Guy Lodge

Gerbase’s thoughtful, precise little film would have marked an impressive enough arrival under normal circumstances. As it is, it might endure as more era-evocative than many of the intentional pandemic dramas to come.

Immersively crafted but never emotionally involving.

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.

All Yogi’s actors work in subtle, effective deference to his natural command of atmosphere and place: This is a film where Hawaiian rainfall has as prominent and evocative a voice as any human presence, and where the growth of a tree marks time as clearly as the deepening crevices in a character’s face.

Beans is a thoughtful, stirring reflection by someone who survived it all, quietly demanding acknowledgement not just of her land, but of her life.

Rather than taking a detached anthropological tour of the community, Bolognesi lets the Yanomami present themselves in their own words and on their own terms, thus enlivening everything from their mealtimes to their mythology.

The jokes write themselves, though in The Phantom of the Open, screenwriter Simon Farnaby and director Craig Roberts make them sweeter and spryer than they could have been, while a wide-eyed, bucket-hatted Mark Rylance plays Flitcroft with abundant generosity of spirit.

Whether wholly performed or partially authentic, The Tsugua Diaries wittily evokes the volatile mood swings of lockdown — how concentrated time with the same people can yield either irritation or intensified closeness from day to day, particularly in a sticky-hot summer haze.

Expect no surprises in Falling for Figaro, a corny, cute-enough carpe diem comedy, in which it’s a lovable ensemble — led by Danielle Macdonald, and spiked by a deliciously imperious Joanna Lumley — that brings the grace notes to a pretty standard-issue script.

Ambitious but tediously precious, sincerely conceived but derivatively realized, The Blazing World throws an ornate heap of production design at an anemically scripted psychological metaphor, and counts on a combination of fairy dust and sheer determined nerve to make the whole contraption fly.

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

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.

A brash, gutsy, morbidly funny first feature from actor-filmmaker-podcaster Dasha Nekrasova, it runs on a premise that could have been written as a dare, or a prank.

Crisply made and gutsily performed as it is, this slender 78-minute film too often feels like pointed social allegory in search of a really good cover story.

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.

Harry Wootliff’s jaggedly grown-up psychological drama True Things thrives on the hot, tense chemistry between its two excellent leads: It’s what pulls the audience through an obstacle course of potentially implausible scenarios that instead ring stingingly true.

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.

Superb ... 'The Box' may see [Vigas] relocating to Mexico, but it’s otherwise wholly of a piece with his debut in its terse, cut-to-the-quick refinement, its loaded, exquisitely composed images, and its fixation on shifting, complex man-versus-boy dynamics.

Sébastien Lifshitz’s lovely, clear-eyed documentary thoughtfully articulates the disorientation of gender dysphoria not from the inside out — Sasha is never less than calmly convinced of who she is — but from the outside in, as her transitioning identity sparks confusion and resistance in an uninformed community, causing her anxiety in turn.

In this hard, unblinking film, even a moral victory feels like defeat.

America Latina may frequently look and sound terrific, but a Ferrari spinning its wheels is spinning its wheels just the same.

Suffice it to say that The Starling’s emotional arcs are as narratively complete as they are psychologically dashed-off.

Happening is filmed and performed in such a delicate, skin-soft register, meanwhile, that the escalating terror of Anne’s situation is all the more pronounced, eventually pivoting into a realm of wholly realism-based body horror.

7 Prisoners’ unfolds satisfyingly, precisely by not offering us complete satisfaction or certainty. The question hovers of whether Mateus can ever escape his prison altogether, or merely into one with more comfortable furniture.

A frenzied vocal tone and wild, untethered physicality connects all the performances, with every character seemingly eager to burst out of their own body, and by extension, the life in which it’s stranded.

There’s a barreling momentum to the filmmaking that feels true to the cut and thrust of restaurant life, regardless of the script’s digressions.

Its portrait of an easy-target industry goes soft just when it needs a little added spine, while the film’s abrupt tonal transitions from jaunty comedy to cross-generational weepie occasionally come at the expense of the characters’ own credibility. But it’s the overarching niceness of “Best Sellers” that sees it through.

Wright’s particular affections for B-movies, British Invasion pop and a fast-fading pocket of urban London may be written all over the film, but they aren’t compellingly written into it, ultimately swamping the thin supernatural sleuth story at its heart.