Jessica Kiang

Having created a striking and potent allegory in “Blue My Mind,” and explored it with grace, seriousness, and exceptional craft, Brühlmann doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with it by the end, except to suggest that the cost of self-acceptance is vast, eternal, oceanic loneliness.

There’s not a lot here that’s wholly new, and the film’s tone of melancholy, offbeat uplift signals from the outset that we shouldn’t expect any grand revelations. Instead its pleasures come in smaller packages.

The downbeat, disenfranchised “dark side of the American dream” thing has been done to death in a thousand noirs, but Stray Dolls elbows just enough room for itself in that crowded category, especially for how it honors the American cinematic tradition of the last-chance motel: a place designed for passing through that somehow never lets you leave.

A docufiction that tenderly, wordlessly and rather too obliquely recreates a 1961 speleological expedition to measure the depth of an unexplored crevasse in Italy’s Calabria region.

When Thomas’ film does find its voice, it is as authentically immersive an experience of a harsh and loveless past as one could hope for, composed of the sensual details that can make the pleasures and horrors of 200 years ago feel like now.

Censor is a stylish calling card for all involved, one that certainly demonstrates an impressive level of directorial control for a debut filmmaker. But that control does sometimes feel like constriction.

It’s a relief to report that Rifkin’s Festival is, to the ravenous captive, like finding an unexpected stash of dessert: not substantial and not nutritious, but sweet enough to remind you in passing of the good times you once had, despite all that’s happened in the interim.

Ambulance is not good, exactly. Still it is an enjoyable, oddly inspiring reminder of how many more flavors not-good used to come in, in the olden days, back when we had the luxury of regarding Michael Bay’s brand of adrenalized, lobotomized moviemaking as a menace to blockbuster cinema, rather than — gulp — one of its potential saviors.

Less designed to provoke than to soothe, perhaps the very familiarity of much of the movie is a virtue, letting us enjoy its sleek surfaces safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing much lurking in the depths to alarm us.

In re-creating life out of life, Liu is quite successful; whether he makes it into drama is another question. Like its characters, Art College 1994 gives the impression of having just too much time on its hands.

For all the film’s playful artistry, the effect is more scattershot.

We might have hoped for a more sparky encounter, but Meeting Gorbachev, though consistently engaging, is less a fireworks display than a fireside chat, and so feels curiously like an opportunity missed.

Szumowska...wants to tackle manifold issues, often unrelated to each other, and her attention feels magpie-ish and unsettled.

If it’s an ASMR video for pandemic-raddled emotions you’re after, you could do so much worse.

As Vita & Virginia loses its girlishness, drawn like the tides to the solemn maturity of Debicki’s performance. With her as the lodestar, this is a stranger and more intriguing film than it really has a right to be, one that becomes less about a clandestine courtship between famous women, and more about Woolf’s relationship with her writing, and with the workings of her own beautiful, restless mind.

Scrambled is a lot of fun when it’s not trying to also deliver uplift, but it ultimately proves that white, middle-class American women in their 30s can can defeat any obstacle that stands between them and the unfettered life they want, except screenwriting convention.

Schematic and manipulative as it is, as a kind of team-effort between the New Zealand Tourist Board and whatever the Chinese equivalent of Hallmark is, Only Cloud Knows is, in the moment, undeniably effective at jerking tears.

The slower stretches — like the entire first hour — have a tendency to plod, which gives ample opportunity to feast your eyes on Søren Schwarzberg’s grandly gloomy production design and Manon Rasmussen’s superb, elaborate costuming, but also makes the story rather too easy to disengage from.

Ortega shows more interest in the how than the why. He mines the scenes of violence for black comedy, rendering the bloodletting anticlimactic and the victims largely irrelevant, and Ferro’s baby-faced, bright eyed disingenuity suits that agenda perfectly.

Even just the rooftop of this vast, scabbed Phnom Penh apartment complex seems to have a thousand stories to tell — it’s perhaps little wonder that Neang’s melancholic, perplexed, slightly ponderous feature debut gets a little lost navigating them.

Merkulova and Chupov deliver the visceral aspects of this Dostoevskian tale particularly well ... But 'Captain Volkogonov Escaped' is so attuned to the physical that the more metaphysical aspects of Volkogonov’s journey are underdeveloped by comparison.

It’s a testament to Kitano’s effortlessly sleek, inherently watchable filmmaking (he reteams with regular DP Katsumi Yanagijima and uses the atonal descending motif of composer Keiichi Suzuki’s score to good effect) that you’re just about kept in your seat throughout all the speechifying.

