Guy Lodge

The push-pull kinetics keeping these increasingly raddled lovers together and apart eventually turn from manic to strenuous, not least because viewers are likely to be less invested than the film is in their final formation.

Sensitive and empathetic but a little timid in storytelling and style, The Little Sister rests considerably on its lead performance by first-time actor Nadia Melliti.

This 86-minute puzzle piece isn’t one of the director’s major works, but is distinguished by his trademark pleasures of texture and tone — and pushes his ongoing collaboration with star Paula Beer into ever more enigmatic territory.

Intelligent, drily seething and duly enraging in turn, “Case 137” keeps its mind strictly on the job.

The film makes no claims to represent an entire disenfranchised demographic, but there’s resonant human texture and political feeling in its close-up individual portrait.

No finer point of craft, performance or poetic nuance has been rushed or neglected in a film that ultimately sounds a warning against the dimming or blunting or de-specification of memory — not just for oneself, but for communities or lineages with more shared stories than they might think, but an inclination to clam up and carry on.

"Marcella” is most interesting, however, when it peels away the layers of achievement and adulation to show us the brisk, unpretentious woman who surprised nobody more than herself by becoming a culinary icon, and articulates something of the oddly intimate but entirely parasocial relationships we form with our most trusted cookery writers.

Nobody is exactly who they appear to be in “When Fall is Coming,” but Ozon’s nimble, perceptive little film takes that as a given: When winter and mortality are beckoning, the past only counts for so much.

Sex certainly comes up early and often in this playful, intricately nuanced character study, but in consistently surprising, stereotype-averse ways.

The film is most enlightening and affecting when it settles into a perceptive, finely detailed examination of everyday domesticity lived under the weight of rushing mortality.

Osit’s brilliant, subtly needling film leaves us unnerved and alert, but not certain of our convictions — an outcome, perhaps, that more true-crime programming should pursue.

Porcelain War thrives on contrast, much of it poignant.

Like its predecessor, this is an angry, viscerally illustrative film — but it’s a weary one too, occasionally narrating its first-hand view of military combat with the jaundiced sense of futility that comes with living through long-term conflict.

Broad in tone and narrow in scope, the film is in thrall to the idea of creating art outside mainstream financial and aesthetic models, though its structure and outlook are not unfamiliar.

Love’s commentary on modern relations may be more complex and chewy than just “live and let live,” but the film’s calm embrace of whatever works for the individual is refreshingly humane, rhetorically exciting and more than a little hot.

The poignancy of Super Happy Forever lies in its unseen tensions, its negative spaces, and the ellipsis of five years where its characters assumed they had all the time in the world to recreate this level of happiness.

The light and shade here is all in Peter Simonite’s splendid, inky-shadowed monochrome lensing; Huston’s visual sense outweighs his screenwriting.

Original and outlandish if only fitfully funny, the film rests considerably on the deadpan comic stylings of Oscar-nominated star (and producer) Maria Bakalova.

The result isn’t as formally or tonally characterful as the previous films, just as the script, more than before, feels bound to a well-worn template.

In Her Place — Chile’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar this year — finally resembles a nifty short-film premise wrapped around an untapped subject for a full-scale documentary or biopic

The film’s gaze is arguably as mocking as it is dazzled — with the macho posturing and hero-worship of Roca Rey a tacit source of comedy — while Serra, living up to his reputation for challenging arthouse fare, doesn’t flinch in his presentation of animal abuse and suffering.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa, not unlike Hitchcock, is the kind of tireless genre craftsman who seems to approach every feature as a test of his own proficiency: Serpent’s Path, a brisk, harsh and, yes, clinically professional update of his own 1998 thriller of the same title, passes said test without a moment’s strain.

Saying something freshly substantive about female desire while honoring the film’s defining spirit of vapid, diaphanous horniness is a tricky, potentially unworkable brief; Audrey Diwan‘s inert, frequently frigid new film opts to do neither.

Tsangari’s vigorous, yeasty period piece occasionally loses the thread of its sprawling ensemble narrative, but transfixes as a whole-sackcloth immersion into another time and place.

Peter Cattaneo‘s amiable film adaptation matches the book’s feathery whimsy while reaching for a little more political import. Almost inevitably, it’s best when it’s about the bird.

Friedland’s film, as sharp as it is soft, conveys both the terror of losing the life you recognize, and the intermittent, fragmented joy of finding it again.

April is loath to explain itself, inviting us instead to watch, listen and feel our way through it — a work marked, like the benevolent but unreachable woman at its center, by immense empathy and isolated, inconsolable despair.

The film backs away from the overtly personal narration of its predecessor, in pursuit of a bigger picture.