Guy Lodge

Opaque and formally ungainly, this itchy meditation on a host of contemporary social ills offers audiences a vividly, deliberately ugly worldview, but finally makes for hollow viewing.

Tracing with exemplary sensitivity the unlikely bond formed between a gay German baker and the Jerusalem-based widow of the man they both loved, Graizer’s film works a complex range of social and religious tensions into its heartsore narrative, without ever feeling sanctimonious or button-pushing.

Even when Rafiki irons out its emotions a little too neatly, however, Mugatsia and Munyiva’s relaxed, sparking chemistry quickens its heartbeat.

There are fleeting moments of wit, bliss and even tenderness amid the gritty severity, as Vidal-Naquet perceptively portrays not just the lonely, drug-fueled rigors of the hustler lifestyle, but the simultaneously competitive and supportive fraternal community that sustains it.

Part loopily queer sci-fi thriller, part faux-naive political rallying cry, glued together with candyfloss clouds of romantic reverie, it’s a film best seen with as little forewarning as possible: To go in blind is to be carried along by its irrational tumble of events as blissfully and buoyantly as its empty-headed soccer-star protagonist.

If not as overtly political as “The Student,” Leto nonetheless represents about as flamboyant a statement of free artistic expression as Serebrennikov could make at this moment: There’s certainly nothing contained or inhibited about its celebration of artists who themselves were given little support or leeway by the Soviet government.

The film, for all its interest in fables, trades less in morals than in equivocal, irony-laced human observation. Rohrwacher deftly skirts sentimentality even as she risks big, expansive poetic gestures.

Cold War may return to “Ida’s” meticulous monochrome aesthetic of “Ida,” but it’s a companion piece with its own tonal and structural energy: less emotionally immediate, perhaps, but immersively informed by the broken jazz rhythms beloved of its protagonist.

Savage’s film thoughtfully and credibly outlines the conflict between a superficially abundant lifestyle and overwhelming internal lack. It’s on less sure footing with the morally fraught wish-fulfilment of its second half, though Arterton’s quiet, consistent emotional conviction pulls matters through.

Exit Music covers the spectrum with grace, good humor and no emotional filter: It’s an unabashed tear-jerker that earns its saltwater through candor rather than undue manipulation.

Itself crafted with great artistry and ingenuity, McQueen works both as a spectacular visual album of his work and an achingly moving account of the incomplete life behind it.

It’s a loving showcase for its star’s most finely wrought powers of expression, but equally beguiling as a display of its first-time helmers’ gentle observational acuity and surprisingly inventive visual storytelling.

Upgrading a sleeping-with-the-enemy premise familiar from countless B-thrillers with a faintly mythic aura and cool psychosexual shading, Beast also sustains a fresh, frank feminine perspective through Jessie Buckley’s remarkable lead performance.

If Considine doesn’t seem to know his characters as intimately as he did in his debut, however, he still knows acting inside out. It’s his unguarded conviction in the lead — and that of a superb Jodie Whittaker as his devoted but devastated wife — that finally lands Journeyman a victory on points, if not quite a knockout blow.

If the story’s political and personal nuances have been a bit flattened in Balaker’s script, keeping proceedings in a movie-of-the-week register, this Little Pink House nonetheless retains what property developers would call good bones.

Undemanding yet never quite effortless, agreeable yet never quite engrossing, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society has fewer stumbling points than its loopy title, but that title sticks for longer than the rest of it.

It’s a commendable departure, even if you can sense the helmer struggling to get the lay of the land at certain intersections in this heartfelt tale of an impoverished brother and sister seeking roundabout justice when she’s imprisoned for attempted murder.

This Is Home gestures toward a more detailed, heterogeneous understanding of these war victims as human beings, characterizing its four chosen families in detailed, individual terms, and listening attentively to their varied expressions of ambition and concern for their new future.

The spare, classical chase drama that ensues is seeded with barbed observations on colonialism, cultural erasure and rough justice, kept poetically succinct by Thornton’s lithe, soaring visual storytelling.

There’s the phantom of a psychothriller for the ages inside “Ghost Stories” that never quite fights its way out of the film’s tightly structured creepshow homage, but the goosebumps it raises are real, and honestly earned.

Inasmuch as one can complain about a film having plot holes when it hinges entirely on a magic cellphone app, much of “Status Update” feels cursory and unconsidered by its hokey standards.

It’s left to Stone to prop up the whole scented-tissue affair, and that she cheerfully does, with a calm, centered force of personality that lends credibility even to the most raggedly developed aspects of her character.

Even when the chips are down, every boy’s adorable beret looks box-fresh. It’s the boys themselves, however, who often cut through the Camembert to deliver a shot of honest, imperilled feeling.

A sly, supple and repeatedly surprising collision of literary, moral and political lines of debate that marks an enthralling return to form for writer-director Laurent Cantet.

It’s Eric Bana, cast as a fictionalized composite of various white-supremacist apartheid criminals, who comes closest to electrifying proceedings in what’s at heart a one-room two-hander, unconvincingly padded and populated for the big screen.

The modest rewards in Finding Your Feet are ones of sprightly human chemistry rather than great narrative discovery, of all-round good humor rather than outright hilarity.

The emotional range of Pfeiffer’s riveting performance isn’t a broad one, though this frequently nonverbal film is entirely reliant on her cutting powers of expression as she progresses from harrowed to exhausted and back, at risk of disappearing into herself entirely.

We’re in schlock corridor here and Soderbergh runs with it, cellphone in hand; under the buzzing suspense mechanics, however, a cautionary note on the perils of disbelieving women is just audible.

This is an impressively rigorous exercise, in which the director’s sober formalism finds a kindred spirit in his leading lady’s studied, secretive restraint.

If mounds of garbage aren’t quite what viewers have come to associate with Planet Wes, the slight scuzziness of Isle of Dogs is its great surprise: From the occasional eye-watering blurriness of its fast tracking shots to the loopy, laissez-faire nature of its storytelling, the whole enterprise might just be as messy as the director lets himself get.