It would be unfortunate if this contextual thicket were to obscure the merits of Butterfly Vision, which, while certainly not reinventing the war-is-hell wheel, is interesting to analyse in formal terms, especially in its sometimes effective, sometimes glib use of modern tech.

Half enjoyable, half frustrating.

The film is most effective when its narrow focus on a single, desperately poor Yakut couple allows it space to be fascinated by the straightforward ethnographic details of this little-seen time and place. But its value as human drama wanes as its allegorical impulses become more insistent and the characters are reduced to ciphers in the end, more important for what they represent than for who they are.

This slight story examines the mystery of the mother-daughter bond without getting much closer to solving it, and when the mist clears is revealed to resemble the hotel it haunts, in being elegant but empty, save for those elusive echoes.

“Humanist Vampire” doesn’t want us to think too deeply, and aims mostly to charm. Largely it succeeds, which is its own kind of critique in this post-“Titane” and -“A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night” era, when some viewers might expect provocation or transgression from their horror archetypes.

The real learning here ought to be that if you cast two such charismatic performers as Louis Gossett Jr. and Shohreh Aghdashloo in your movie, it would be better to clear all the Life Lesson clutter away and just let them get on with it.

A sappy but enjoyable slice of family fun that has a nice horse doing wacky tricks for the younger viewers and for parents and older fans, is a gently meta, valedictory canter through the paddock of Chan’s previous achievements.

More even than Declan Quinn’s sumptuously old-school cinematography and the throwback styling and stock footage exteriors that deliberately mimic the Technicolor romances of old, it’s the fresh-faced naiveté of the storytelling that feels so anachronistic.

The story Sealey tells is slender, dissociative and inward-looking to the point of self-indulgence at times. But Brockis, with her stubborn jawline, two-tone shock of hair and striking heterochromatic eyes, is a powerful presence.

A lively, bittersweet meditation on an impoverished childhood that is still rich in innocence and imagination, it feels old-fashioned in a way that does not quite gel with its bid for contemporary grit.

Solid, stately and — like the collapsing Papal States of the Italian Peninsula in the late 1800s — just a little too tradition-bound for its own good.

As much fun as it is to watch Lee beat people up and strut around in shiny pinstripe suits, it’s just as much of a pleasure to watch him think it all through.

Émond obviously has deep feeling for Arcan, and “Nelly” is a sincere and respectful attempt to do at least partial, fragmentary justice to a troubled woman able to self-create any persona except a happy one, but it can’t put her back together again.

Gentle Monster is a meticulously plausible depiction of the dissolution of a family under the most trust-annihilating of circumstances, but that is all it is.

Superior feels like a John Dahl movie given a “Twin Peaks” vibe on a Hal Hartley budget, with just the odd dash of Old Hollywood thrown in for good measure, like the deliberately “Rear Window”-aping, flashbulb-popping finale.

Youth (Spring) uses the workshops of Zhili City to illustrate — again and again, to the point of dulling its impact — the desolate truth that in the lower echelons of China’s industrial sector, youth is not wasted on the young. It is methodically ripped from them, day by day, seam by seam, stitch by stitch.

Timing alone makes The Rape of Recy Taylor something close to essential viewing. But Buirski’s approach is oddly diffuse, lacking the clarity of rage that has informed so many recent touchpoints in social-issue documentary.

Its sincerity and solidity are never in doubt — the actor’s directorial career is certainly off to a clean-lined, competent start. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is the sort of film that fond parents wish their children would love, as opposed to a film their children actually will love.

It is entirely well intentioned. But the fair-mindedness of Lennon’s approach also contributes to a sense, ironically enough, of godlike detachment from the slivers of life and faith the film comprises.

The pathos of this situation is clear, the stakes, which obviously involve genocide, justice and actual Nazis, are sky high and Plummer is completely extraordinary. So why on earth isn't Remember a better film?

There is no shading, there is no ambiguity, and while there are observations and stilted epithets aplenty, there is precious little wisdom.

The more dramatic moments feel unanchored to the more farcical, and the humor ranges erratically from scatological to tender/heartwarming and back to cheap shots at slightly uncomfortable stereotypes. "Uneven" would be the kind way of putting it, but "messy" is probably nearer to the truth.

There are jokes that land, and every time Kathryn Hahn steps on screen the film threatens to tilt on its axis and point toward a truer north.

