Jessica Kiang

The engaging and defiantly hand-crafted, offbeat experiment Bait may be black and white, but its insights, thankfully, come in subtly graded shades of gray.

O’Connor’s well-modulated debut doesn’t pretend to be a faithful recreation of the facts of the Brontës’ lives. Instead it succeeds on a much trickier level, giving us a psychologically vivid Emily who did not write “Wuthering Heights” because a real-life romance unlocked her passionate nature, but whom we’d love to imagine having had such a grand affair, because she was always the woman with “Wuthering Heights” inside her.

Dupieux injects his own particular brand of daffy humor too, writing, directing, shooting and editing his movie, cutting it along a bias that is familiar to those of us who’ve been paying attention to his recent run of form.

An enjoyable, absorbing, characterful testament to shuffling the whole deck of genre conventions, and then politely setting it on fire.

Without proselytizing, and without distracting from the main thrust of her gripping, intelligent psychodrama, Kreutzer and her predominately female team have created a story both knottily specific and usefully general in its understanding that for many women, an ultimately untenable level of watchful self-control is the price of ambition.

If that lack of discipline is the cost of the generous, expansive, energetic wit of Yan’s immensely promising first feature, it’s one we should be happy to pay.

Incredible but True is a fun little trinket that unmistakably comes from Dupieux’s far-out perspective, but if you find yourself chiming more than usual with its quixotic quandaries, who’s to say whether that’s because Dupieux has mellowed, or because the past couple of years have driven us all so nuts that now we’re meeting him halfway.

Part John Ford, part Sam Fuller, the film’s old-fashioned approach is oddly impressive: To tell this kind of story in such blunt-edged, straightforward style is a distinctive choice when the temptation to veer into revisionist war-is-hell commentary, Malickian nature-study or Herzogian descent-into-madness bombast must have been strong.

In this zoo, the story may be tame, but the images, and the imagination that releases them, run wild.

Haenel’s role is a mercurial one, full of opportunities for Clouseau-esque following sequences, mistaken identity mixups, and bumbling acts of well-meaning quirk. But there’s something resolutely un-ditzy about the actress, with her matter-of-fact sexiness and earthy intelligence grounding even the screenplay’s most contrived moments. It is a pleasure to watch her face as she works things out.

On occasion the deep investment in the long silences and sorrowful gazes that mostly make up Cáit’s life can teeter close to preciousness. When it does, though, there’s always Clinch’s superbly modulated performance, and the way the compassionate camera lavishes on Cáit all the attention that quiet, nice kids like her rarely receive, to bring us back onside.

The Roundup: Punishment minimizes unnecessary originality, while gloriously maximizing the opportunities for Lee to crack wise, or look aggrieved and a little bored, as though he’s just remembered he needs to do laundry, all while his meaty forearms land a flurry of sledgehammer punches so rapid their recipients, often quite literally, do not know what hit them. This, truly, is cinema.

This kinky, often grotesque melding of genre science-fiction with all-out body horror is an audacious project, but the scope of its ambition is cleverly reined in by the low-key presentation, its more salacious potential muted down to an insistent threatening hum, like the background radiation of Stuart Staples’ score.

It may refer inescapably to genre classics from elsewhere, but The Wild Goose Lake is like an organic feature of the Chinese cinematic landscape, as though it pooled onto the screen in all its oily, murky glory, having welled up from deep inside the ground. Suddenly, China feels like the noirest place on Earth.

The power of documentary filmmaking often lies in discovering seams of humanity running though even the bleakest environments. But the sledgehammer impact of Hollywoodgate comes from director Nash’at peering into the Taliban leadership’s inner circle for a year and finding not even a glimmer of goodness. Finding, in fact, nothing — a terrible emptiness.

Even when it trips up in its later stages, Daughter of Mine is a noble rarity, passionately involved in the exploration of oppositional ideas of motherhood not just as an abstract concept, but as a real and vivid, painfully sacrificial thing.

While Chou’s elliptical screenplay gently explodes many preconceived assumptions about the effects of adoption on adoptees, it is too clear-sighted to ignore the fact that whether biology affects identity or not, the mere possibility that such a link exists could exert a powerful attraction on a searching spirit not quite sure what it is searching for.

The sad, wise heart of Drljača’s small, impressively controlled film condemns neither of them, but instead understands what horror stories and fairytales have in common: both are narratives in which the characters have no control, and are instead propelled by forces far bigger than they are, toward destinies they were born into that they cannot avert.

The Levelling is an intimate story, waterlogged with guilt, grief and blame, but it explores this dark spectrum with such unsentimental honesty that its tiny moments of uplift, when its repressed characters form tentative connections despite themselves, are magnified and moving.