Departing only incidentally from E.L. James’s trashy tome, and making up for any short cuts with extra set dressing, this is brochure cinema of the most profuse order, selling its audience more on a lifestyle than on any of the lives inside it.

Darkly dainty as this ornate storytelling geometry is, however, it’s hard to remain heavily invested in the outcome through a runtime that, even at a modest 90-plus minutes, feels a tad stretched.

The very artlessness of My Art is what sometimes makes it endearing, but its storytelling could use a few more foundational lines.

Freak Show...doesn’t exhibit an understanding of queer identity that goes much deeper than the sheer sequined fabulosity of Billy’s image.

Without advertising itself as such, Western could be viewed as a wry reflection of the European Union’s sometimes fractious present-day state — though much of its character conflict hinges on a more universal fear of the other.

The Commuter’s breakneck incoherence — not to mention a generally dour demeanor, shorter on incidental humor than most of the helmer’s work — makes it a notch less fun than those previous ex-trash-aganzas.

[A] living, breathing, stunning documentary.

Pat Collins’ echoing, elegiac evocation of the spirit of Irish sean nós singer Joe Heaney is most interested in his haunted vocal gift, letting the troubled life that weathered it show through only in glimmers between the gorgeous songs.

A thin, sparkless romantic comedy that takes satirical aim at a host of current hipster-culture targets, before concluding that merely identifying them is droll enough.

Acted and executed with brute conviction, if not much delicacy, by its writer-director-star, with an excellent foil in Jason Ritter’s boorish, baffled husband, the film feels overstretched in its latter half — with its central metaphor revealing only so many facets before the shock factor begins to pall.

Paddington 2 is another near-pawfect family entertainment, honoring the cozy, can-do spirit of Bond’s stories while bringing them smoothly into a bustling, diverse 21st-century London — with space for some light anti-Brexit subtext to boot.

A piercing, immersive, and superbly played convent drama in which the suppression of speech is witnessed at both an individual and institutional level.

Billed as a “documentary musical,” this potential crowd-pleaser gets considerable comic mileage out of the friction between two very different brands of cultural eccentricity — but it succeeds as more than a diverting novelty, packed as it is with pointed observations on diplomacy and censorship in a country that’s still a mystery to many.

There’s a lot happening on the surface of Alfredson’s perplexing winter wonder-why, but considerably less going on inside.

The film’s tone and outlook is changeable throughout — down to a striking, only semi-successful framing device of docu-style testimonies that hover deliberately between worlds.

Sympathetic as Thor’s journey to awareness is, Heartstone’s languid, rollingly repetitive storytelling never quite justifies its weighted focus on his character at the expense of his friend’s more active anguish; a more judicious edit could place both in sharper relief.

It’s hard to deny that the small screen may be the most natural fit for Batra’s film, given its pleasantly mollified storytelling and blandly unassuming visual style.

This earnestly romantic biopic of odds-beating polio patient Robin Cavendish and his unwavering wife, Diana, keeps its eyes moist and its upper lip stiff to the last — but its sweeping inspirational gestures rarely reach all the way to the heart.

With the film’s human element so glassy and its storytelling so thin, however, all this elegant formal trickery soon turns more aggravating than intoxicating — by its extremely splintered, impressionistic finale, the film skates perilously close to misery chic.

Superb, skin-prickling performances by the three principals contribute invaluably to the pic’s stern believability, with Findley utterly wrenching as a dedicated mother pushed to frank irrationality by others’ neglicence.

Danny Strong’s film is diverting, mildly informative and — to borrow Caulfield’s adjective of choice — somewhat phony, heavy as it is on tortured-writer clichés and contrived art-imitates-life parallels.

The final effect is akin to that of a Hallmark card inscribed by Christopher Nolan, and it’s that earnest self-importance of tone that finally makes this light sci-fi effort a bit of a trudge, despite Dinklage’s committed and empathetic performance.

Taut and rattling in setup, before losing its bearings in more ways than one as no end of jungle fever seizes Daniel Radcliffe’s agonized protagonist.

Perhaps the greatest of The Shape of Water’s many surprises is how extravagantly romantic it is, driven throughout by an all-conquering belief in soulmates as lifelines.

A sweat-slicked, exhausting but glibly entertaining escapade on its own terms, American Made is more interesting as a showcase for the dateless elasticity of Cruise’s star power. It feels, for better or worse, like a film he could have made at almost any point in the last 30 years.

Technically smart but dramatically a bit flat.

This simultaneously beautiful and abjectly unhappy film is forced to close by silently admitting its limitations.

A film that, for all its tinniness of craft and carelessness of storytelling, gets by on sheer force of personality.

Unapologetically rambling but never dull at over 140 minutes, this story of two gay lovers both separated and united by mobile distractions of the flesh loiters coolly where the sensibilities of Jacques Rivette and Alain Guiraudie intersect — which is to take nothing away from the droll peculiarity of Reybaud’s own voice.

Chon’s sophomore feature wavers uncertainly in tone, getting a little too cute for comfort in spots, but is otherwise a lively, auspicious breakthrough.

Marie Noelle’s evidently impassioned portrait of the trailblazing Polish-French physicist and chemist emerges as an odd blend of, well, formulae, following a starchy biopic pattern one minute and giving in to impressionistic abstraction the next.

Watching these two fine actresses circle each other in a kind of watchful alligator’s tango, each waiting for the other to blink first, is the chief pleasure on offer in Moka.

What scant charms this direct-to-video-style Nineties throwback has belong mostly to Willis.

Gleeson and Keaton, for their part, play this bourgeois rags-to-tweed fairytale with such good humor that one is fleetingly able to overlook the frank bogusness of the mechanics that bring them together.

Such a sprawling, two-pronged saga may well have been better served in television miniseries format.

This handsome debut feature from Swedish-Sami writer-director Amanda Kernell robustly blends adolescent fears that resonate across borders and generations with a fascinatingly specific, rarely depicted cultural context: Sweden’s colonial oppression of the indigenous Sami folk.

