Guy Lodge

Oddly, Funny Face feels more like a promising but overreaching debut than any of his earlier films, particularly at the level of its slender script, heavy as it is on banal, minimalist dialogue that doesn’t fuel the flickering chemistry between leads Cosmo Jarvis (“Lady Macbeth”) and appealing newcomer Dela Meskienyar as best it could.

The State Against Mandela and the Others outlines a complex network of motives and tensions underpinning this single sensational trial: Nothing here is exactly revelatory to those with a working knowledge of apartheid history, but few documentaries have gathered the stakes involved in the trial quite so deftly.

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

The ironically inviting title only hints at part of the story in this wholly devastating documentary: The crisis, it turns out, is all around us.

At once a celebration and a lament, simultaneously jubilant and ineffably sad, it’s a film worth sticking around to see.

Lively as an overview of Cardin’s creative and commercial achievements, House of Cardin is considerably vaguer when it comes to his personal life and legacy.

It’s a cheap, unloving death march of a movie — scarcely made more intriguing by the half-cooked theory it posits as to who (or how many) did the deed.

The film — in tandem with Lacoste’s lovely, unguarded performance — works as a magnified study in coping, charting the stages of his jumpstarted growing-up alongside the more meandering course of his grief.

Tsemel’s hard demands on her family and co-workers alike are kept in view: “Advocate” isn’t a bland hagiography, but a textured nonfiction character study of complicated heroism. You can’t challenge the system, after all, without being a bit challenging yourself.

For all The Informer lacks in surface style — shot and scored as it is in functional, straight-to-VOD fashion — it remains a surprisingly well-oiled genre machine.

The great pleasure of these films’ bright, largely wordless slapstick is that it plays universally whilst accommodating all manner of obsessive, idiosyncratic detailing at the edges.

The actors, splendidly kitted out in autumnal suiting and knitwear by costume designer Michael Wilkinson, have what fun they can with such thin, dated material, but everyone here deserves better.

The film grabs at so many thematic strands — further including toxic female friendship, urban alienation and abusive sexual manipulation — that it can’t substantially sort through them all. Still, the attempt is audacious and stimulating.

When Lambs Become Lions thoughtfully and provocatively articulates a collision of social and environmental crises in which man is both victor and victim: a circle of life that stalls us all.

Not quite a fleshed-out personal study, nor fully a meditation on what Battaglia’s camera sees, this intriguing but frustrating film finally makes the case for letting the photographer’s pictures tell their story.

This easily digestible “Feast” is unlikely to join the holiday viewing canon, but the particularity of its focus on the eponymous, American-fried immigrant tradition is welcome: Any Christmas film that teaches us how to correctly soak baccala is more useful than most.

This easy-to-take film’s pleasures, then, lie chiefly in its relaxed evocation of place and time. Set in 1993, though it could just as easily work in a contemporary setting, Angelfish wisely doesn’t go all in on period kitsch, though music and costuming are both deployed to evoke a pre-internet, arguably gentler era of youth.

It’s as creatively anemic and blandly calculated as, say, this summer’s billion-grossing “The Lion King.”

The disappointment of Mrs. Lowry & Son is that it finds neither of its star attractions at the peak of their powers: Both Spall and Redgrave feel stifled and stiff-jointed, hemmed in by a thin, shallow-focus script that betrays its origins as a radio play all too easily.

In a conversation piece pitched halfway between the delicate Sirkian tragedy and Adrian Lyne at his most sensational, it’s the overridingly controlled nature of proceedings — from performance to production design — that keeps “Queen of Hearts” from sliding into the hysterical silliness that its provocations invite.

Authoritative and dense — though never dull — at over two hours, Citizen K is the prolific docmaker’s most rewarding feature in several years, attaching his typically methodical research to a cheerfully slippery, charismatic human subject who, even on the side of right, is cagey in the face of investigation.

Nourry isn’t the most self-effacing of artists, and Serendipity could stand to reveal more of her artistic process, rather than gazing upon the often formidable finished product. Still, on the occasions it stops self-curating and gives us a glimpse into Nourry’s frightened, still-restless soul, this is a stirring, imposing self-portrait.

Populist politics can turn all too easily to popcorn ones; On the President’s Orders vividly captures the tipping point.

The reliably charismatic work of its players, notably ringleader Mathieu Amalric, keeps this somewhat soggy macaron diverting.

In My Room presents and accepts its partial apocalypse with unquestioning calm — an extreme contrivance that merely enables an elegant, exacting character study.

Skirting easy cynicism to view fire, brimstone and occasional grace through Maud’s awestruck eyes, this is finally as much a sympathetic character study, a mental heath mind-map, as it is any kind of chiller. Whatever the case, it’s one hell of a debut for Rose Glass.

Notwithstanding any comparisons, there’s more assured personality here than there was in her last feature, the bright, proficient but somewhat synthetic big-studio teen romance “Everything, Everything.” Much of that film took place, by narrative necessity, in hermetically sealed rooms; here, the fresh autumn air agrees with everyone involved.

Coetzee’s novel, with its measured, interiorized voice and sparse, incrementally devastating narrative, was never an obvious fit for film treatment. After a stiffly mannered, overwritten first act, however, Waiting for the Barbarians gradually gains in poetry and power, while Mark Rylance’s lead performance, as a liberal-minded colonial official undermined and overwhelmed by his tyrannical superiors, gives proceedings a quiet but firm moral core.