Jay Weissberg

When does an exercise in style become a wearying ADD slog through blood-splattered pseudo-Freudian nonsense? When it’s The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears.

While Rondon’s focus is the struggle of wills between a boy awakening to homosexual feelings and his embittered mother, the helmer invests their collision with a powerful specificity.

Sharply yet subtly capturing the atmosphere of fear fostered by the dictatorship of President Ben Ali, this skillfully made drama is especially attuned to the myriad forms of surveillance, from the prurient to the political.

Inland Empire may mesmerize those for whom the helmer can do no wrong, but the unconvinced and the occasional admirer will find it dull as dishwater and equally murky.

Frantz plays like classic melodrama, and has certain charms.

What 13 Minutes fails to understand is that it’s a moral imperative to remember, but it’s an ethical minefield to remember in a simplified manner.

A handsomely made, nicely modulated fugitive drama with forceful social overtones that decries the ongoing practice of marrying child brides in tribal regions of the country’s mountainous north.

Through an ingenious blend of image and music, Memory Box opens channels that allow our own experience to empathetically blend with those of the characters in a mix of imagination and reality.

Aiming for a Hitchcockian take on an eccentric auctioneer (well-handled by Geoffrey Rush) who becomes enamored of an heiress with severe agoraphobia, the pic ends up more in Dan Brown territory, with over-obvious setups and phony insight into the art establishment.

Riklis’ strongest film in several years, this is another well-intentioned plea for coexistence, though apart from one scene that lays bare, with welcome righteousness, the disturbing orientalism infiltrating even Israeli intellectual circles, the whole thing is rather too scrubbed and clean.

Class, desire, motherhood, responsibility to society — all these themes are worked in, to varying degrees. Yet balancing the film’s two halves is less successful, and certain shifts between humor and dead-seriousness don’t quite work.

It’s impossible not to be charmed on some level by Jung Henin and Laurent Boileau’s Approved for Adoption, though it’s best not to ask for too much.

Toward the end, Doueiri attempts to give his two leads a little more nuance, but Tony’s overwhelming anger steamrolls over occasional conciliatory behavior, which winds up feeling just manipulative.

The film nicely plays with the standards of romantic comedy.

Widow of Silence is a classic example of festival filler, the sort of issue-driven art-house film that masks a plodding obviousness of intent beneath a thick varnish of righteousness and attractive visuals.

A standard-issue piece of heart-tugging reportage better suited to small screens than art houses.

Utilizing news footage, TV programs, crude activist films and the like, Périot (always his own editor) builds his arguments almost invisibly, guiding the viewer while trusting his audience to use their heads. How refreshing to have a director refuse black-and-white conclusions, knowing that formulating questions is the best way to probe the past and its ramifications.

Paolo Sorrentino, with Youth, delivers his most tender film to date, an emotionally rich contemplation of life’s wisdom gained, lost and remembered — with cynicism harping from the sidelines, but as a wearied chord rather than a major motif.

"Beauty" has numerous scenes of enormous power, though removing one unnecessary plot strand would allow deeper probing elsewhere.

Less a portrait of an individual than of an unchecked culture where the lure of staggering profits eliminates ethics, Universe subtly exposes the pernicious effects of deregulation and does so in an ingeniously cinematic manner.

All four main actors are in top form, but it’s Mohammadzadeh who steals the show in his scene at the poultry plant, when his desperate monologue takes on an epic, Shakespearean quality as he throws all his physical force into a verbal storm of pained outrage.

At every step, Al Mansour feeds the audience exactly what she thinks will make them feel good about positive change in Saudi Arabia, setting up conflict and resolution with all the nuance of a by-the-numbers construction kit.

The pic has genuine appeal, though in truth the script and direction are little more than average.

Does it all come together? Well, yes, if viewers think of the film as a freewheeling poetic essay, highly personal yet captivating.

The bottom line is that Oelbaum and Krayenbühl have fleshed out a complex, fascinating figure.

Structured as a straightforward life story followed by an extended coda looking in detail at the features Cohen is restoring, The Great Buster can’t hold a candle to the 1987 three-part series “Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow” but will make do as a decent DVD extra.

As carefully crafted as the clothes is Tcheng’s well-considered direction, privileging the creative process over stereotyped glamour or backstabbing.

Archambault’s handling of Gabrielle and Martin’s sexuality is one of the pic’s strong suits, presenting their desire with a refreshing, straightforward honesty.