Creatively speaking, however, A Ciambra is something of a step sideways for the Italian-American filmmaker, consolidating his considerable formal and observational gifts while fumbling a bit as storytelling.

Ramsay has made more sensually rapturous films, but this may be her most formally exacting: No shot or cut here is idle or extraneous.

Perfectly small rather than slight, and radiantly carried by Juliette Binoche — in a light-touch tour de force to be filed alongside her work in Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy” — this turns out to be a subtler departure than it outwardly appears for Denis, most evoking her other Parisienne drifting-hearts study, “Friday Night,” in its bittersweet tone.

Even as harder realities hit home, The Rider is in complete sympathy with its protagonist’s wild, wistful yen.

[A] sprawling, thrilling, finally heart-bursting group portrait of Parisian AIDS activists in the early 1990s.

With its tricksy timeline and waifish subplots, the film feels unduly stretched even to reach its modest length, while our dramaturgy-fixated protagonist is slow to stumble into a compelling arc of her own.

These restlessly independent auteurs have passed the genre-foray test with flying neon colors, at no cost or compromise to their abrasively humane worldview.

The film’s thematic preoccupation with the power of images — as perceived through any of the senses — is a worthy and thoughtful one. Yet the execution lacks the visual and emotional rigor of Kawase’s most imposing films, instead swaddling viewers in buttery lighting and blunt, earnest platitudes.

Even lesser Hong has its lackadaisical pleasures, and The Day After has its share of wry musings and twitchy banter between characters to counter its visual stasis and lulling storytelling.

Characters often most reveal themselves when they’re saying nothing of any particular consequence in Hong’s short, loose script.

Oddly stiff where Alexander Mackendrick’s original village farce was infectiously tipsy, Gillies MacKinnon’s interpretation is twee, tweedy and rather timid about putting its own stamp on a now-quaint story.

This articulate, formally immaculate portrait proves less compelling in practice than it does in principle: Over-burdened at the outset with extraneous ceremonial detail and starchy speechifying, the film takes a dry, acolytes-only approach before later, more domestically focused chapters raise the body temperature of proceedings.

An anonymously enjoyable espionage thriller that, for purposes of memory, all but self-destructs the second the closing credits begin to roll.

A sexually frank but narratively flimsy girl-meets-girl romance that never gets under its gorgeous characters’ amply exposed skin.

It’s Quillévéré’s soaring visual and sonic acumen (with an assist from composer Alexandre Desplat, here in matchless form) that suffuses a potentially familiar hospital weeper with true grace.

May not be the most comprehensively explanatory or analytical film yet made on the war, but it’s the one that provides viewers with the most sensorily vivid and empathetic sense yet of how it feels to live (and die) through the carnage.

This most defiantly rule-resistant of filmmakers certainly hasn’t lost his capacity to surprise. Salt and Fire’s punchline, however, only enhances the sense of a shaggy-dog tale dashed off on the back of a postcard — it’s the scenery on the other side that holds our attention.

An unabashed wish-fulfilment fantasy that sweetly checks off every conceivable follow-your-heart cliché.

Spectacularly honoring the spirit and aesthetic of Mamoru Oshii’s beloved animated adaptations without resorting wholly to slavish cosplay, this is smart, hard-lacquered entertainment that may just trump the original films for galloping storytelling momentum and sheer, coruscating visual excitement — even if a measure of their eerie, melancholic spirit hasn’t quite carried over to the immaculate new carapace.

Nominally focused on the celebrated filmmaker’s lesser-known dabblings in fine art, The Art Life emerges as a more expansive study of Lynch’s creative impulses and preoccupations, as he relates first-hand the formative experiences that spurred and shaped a most unusual imagination.

Unforgivingly rigorous to its final, exactingly composed monochrome frame, I, Olga Hepnarova shows us scarcely a flickering moment of light or joy in its anti-heroine’s short, loveless life, depicted on screen from adolescence upwards.

A likably lame rattletrap of a road movie that gets what limited spark it has from the “Dynasty” diva’s still-lascivious on-screen charisma.

As is Ott’s wont, California Dreams blurs the line between simulated vérité and authentic observation, making it often impossible to tell whether those on camera are playing themselves, simply being themselves or a combination of the two.

Crow and fellow up-and-comer Ashleigh Murray make an infectiously spirited duo in director Sydney Freeland’s sophomore feature; exuberant but not obnoxious, their combined energy and ingenuity is enough to steam the film through some off-track script wobbles.

The join-the-bullet-holes nature of Mean Dreams' storytelling would be less of a problem if the characterization were a little more textured, but for all the picturesque anguish on display, the febrile messiness of actual human life is little in evidence.

This narratively slender item is unapologetically a mood piece: a film that’s in love with love, in love with cinema, and concerned that neither is built to last.

The Wound is rich in such small, observational details.

Narrative and reality clash, tussle, and are eventually rendered indistinguishable in a witty, tortured puzzle picture — one in a growing subgenre of hybrid inquiries into the nature and limits of performance, which is not to say there’s anything quite like it out there.

There’s considerable poignancy in the contrast between this eccentric pair’s mutual sense that their lives are winding down and the vast, still-unshaped futures of their young charges, but Ní Chianáin’s film largely resists sentimentality of the “Greatest Love of All” variety.

Still, it’s one of the terrorist's wives (Melissa Benoist) who carries the film’s most riveting and provocative scene.

It’s to the credit of Borbély’s intelligent, melancholically understated performance that Maria remains sympathetic even as she becomes more of a condition than a character — and to the richness of the writer-director’s ideas that they move and intrigue even when they’re most artificially expounded.

Gomis’ latest is far from the miserablist issue drama that synopsis portends, instead weaving a sensual, sometimes hopeful, sometimes disturbing urban tapestry with threads of image, sound, poetry, and song.

Slight and self-contained, it won’t go down in cinema history as anything but, perhaps, the most purely fun film ever made by peculiar British experimentalist Sally Potter.