Personal Shopper is a mess — not an uninteresting one, and better that than a staid, unadventurous bore, but a mess nonetheless.

Unfortunately Things People Do scuppers its own chances by having people do things we just don't ever, ever believe they would.

An irreproachably tasteful, easily digestible but an unsurprising, undemanding watch.

Though it's impressive in many technical and surface ways, The Croods lets us down on the essentials of character and story, and no amount of late-stage father/daughter bonding or vertiginous 3D cliffside tumbling can make up for that.

A Single Shot does not add up to anywhere near the sum of its parts.

A loving and in fact overly adulatory genre film which is not so much a take on the revenge Western as a deeply faithful recreation of it, at times so faithful as to veer dangerously close to pastiche.

For every moment of comedy that lands or drama that touches a nerve, there are ten of “why the bloody hell should I bloody care?” or “cry me a river, you had to sell your Brueghel.”

It's a sterile affair, no ambiguity, no ambivalence, just people doing one thing and then another.

Aloft and its icy landscapes and feel of gently dropping barometric pressure can only distract so far from what is essentially an overwrought melodrama that here and there tips over into heavy-handedness despite the restrained beauty of its images.

Alternating immense bombast with long stretches of longueur in its psychologically questionable evocation of the formative years of a future despot, the film is formally confident, stylistically inventive and intensely irritating.

Perversely episodic, strangely empty, and unfolding in a series of beautifully composed but static wide shots (giving us the unusual experience of literally yearning for a close-up), the film is a test of patience.

A film that, while often beautiful to look at, feels oddly bloodless in execution.

Shot in pedestrian fashion, it is set in an intriguing and entirely foreign milieu, but the film ends up just too inscrutable and oblique for us to really engage with it, or its often incomprehensibly motivated characters.

Though he gets fine performances from many quarters...the film is scuppered by an approach that sees it build on the bones of the novel without ever quite animating its heart.

Despite Seyfried’s gameness, we come away a little deadened from the experience and knowing precious little more than before about the person who inhabited the body, the life and the throat of Linda Lovelace.

The film makes distant what surely should be vital and alive.

Desplechin lashes storylines and filmmaking gimmickry in to the one ginormous stewpot with gusto, slams the lid down on it and promptly forgets to turn on the heat. [Cannes Version]

It’s maybe Franco’s best-crafted film to date, and also maybe his dullest.

As a film, Chicuarotes is intermittently impressive and as a director, García Bernal clearly has real heart — it’s just that here, he puts it in the wrong place.

Scrupulously sincere in its approach and well-meaning to a fault in intention, the film aims for inspirational true story, but is sadly uninspired, and its relationship to real history is obscured by the schematic way it is fictionalized.

Sandra Wollner’s The Trouble With Being Born inspires nothing but strange feelings, from unnerving horror to shocked admiration to visceral disgust to that specific type of disorienting nausea that comes from the fractional delay between your eye processing a well-composed image, and your brain comprehending the implications of the actions so coolly depicted.

For a movie that is all about accumulation, it adds up to very little, and for a story all about connectedness, 11 minutes, intermittently enjoyable though it may be, never connects.

After a genuinely promising beginning, Halloween Kills, already somewhat robbed of potential suspense by the fact we all know that another go-round, “Halloween Ends,” is on its way, seemingly doubles the body count of the previous installment while roughly halving its IQ.

Devolving into clodhopping heavyhandedness...Stations of the Cross tackles a weighty, complex subject in simple-minded fashion.

Though the intentions are pure, the combination of social-realist austerity and cinematic exuberance never coheres.

Closeness is a tough-minded, rigorously composed, quite brilliantly acted story of the challenges of everyday religious prejudice and ethnic divides in the bleak heart of Russia’s North Caucasus, and in many ways Balagov’s uncompromising but stylized social realism rewards as much as it punishes.

Manages to be both overwrought and strangely lacking in drama, staggering under the deadening weight of an uninvolving central character. It is a shame, because many of the elements were in place for something much more compelling.

It promises a minute character study, but Franny, though embodied by a game Gere who in all fairness does visit places in his performance we have rarely seen him even stop by before, is less a person than a collection of quirks.

Instead of the cleavage, hair-pulling and Jerry Springer antics it teases, Chick Fight serves up a blandly formulaic and scrupulously inoffensive tale of female empowerment.

Bloodless, far too genteel, and perfectly content to continually tell where a little showing would be nice; Night Train to Lisbon ends up a deeply unadventurous adventure story.

