bound by a palpable sense of female friendship and a perceptive interest in the dynamics thereof.

Solving one mystery unexpectedly quickly before diving into deeper, more searching uncertainties of human behavior and relationships, the third feature from Singaporean writer-director Yeo Siew Hua gradually reveals a broken heart beneath its sleek, chilly veneer.

Theirs is an outwardly simple life made complex with yearnings, resentments and impossible dreams: equally mythic and mundane, as presented in Miro Remo‘s wonderfully sui generis portrait Better Go Mad in the Wild.

It’s busier than it is funny, more frenetic than dynamic, but watchable enough.

Whether gazing in rapt widescreen across wondrous ancient structures, ruined recent cityscapes or the oceanic shift and shake of a stone quarry in action, this is blatantly dazzling, epic-scale filmmaking that nonetheless invites viewers to consider the implications of our awe.

Tortorici evidently remembers that disorienting sense of being released (or perhaps abandoned) into the world before you’ve quite found yourself; if you don’t, his funny, nervy, aptly unformed film will give you quivery flashbacks. It’s an auspicious arrival for both the filmmaker and his intense, mercurial young star Manfredi Marini, who holds the camera with the guilelessness of a newcomer and the ease of a natural.