After a taut, flinty opening that sees Huppert and Chammah sparring to quietly heart-ripping effect, the air trickles out of this sensitive but cliché-laced drama

Unfussy in form, open in expression and gentle in reach as its maker revisits such recurring preoccupations as loneliness, regret and the value of love in life and art.

Vega’s tough, expressive, subtly anguished performance deserves so much more than political praise. It’s a multi-layered, emotionally polymorphous feat of acting, nurtured with pitch-perfect sensitivity by her director, who maintains complete candor on Marina’s condition without pushing her anywhere she wouldn’t herself go.

Even at their least individually striking, each of these mismatched tasters stirs an appetite for a fuller, meatier meal from its maker — cooked as bloodily rare as possible, please.

For all its structural and psychological deficiencies, it’s hard not to enjoy Fifty Shades Darker on its own lusciously limited terms.

Where “Trainspotting’s” dive into the void was targeted, bristling with snarky anger at a Conservative system that provided few lifelines, “T2” — despite landing in a Britain once more under divisive Tory rule — is mostly content to let its characters alternately indulge and excoriate themselves.

This kooky-monster escapade is never less than arresting, and sometimes even a riot.

Though it mostly resists contrived “opening-out” devices, and preserves the decidedly low-tech visualization of the play’s sci-fi premise, Michael Almereyda’s well-cast film never finds a suitably complex cinematic language for its tangle of intellectual and emotional ideas.

Many will accuse Perry of navel-gazing here, but that’s partly the point: Golden Exits means to frustrate, even to abrade, in its coolly articulate portrait of cosseted people who want for nothing and vaguely desire everything.

Skipping some of the more predictable narrative obstacles we’ve come to expect from the coming-out drama, this sexy, thoughtful, hopeful film instead advances a pro-immigration subtext that couldn’t be more timely amid the closing borders of Brexit-era Britain.

The more Dayveon attempts to up the dramatic and moral stakes of its narrative, the less persuasive it is as idiosyncratic, indigenous storytelling.

Writer-director Eliza Hittman has a sensitive ear for the way adolescents reveal themselves through evasion: It’s a tension crucial to this anxious, tactile, profoundly sad study of a young man’s journey of sexual self-discovery and self-betrayal.

Between more trickily opaque stretches of character development, Shortland nails a handful of straight-up, nerve-shredding tension sequences, teasing a version of the film that might have tilted into full-bore horror.

Tastefully lit and art-directed throughout, with a somberly mellifluous Alexandre Desplat score to ease it along, this fact-based drama finally cushions its harshest emotional blows, though Brendan Gleeson’s deeply sad, stoic dignity in the lead cuts through some of the padding.

No one behaves quite like a human being in Eugene Green’s Le Fils de Joseph, yet a soulful sense of humanity emerges from their heightened declamations anyway.

Keaton plays Kroc as a man both pathetic and singularly possessed, cannily resisting lovability at every turn, while delivering the internalized self-help speak of his sales pitches with chillingly glib precision.

While the film initially exercises commendable restraint in braiding its separate narratives, its second half grows increasingly reliant on pat connections and coincidences.

While not every tonal downshift here is entirely fluid, this remains a smart, risky one-off, unconcerned with those (and there will be many) who can’t acquire its taste.

Unpretentiously touching on the page, this material feels stretched a bit thin on film, with televisual production values and a samey song score doing little to enrich matters: Still, it’s sweetly hopeful .

If Zwick’s film improves on Christopher McQuarrie's inaugural, incoherent 2012 entry in the series, it's not through any special initiative on the film's part. But it's efficient, unfussy, and doesn't try to think any faster than it can run.

The life-and-death stakes are there, but the people involved — while uniformly ravishing to gaze upon — are too wanly sketched for this melodrama to pump much blood.

Clark’s fifth feature is marked by his characteristic brand of distorted realism, though a classically redemptive arc — with even a hint of spiked sentimentality — sounds a new note in his oeuvre.

There’s a stern, let’s-get-to-work air to the film’s craft and conception that hampers whatever thrill of the chase “Inferno” has to offer. Fundamentally silly the film may be, but it never graduates to spryness.

Vincent’s calm, almost strenuously low-key film never gathers enough emotional momentum to become a fully dimensional romance — which might be its poignant intention.

Televisually presented and arduously overlong at 127 minutes, 150 Milligrams can’t always separate the compelling personal stakes of its narrative from its surfeit of informational minutiae.

Pesce’s spare script doesn’t seek to obscure, but its quiet, matter-of-fact handling of drastic dramatic events will catch some off-guard.

While shot through with pointed jabs at chauvinism and mainstream homophobia in Mexican society, The Untamed never quite exceeds the sum of its intriguingly opposed parts.

It’s Roy, having written herself a part for which many actresses would patiently wait, who does the heavy lifting here: Playing a woman who’s either losing her mind or playing dangerously at it, with as much attention paid to body language as befits her character’s artistic calling, she makes a revelatory, slightly otherworldly impression.

An impressively stark, narratively ruthless Victorian chamber piece that feels about as modern as its crinolines will permit, William Oldroyd’s pristine debut feature slowly reveals a violent moral ambiguity that needles the mind far longer than its polite period-piece trappings suggest.

A major disappointment from a major filmmaker, Diaz’s latest super-sized tapestry of historical fact, folklore and cine-poetry is typically ambitious in its expressionism — but sees the helmer venturing into the kind of declamatory, didactic rhetoric that his recent stunners “Norte, the End of History” and “From What Is Before” so elegantly avoided.

This occasionally transcendent opus finds Diaz’s formal powers — not least his own incisive monochrome lensing — at full strength.

It’s fitting that Kasper Collin’s excellent documentary I Called Him Morgan, a sleek, sorrowful elegy for the prodigiously gifted, tragically slain bop trumpeter Lee Morgan, is as much a visual and textural triumph as it is a gripping feat of reportage.

Eschewing standard biopic form at every turn, this brilliantly constructed, diamond-hard character study observes the exhausted, conflicted Jackie as she attempts to disentangle her own perspective, her own legacy, and, perhaps hardest of all, her own grief from a tragedy shared by millions.