Divided into seven quirkily titled chapters which are only useful as a kind of interminable countdown, “Story” falls into every trap of the over-reverential adaptation: individual scenes go on too long, there are far too many of them, and everyone sounds like they’re reading when they speak.

It’s a heartfelt and undoubtedly well-meaning film, attempting a character study of a woman of an age and lifestyle that makes her an unusual and therefore unusually worthy subject. But Angelique’s overriding characteristic is that she is incapable of fundamental change which makes her at best a frustrating protagonist for this drama.

This unintentionally hilarious take, on territory covered much more soberly and with far less reliance on prosthetic bellies in current Netflix hit “Narcos,” is so trashy it may even make you forget a few things you knew before.

Sergio Vieira de Mello was, by all accounts, not a man who let fear of making the wrong decision stop him from acting decisively, and it’s a shame that the soft-edged romantic prevarications of Sergio prevent the film from embodying that same dynamism.

Eventually, en route to a finale that strives for tragic poetry the rest of the film scarcely earns, the narrative ice wears so thin that it cracks under the weight of a moment’s thought.

Chabot’s film is not “The Garden,” but The Gardener and as a portrait of the man behind Quatre Vents, unlike the gorgeous flora, it never blossoms.

Summerland is very pretty, and bursts with affection for its gently befuddled characters, but for all its eager charms, streaming like colored pennants from every turret, it’s a castle in the air.

The shock feels less than shocking and the awe less than awesome in Rob Reiner’s righteously motivated but clunkily executed exposé of media manipulation in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Despite fun trappings . . . the actual conflict in the film boils down to a series of very simplistic binaries: good and evil, sacred and secular, female and male, one and zero, being and nothingness.

De los Santos Arias sends us on an uncategorizably odd journey down the river of his noodling, needling imagination in a rickety canoe that keeps on capsizing, upended by another sideswiping reference, another jarring change of scene and timeframe or yet another stretch of borderline incomprehensible narration from Pepe himself, a creature who is as surprised as we are that he has suddenly acquired language.

It winds up several stops north of bonkers, in a finale that shoots for transgressive, psycho-biological role-reversal, but plays like 1994’s Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy “Junior” given a torture-porn makeover.

Without any modulation in the brazen, head-on-collision presentation, once the story takes a turn for the sappy, there is really nowhere for any subtlety or subtext to hide.

In her voiceover, Almada, who has made one fiction feature but mostly works in documentary form, shuffles through half-formed ideas too randomly to gather these scattered wonders into an identifiable thesis.

It’s always dangerous to wonder about what a film might have been rather than contending with what it is, but in this case what it is, is so bland, and so stolidly workmanlike in execution that even the most dedicated viewer might find her attention sliding off DP Zac Nicholson‘s ration-book-colored images and wandering to the what-ifs.

The Connection feels at best like a cover version of the classic American crime films of the 1970s, and at worst like so much glossily mounted karaoke.

Doubling down on the first chapter’s intermittent triumphs but also on its grievous structural issues, it is an exercise in contradictions: incident-packed yet oddly sedate; replete with characters new and returning, yet largely lacking in compelling characterization; and, running to over three hours, simply too long a film to be so jarringly abrupt.

Justice re-equips the anti-Kavanaugh side by pulling a more streamlined narrative from the blizzard of detail that threatened observers at the time with snow-blindness.

A rather pedestrian presentation of a potentially fascinating story, Vanessa Lapa’s Speer Goes to Hollywood expands on a little-known footnote to the Hydra-headed history of the post-war fates of top Nazi lieutenants.

Despite presenting an environment enriched to weapons-grade plutonium levels with potential for interpersonal drama, Vinterberg can’t seem to find any.

Filmmaking craft is not the issue here, it’s the timidity of the storytelling that sits in sharp contrast to the boldness of some of the visual and sonic experimentation.

Perhaps the key issue, aside from the inherent silliness of the unsubstantiated mystical psychobabble that is fielded as an explanation for Inés’ “condition” is that Inés herself is not a particularly well-developed character.

If the slender paradox at the heart of the film is that the thing that connects us most is the difficulty of connection, The Human Surge is a victim of its own effectiveness: It’s rigorous, rarefied, and utterly remote.

Vinterberg’s Kursk occasionally lands an emotive blow but only in its more fictionalized stretches, while it pulls its punches with the thorniest and most provocative elements of the real story, an instinct that unduly submerges much of the real horror and lasting consequence of this tragically, enragingly, heartbreakingly bungled incident.