Guy Lodge

Beautifully written and performed by the director and real-life BFF Kyle Marvin, Covino’s film gets precisely the balance of dependency and denial that keeps a bad bromance afloat.

Needless to say, a historical anti-musical that makes [the previous film] “Jeannette” look like “Moulin Rouge!” by comparison is going to win the filmmaker few converts.

It’s conventional, occasionally maudlin docmaking that nonetheless grips the heart exactly when it needs to.

Beats proceeds to give a dying scene its euphoric due, in a dazzling digression from stage-based form.

From its rigid, symmetry-inclined compositions to its heavily worked one-liners, this is cautious, stifling filmmaking in thrall to a reckless, retrograde man, who does little in the course of 90 minutes to merit great fascination or pathos.

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.

One wishes the film were a bit more inventive with its dog’s-eye view: the odd ground-level action shot aside, there isn’t much to cinematically suggest how animals see the world differently.

Robert Bahar and Almudena Carracedo’s straightforward but emotionally acute documentary works as both a thorough history lesson and a work of contemporary activism.

The film, effective on its own unassuming terms, seems to cut out with some distance left to run.

Superb ... An alternately lyrical and gut-punching coming-of-age study.

Viewers, too, may feel at once cast adrift in the film’s amorphous quests, and languidly seduced by its disorder.

The opening frames of Honeyland are so rustically sumptuous that you wonder, for a second, if they’ve somehow been art-directed.

This is the first stumble in Hansen-Løve’s hitherto impressive filmography — the kind of directorial misstep that at least makes it clear how deft her footwork usually is.

The resulting film is so delicately wrought and exquisitely visualized that the harsher, eerier details of Ailhaud’s account stand out all the more strikingly, like a shot of vinegar in a pristine crème caramel.

The result is attractive and diverting, as any well-appointed film starring these actors in mouthwatering period finery could hardly fail to be — though for a story about people rebuilding their lives through grievous personal loss and moral torment, it’s hard not to wonder if its vast reserves of enviable knitwear are counting for more than they should.

This strong second feature from Guatemalan talent Jayro Bustamante doesn’t ask new questions, but its sensuous, reverberating atmospherics find fresh, angry ways to answer them.

Slight as a Varda film, but shot through with its maker’s characteristic pluck and whimsy, Varda by Agnès gives her newly recruited fans everything they’ve come to see.

This is a film with a mature, heartbroken understanding of how we hold onto things.

A proficient but unsurprising espionage thriller from Israeli writer-director Yuval Adler that offers another well-fitted showcase for Diane Kruger’s stern resolve as a performer.

As drama, Mr. Jones sometimes struggles to get out of its own way, but its message still lands with concrete force.

Too much of the kindness in “Strangers” feels sentimentally story-dictated rather than born of profound human observation, leaving you with mild, woolly good feeling but little to contemplate or chew on.

I Was at Home, But… works as a mood piece in the truest sense of the term: once you stop trying to logically assemble the narrative and submit instead to its clashing, enveloping currents of feeling, they form a persuasive story of their own.

The Golden Glove may not celebrate its subject, but the intimate examination it offers him is itself a privilege — one for which this ugly, unenquiring film scarcely makes a case.

That the film works as stirringly as it does is largely because of that brash, heart-on-sleeve engagement with its characters’ messy, unfinished feelings, not to mention Ozon’s canny knack for playing on French star personae.

[Cronin's] trim, jumpy debut feature rewrites no genre rules, but abounds in bristly calling-card atmospherics. ... Only in the film’s muddy-in-all-senses finale — which leaves a few too many dots unjoined, even by forgiving genre standards — does its grip on proceedings slip a notch.

Achingly well-observed in its study of a young artist inspired, derailed and finally strengthened by a toxic relationship, it is at once the coming-of-age story of many women and a specific creative manifesto for one of modern British cinema’s most singular writer-directors.

For all the complex class politics and bottled-up desires at play in its narrative, Batra’s film is perhaps a shade too timid for its own good; it touches the heart, but hovers just short of the soul.

The new age of Brazilian protest cinema begins here, and “Divine Love” has kicked it off in dancing shoes.