This deceptively artless, journal-style film has no need for any carefully sculpted twists; rather, it’s the sheer unpredictable perversity of human nature that takes the breath away at key points in Fassaert’s unsettling, perhaps unsolvable, inquiry.

The film is most thoughtful, and sometimes even painful, as a study of the pitfalls (and pitiful rewards) of local celebrity.

'Aranjeuz” has less of a pulse than the already inert “Every Thing Will Be Fine."

Setting up a number of promising kinks in the now-standard found-footage formula, as the seemingly spooked forest begins to close in its hapless victims, Blair Witch disappointingly casts most of them aside for a finale that does little to advance the series’ existing mythos.

Voyage of Time veritably tongue-bathes the eyeballs with its succession of extravagant images and with its digitally enhanced vision of a natural world that practically tips the scales into unearthliness. But somehow we're never truly surprised by any of its wonders.

Though there’s much to savor in the pic’s lavishly distressed visuals and soundscape, its narrative feels increasingly stretched and desultory.

Morelli and tyro scribe Matt Hansen unpack this Charlie Kaufman-lite premise with more cleverness than wit, struggling particularly to find the right racy tone for various erotic interludes — but the part-toon pic’s neatly collapsing structure and pop-art flourishes ensure it’s never dull.

There’s considerable charm in the pairing of Marling and Huston.

It comes as little surprise that Howard, a nimble and proficient storyteller in non-fiction and fiction like, hasn’t a natural documentarian’s drive for information: This diverting, brightly assembled boomer nostalgia trip won’t open the eyes of any existing Fab Four fans, however much it pleases their ears.

Some viewers will work themselves into a state of severe agitation trying to keep pace with Haghighi’s panoply of diversionary tactics within diversions. Others may simply give in to the sensual allure of the whole contraption, as Haghighi gives lively indigenous treatment to motifs and atmospherics drawn from the Hollywood genre playbook.

The ensemble commits to the premise with utmost gravity and conviction, enabling our belief in even the most improbable interpretations of its core enigma.

There’s an over-compensatory fussiness to its most elaborate formal conceits, with the gradual shifting of the pic’s palette from desaturated December grays to iridescent oil-pastel tones a crude symbolic device.

For Vinterberg, this uneven but nonetheless absorbing pic at least marks a return to characteristically bristly territory.

This study of adolescent desire and alienation across class lines takes its time nurturing a tensely ambiguous relationship between its two young female leads — alertly played by newcomers Lauren McQueen and Brogan Ellis — only to squander a measure of that intrigue on a blunt third-act twist.

Sometimes bloody good fun is enough. It’s as good a reason as any for making this sunny, silly rallying cry for irresponsibility, and a better one still for watching it.

This cinematic Big Mac entertains abundantly on its own second-hand merits.

Psycho Raman often entertains most with its most lurid formal, musical and narrative gambits.

Amid the film’s narrative lulls and lapses, it’s the actors who hold our attention.

Generally laudatory in its approach to its irresistible human subject — if Lear’s signature white hat remains immovably on his head, the film’s stays very much in hand — this appreciation is nonetheless most fascinating in a brief stretch where the political correctness of Lear’s work is called into question by black performers.

An intelligent, restrained but warmly intimate cinematic conversation with the Sixth Generation Chinese trailblazer.

Turkish writer-director Mehmet Can Mertoğlu’s substantial debut feature can’t suppress a sneer at the very 21st-century practice of exhaustive yet evasively filtered self-documentation. That’s hardly the only modern malady under fire in this elegantly opaque social satire, which touches on bureaucratic ineptitude, class conflict and very questionable parenting.

Kuosmanen’s unassuming yet immaculate command of tone and form here would impress at any stage of his career, but it’s entirely remarkable in a first feature.

Knowingly incendiary but remarkably cool-headed, and built around yet another of Isabelle Huppert’s staggering psychological dissections, Paul Verhoeven’s long-awaited return to notional genre filmmaking pulls off a breathtaking bait-and-switch: Audiences arriving for a lurid slab of arthouse exploitation will be taken off-guard by the complex, compassionate, often corrosively funny examination of unconventional desires that awaits them.

The Student is a film that never stops to think; it thinks (and speaks, and shouts) while prodigiously on the move.

Amid all the shifting mirrored surfaces and hazy ambiguities of Olivier Assayas's bewitching, brazenly unconventional ghost story, this much can be said with certainty: Kristen Stewart has become one hell of an actress.

Part dreamy millennial picaresque, part distorted tapestry of Americana and part exquisitely illustrated iTunes musical, “Honey” daringly commits only to the loosest of narratives across its luxurious 162-minute running time. Yet it’s constantly, engrossingly active, spinning and sparking and exploding in cycles like a Fourth of July Catherine wheel.

Though what we get is largely exemplary: a simple but urgent objective threaded with needling observations of social imbalance, a camera that gazes with steady intent into story-bearing faces, and an especially riveting example of one in their gifted, toughly tranquil leading lady Adèle Haenel. What’s missing...is any great sense of narrative or emotional surprise.

The film takes precisely as much time as it needs for its muddled, maddeningly human characters, played with extraordinary courage and invention by Peter Simonischek and Sandra Hüller, to find their way into each other, and so into themselves.

Tempering the strong medicine of its social-justice protestations with a streak of outlandish melodrama, this “Monster” may not have quite as many facets as its title implies, but Pla’s formally deft manipulation of perspective keeps the pic both urgent and even-handed.

A fast, fizzy and frenetically entertaining extension of the manic gaming franchise.

Even when the director pushes too far...the film’s formal severity feels appropriately claustrophobic — another form of authority closing in on the light.

Viva appealingly makes up for a coy approach with gutsy, grabby follow-through on the high notes.

The film has a knowingly conflicted engagement with millennial-generation feminism that freshens its outlook even as it unevenly rejigs many of its predecessor’s gags. Still, while a subtly clawed Chloë Grace Moretz proves a worthy new foil, it’s Zac Efron’s tragicomic anatomy of a dudebro that remains this series’ sharpest asset.

It’s Watkins’ lean, keen instinct for choreographing and cutting action set pieces that keeps Bastille Day afloat.

Whether or not they’re familiar with the source property, kids are unlikely to be bothered: There’s just enough blaring sound and color to this knowingly silly tale of interplanetary derring-do to adequately offset its impersonal corporate sheen.

[A] sensitive, deliberate debut feature.

Cividino depicts the tricky male power games between the boys with tact and compassionate impartiality.

Florence Foster Jenkins is an audience picture first and foremost: one wholly sympathetic to its eponymous subject’s delusional drive to delight crowds with or without the requisite artistry.

Given how much of 11 Minutes takes place in the glibly heightened realm of the Hollywood-molded actioner, its various fragments are rather short on intrigue, whether considered alone or in simmering context.

The sheer abundance of on-screen ornamentation isn’t quite enough to make The Huntsman: Winter’s War a beautiful film.... Still, it’s one that has been exhaustively designed by many hands — which only further shows up its inelegant patchwork in the writing department.

There are gentle rewards to be gained from the initially brittle, gradually tender rapport between two actors of contrasting greatness.

A brittle, no-joke comedy of unchecked privilege that maintains the tone of social satire without ever alighting on a specific target.

This potentially lurid material is lent considerable ballast and believability by the excellent work of its trio of child actors.

Right Now, Wrong Then is a film of minute observations rather than grand revelations, less concerned with butterfly-effect consequentiality than the variable human foibles that can turn a bad day into a good one.

For all the slicing and dicing of the editing, narrative momentum grinds to a trudge after the synthetic spectacle of the capital’s undoing.

Just as An itself seems on the verge of flying away, however, Kawase rewards her audience with an unapologetically contrived but effectively eye-moistening surge of feeling.

[Davies'] most mannered and least fulfilling work to date, A Quiet Passion boasts meticulous craft and ornate verbiage in abundance, but confines Cynthia Nixon’s melancholia-stricken performance as arguably America’s greatest poet in an emotional straitjacket of variously arch storytelling tones.

Thompson elevates and enervates every scene she’s in.

Baron Cohen’s unflinching ability to play dumb is still good for a few chuckles, making some of the film’s funniest moments out of its most innocent quips.

If the material feels inadequate for a freestanding doc, that’s no fault of Nichols, who’s on playful, perspicacious form.

Franco’s script teases out the character’s tangled ambiguities with immaculate control: even as the story proceeds in the lowest of keys, our nerves never settle.

Huppert is such a persistently and prolifically rigorous performer that she risks being taken for granted in some of her vehicles, but this is major, many-shaded work even by her lofty standards.

This elegantly wrought oddity appears at the halfway mark to be heading into uncharacteristically hopeful territory for Solondz — until a toe-tapping intermission marks a reassuring plunge into abject despair.

The truest and most tearduct-tugging relationship here is that between Conor and his lank-haired college-dropout brother, played with spaced-out warmth and wistful good humor by the ever-likeable Reynor.

Greene encourages our curiosity (and even a hint of caution) about documentary perspectives and techniques that other films prefer viewers to take as given.

Krasinki’s film remains resolutely resistant to surprise in style or story terms.

While the severity of the film’s environment convinces, the specifics of Amy Fox’s screenplay — tangled up in tech IPOs, post-Snowden security paranoia and venal investment banking practice — are less consistently persuasive.

Oakes’ film may not share its subject’s hard-headed journalistic drive, but as an articulation of grief — directed by a childhood friend, with significant participation from the Foley family — it’s undeniably moving.

Luxuriously conversational in structure, it would make an outstanding stage play, and the two stars play it with chamber-piece rigor.

Far from the austere death march it might threaten to be on paper, this is a thrumming, heartsore, sometimes viciously funny character study, sensitive both to the singularities of Chubbuck’s psychological collapse and the indignities weathered by any woman in a 1970s newsroom.

As with Reichardt’s more streamlined miniatures, regional detail accounts for much of the film’s lingering resonance, as her characters are molded by (and, in some cases, rail against) the landscape they inhabit.

Thompson and his appealing young cast enliven the material with authentic, ingenuous feeling; there’s a palpable understanding here of the substantial difficulties involved in growing up under any circumstances, and Thompson’s script never condescends to its teen subjects with dewy-eyed nostalgia for youth.

That Tsangari resists escalating the conflict, counting on subtle political insinuations to emerge as these perplexing social Olympics wear on, will leave as many viewers enervated as amused, but it’s an expertly executed tease.

Whether scenes tilt toward very mordant farce or gut-stabbing trauma, there’s a compelling sense — crafted or otherwise — that the actors are driving the tone from scene to scene, with Silver and his incisive editor Stephen Gurewitz determining the emotional transitions between them.

Beneath the film’s entertainingly crude hijinks, there are actual human stakes here, as the two sisters recognize in each other the growing up they themselves need to do — though Pell’s script keeps the hugging and learning to a reasonable minimum.

Bharat Nalluri’s chrome-colored thriller plays less as an organic extension of the series’ universe than an all-purpose genre piece nominally tailored to fit the “Spooks” franchise — not to mention the star quality of previously unaffiliated leading man Kit Harington.

Julian Jarrold’s brightly performed exercise in speculative history scores as a frothier, more feminine bookend to “The King’s Speech” — though it’s no less engaging or accomplished.

This airily shot talkfest doesn’t want for sensitivity, but overestimates viewers’ investment in a quintet of prickly characters whose personal histories take the film’s entire duration to assemble.

A piercing, poignant and — as befits its subject — beautifully composed exploration of the challenges and responsibilities faced by photojournalists in Afghanistan’s post-Taliban free press.

Utilitarian in construction but personally invested, it’s a duly humble career overview that doesn’t risk much individual interpretation of such rich, essential films as “Black Girl,” “Xala” and “Moolaade” — though it should leave viewers eager to make (or regain) their acquaintance.

Grabby and grubby in equal measure, this meticulously composed trawl through the contents of several middle-class Austrians’ cellars (a space, according to Seidl, that his countrymen traditionally give over to their most personal hobbies) yields more than a few startling discoveries.

In its shape and sheen, Fathers and Daughters seems dated even before Michael Bolton surfaces to cough up a gelatinous closing-credits ballad.

Ritter’s performance is the liveliest thing in a callow, shallow cautionary tale, which wears its influences on its artfully frayed sleeve and no closer than that to its heart.

What’s missing is the unexpected emotional urgency of “Skyfall,” as the film sustains its predecessor’s nostalgia kick with a less sentimental bent.

There are certainly enough dopey diversions here for The Last Witch Hunter to be considerably more fun than it is, but even its most extravagant bouts of silliness are hampered by desultory plotting and Eisner’s oppressively synthetic mise-en-scene.

Brashly uneven and wildly overlong, this comedy of brotherly love and outsider acceptance nonetheless boasts a spirited, audience-pleasing core.

Sicario occasionally seems a little too impressed by its own nihilism. Still, this is an involving, grown-up film from a director whose muscular technique continues to impress: one might call it pulp in the same manner one would a plate of minced meat.

Bone Tomahawk may seem over-indulgent at 132 minutes, yet it’s the wayward digressions of Zahler’s script — navigated with palpable enjoyment by an expert, Kurt Russell-led ensemble — that are most treasurable in a film that commits wholeheartedly to its own curiosity value.

From its elaborate but incoherent premise to its clunkily staged time-freeze fight sequences, not one detail of “The Anomaly” hasn’t been borrowed from a better movie. That magpie opportunism would matter less if the film at least had barreling narrative momentum.

It takes all the leads’ considerable combined charm to forestall the aftertaste of the pic’s smug life lessons and near-comically blinkered worldview.

Crafted in utilitarian fashion by Egoyan, Remember does little to earn the poignancy of Plummer’s stricken performance.

A War doesn’t seek to break new ground in the ongoing cinematic investigation of the Afghanistan conflict; rather, it scrutinizes the ground on which it stands with consummate sensitivity and detail.

Low on narrative drive, and marred by a misjudged final-act swerve into extravagant whimsy, Nicholas Hytner’s amiable luvvie-fest is enlivened by Smith’s signature irascibility.

Berg’s film is no stylistic innovator itself, but it’s the satisfying feature-length overview that Joplin’s brief, fiercely brilliant career has long merited.

Looking, not touching, is the act of choice for a sexually wary gay man in From Afar, and his hands-off approach is shared by the expert storytelling in Venezuelan helmer Lorenzo Vigas’ pristinely poised but deeply felt debut feature.

A overweening, maddening but not inconsiderable directorial debut for actor Brady Corbet

Though performed with some perspiring conviction by Emma Watson and Ethan Hawke — as a confessed victim of cult abuse and the agnostic cop investigating her case — the pic is neither disquieting enough to take seriously, nor lurid enough for fright-night indulgence.

In the film’s richest performance, Plemons beautifully teases out the ambiguities and potential hypocrisies of Landis’ own moral position, tracing Armstrong’s slippery downward spiral almost in spite of himself.

It’s the high-gloss realization of that world that affords many of the pic’s most delicious pleasures: “Bombay Velvet” is an extravagant canvas for both production designer Sonal Sawant and costume designer Niharika Bhasin Khan, one on which even apparent anachronisms look calculated.

Acolytes of Brian De Palma’s flavorful, flamboyant filmography hardly need reminding of his acrobatic ability as a visual storyteller; what they’ll learn from De Palma is that in front of the camera, he’s a pretty marvelous raconteur, too.

For all Hardy’s expressive detail and physical creativity, Helgeland’s chewy, incident-packed script offers little insight into what made either of these contrasting psychopaths tick, or finally explode.

A queasy but strangely gutless exploitation pic.

Morley marries a quasi-Victorian premise with a modernist technique that feels drawn from her film’s own milieu.

Its appreciation of Thomas’ work remains superficial, while the polished filmmaking never quite finds its own poetry.

Deftly balancing restrained sentimentalism with tough-minded human tragedy, this impressive, unashamedly classical feature debut by TV helmer James Kent has the populist heft one expects from producer David Heyman, while preserving the solemn intimacy of Brittain’s account of lives and loves severed by the conflict.

Fearsomely visceral and impeccably performed, it’s a brisk, bracing update, even as it remains exquisitely in period.

Winocour hurtles into a violent, heart-in-mouth third act rife with look-behind-you peril. It’s a silly but robustly effective escalation of the latent suspense already conjured in the impressive, snakily extended party sequence.

A tasteful grieving-family weepie, it's conceived and performed with utmost sincerity, yet lacks the intemperate human authenticity, the sense of profound strangeness in the everyday, that made Trier's ‘Reprise’ and ‘Oslo, August 31st’ so hard to shake.

Characterization and emotional investment, however, are in disappointingly short supply, while crucial tension is permitted to dissipate in an anti-climactic final third.

Hardly innovative in form, but boasting the same depth of feeling and breadth of archival material that made Kapadia’s “Senna” so rewarding, this lengthy but immersive portrait will hit hard with viewers who regard Winehouse among the great lost voices not just of a generation, but of an entire musical genre.

An amusing, extravagantly implausible farce that nonetheless makes a pointed argument about the perceived marginalization of childless women in modern society.

A wickedly funny protest against societal preference for nuclear coupledom that escalates, by its own sly logic, into a love story of profound tenderness and originality.

Kay Cannon’s script is even lighter on narrative than its predecessor, but fills any resulting void with a concentrated supply of riotous gags, and a renewed emphasis on the virtues of female collaboration and independence.

The ensemble labors sincerely to bring Nelson’s dense, frequently didactic writing to life, though it can be a hard task.

What Hyena lacks in invention, however, it makes up for in technical bravado and geographical specificity.

Franco’s cultivated impenetrability makes for a pain-ridden but peculiarly passionless experience, with multiple clashing subplots — on such insufficiently explored themes as parental abuse, uxoricide and masochism — obstructing an already opaque character study.

Though Henry Hobson’s hugely promising debut feature is generating buzz from the casting of a fine, low-key Arnold Schwarzenegger as the anguished father of a semi-zombified teen, it’s Abigail Breslin’s gutsy, nuanced turn as the reluctantly undead title character — at once a heroine to be protected and a mutant threat to be destroyed — that makes the film unique within its grisly canon.

Airless visual treatment and mannered performances compound the impression that LaBute might have been better off saving this material for the stage, though it’d be a pretty tame trifle in either context.

The upshot of this loopy masquerade is more predictable than it is progressive, but considerably pleasurable thanks to Morris’s generous supply of pithy one-liners and the resourceful, ribald skills of Bell, as engaging and elastic a comic everywoman here as she was in her impressive directorial debut “In a World … ”

A wry, oh-so-gentle dual character study saved from sleepiness by the unexpected star pairing of Catherine Deneuve and Gustave Kervern.

Even with such generic scripting, however, there’s a genial, palpably enthusiastic chemistry between the four young, capable stars that gives their hijinks a bit of bounce.

Clumsy storytelling decisions, however, can’t entirely get in the way of a good story, and it’s when Suite francaise focuses on the simplest human dynamics of its yarn that it forges a sincere emotional connection.

Penn’s veiny, sweat-glazed biceps are the most objectively impressive feature of this rote, humorless thriller, a distinctly unconvincing attempt to refashion the star — who also co-wrote and produced — as a middle-aged action hero in the Liam Neeson mold.

Its visual and sonic verve more than compensate for some overworked symbolism.

Campillo’s original screenplay demands any number of trusting leaps from its audience and characters alike, yet maintains credibility thanks to the studied assurance of its most elaborate setpieces, and the wealth of socioeconomic detail in its portrayal of both Daniel’s aging-yuppie lifestyle and the nervous group dynamic of the immigrants.

Audiences may come down from the high a little sooner than the film does, with the characters’ increasingly ill-considered actions testing our faith and engagements to the breaking point, but the sheer centripetal force of the film’s vigorous technique never loses its hold.

While Wenders has argued intelligently in interviews for the merits of realizing character-driven drama in three dimensions, this isn’t the most helpful case-maker — not least because Norwegian writer Bjorn Olaf Johannessen’s screenplay has barely been rendered in two.

The film milks some brisk comedy from its upstairs-downstairs peekaboo, but is too breezy to convince in its depiction of obsessive erotic fixation — making for a “Diary” that oddly feels less exposing as it goes along.

[An] engaging, elegiac portrait of a legend in the making.

It’s an opportunity only half seized: Haphazard both as biography and historical survey, the film asks more salient questions than it can answer in a rushed 76 minutes.

Conventionally constructed but remarkable for the honest, intimate rapport it achieves with highly vulnerable human subjects.

Though realized on a more modest scale than other Aardman features, the film is still an absolute delight in terms of set and character design, with sophisticated blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detailing to counterbalance the franchise’s cruder visual trademarks.

There’s a fatal shortage of zingers to supplement its exhausting zaniness.

Ex Machina turns out to be far wittier and more sensual than its coolly unblemished exterior implies; it’s a trick that mirrors Ava’s own apparent Turing-test-defying evolution.

This admirable, watercolor-delicate tale of individual feminist emancipation never quite blooms into living color, hampered by spotty casting and Richard Laxton’s overly deliberate direction.

Distinguished by exquisite performances from Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric as a bourgeois couple unsure when to call time on their marriage, the pic initially follows the dry, droll template set by so many tasteful French relationship dramedies, before venturing into less comforting emotional territory for its final act.

As ruggedly crafted as you’d expect from director Kevin Macdonald, with a sturdy ensemble led by Jude Law as a submarine captain of formidable sangfroid, the film nonetheless never quite sparks to life.

Correctly ascertaining that auds will be less interested in the outcome than in the obstacles along the way, Levasseur plants and executes the pic’s exclamation-point scares with grinning, squelching gusto.

At least three entertaining films are jostling for position in Australian writer-director Julius Avery’s messily propulsive debut feature, Son of a Gun — and if none ultimately emerges dominant, the red-blooded tussle between them is never dull to watch.

Affectionately honoring the everyday quirks of Bond’s stories, while subtly updating their middle-class London milieu, King’s film may divide loyal Paddingtophiles with its high-stakes caper plot, but their enraptured kids won’t care a whit.

This tediously metatextual exercise conjures few inspired jolts of its own.

It’s a rare pleasure to see Tomei in a lead role, and she fills out the short cuts in Lawrence’s characterization with wry warmth and a hint of swallowed disappointment.

Robert Greene's extraordinary collaboration with actress Brandy Burre is a playful, provocative examination of self-performance.

An arrestingly nihilistic Depression melodrama, marked by courageous performances and exquisite production values... The result is both problematic and fascinating, an unsympathetic spiral of human tragedy that plays a little like a hand-me-down folk ballad put to film.

As appealingly humanized by Collins and Claflin, Rosie and Alex are sufficiently flawed, three-dimensional beings for their continued attachment to each other to convince.

Seemingly caught between a daring impressionistic approach and a pedantic recital of dates and locations, this three-hour endurance test is marked by sincere adoration of its subject.

Both stars are in agreeable if uncharacteristically muted form, doing little to distinguish Genz’s pic from any amount of formula-following filler in the same B-movie ballpark.

A dismal My First Heist thriller that is all-too-aptly nailed by its own title.

Bjork’s charm has always hinged on her ability to be guileless and unknowable at once; “Biophilia Live” is no exception.

Kids still experiencing World Cup withdrawal symptoms may be entertained by this animated oddity from Argentina.

Mellow, digestibly sweet and embellished with lovely folk tunes, this modest bit of Americana reveals pleasing new sides of both leads.