Trueba has drawn a funny little valentine, shot through by a bright, sharp arrow of feeling.

What on paper might be a standard sporting bio-doc, largely relevant only to tennis aficionados or fans of John McEnroe at the height of his powers, instead becomes a lovely meditation on time and movement, dedication and obsession, image and perception.

Will Nikola, like Job, regain some measure of grace if he stoically endures enough suffering? The barely discernible uptick of optimism that closes the powerful but grueling Father is a small mercy in suggesting he might

The simple humanism here makes the case for nurturing and celebrating America’s immigrant population in a more eloquent and persuasive way than a more polemical film ever could.

Achieving a delicate balance between drama and deadpan comedy, Guan’s approach gives the scenes of violence or tragedy a certain antic, Buster Keaton quality, which is enhanced by both Peng’s impassive yet physically expressive performance, and that of his wonderful canine co-star.

A beguilingly immersive, multifaceted, vividly sensorial portrait of his mother’s homeland, Jamaica.

Salmerón’s film, crammed as full of tchotchkes and knick-knacks and bibelots as one of his mother’s closets, refutes that, presenting an endearingly haphazard portrait of an extraordinary woman and the family she made — one that has discovered its own, completely unique way to be happy.

Even though Great Absence, is a little overlong and its framing device, an avant-garde theater piece, feels unnecessary, in another way its multiple strands and many endings are extraordinarily, poetically appropriate.

Les Nôtres” remains — right up to its tight, repressed ending — a deeply disquieting, superbly performed evocation of a very banal sort of evil.

To imagine the decades-long catch-and-release sweep of a single lifespan and condense it into one sub-90-minute film is a feat; to do so about multiple interconnected lives without losing definition is even more impressive.

This is punchy first-person filmmaking, from the point of view of the last person you want to be.

A funny, rueful valentine to the fine art of the farewell — the smaller ones that litter our lives and the big final one at the end.

Neither switch-your-brain-off-escapist, nor the kind of arthouse filmmaking that makes heavy demands on your time or willpower, Hong’s cinema remains one of the most reliable sources of this particular pleasure.

If “All Dirt Roads” perhaps does not connect quite as powerfully as it could on a narrative level, it marks the arrival of an arresting new talent in Raven Jackson, at the very least as the creator of the kind of cinema you do not watch as much as touch and smell and taste.

If the hero’s dire situation is a ticking clock, Lojkine’s intelligent and empathetic film places us right alongside him, with each cog of circumstance and each gear of good fortune grinding against him at every turn.

Monge’s deliciously seedy first film is light on originality but heavy on atmospherics: a sleazy, sultry, saxophone-blare echoing down a Parisian metro tunnel at night.

Mesen’s delicate yet earthy, thoughtful yet sensual movie never tips its hand as to whether Clara’s abilities are real or imaginary — indeed it makes the line between fact and fantasy seem as nonsensical as it might to a horse — and it pays off in one of those obscurely uplifting endings.

After the 140 minutes of “The Sparks Brothers” zip by like a tight half-hour, even the previously uninitiated may well feel like they’ve known Sparks all along – or at least that they should have.

A sublimely crafted saga about child soldiers discovering their own hearts of darkness in an unnamed, untamed Latin American wilderness, Monos presents an ugly reality in terms so profoundly paradoxical it becomes surreality: an experience at once jagged and lyrical, brutal and beautiful, angry and abstract, scattered and wholly singular.

Rojo is a witheringly provocative examination of temporary moral eclipse becoming permanent moral apocalypse.

The humdrum and heartswelling Compartment No. 6 evokes a powerful nostalgia for a type of loneliness we don’t really have any more, and for the type of love that was its cure.

It may not be wholly successful, but it certainly is bleakly fascinating to witness a master filmmaker paint so subtle and soothing a portrait of humanity, only to finally, bitterly remind us that there is no soothing nature – human or otherwise – when there’s a bullet in its belly.

Partly, the balance between gritty, true-life fidelity and pacy, exciting storytelling is achieved because in Rye, to whom Eric Kress’ warm, compassionate camera clings so doggedly, we have such a sympathetic, human protagonist.

Craig reveals himself as perhaps the most generous actor to have inhabited the role. And not only toward the rest of the cast, but toward the very idea of Bond itself. Craig sets Bond free from the prison of forgetfulness that has previously trapped him like a caveman in ice, though the price is steep, and it remains to be seen if future installments can continue to pay it.

Norm Li’s photography perfectly suits the tone, neither romancing the locations of Lu’s life nor making them look condescendingly squalid. And his aesthetic keeps pace with Brendan Mills’ excellent editing.

Quite possibly brilliant, and very definitely all but unbearable, Ahed’s Knee is filmmaking as hostage-taking. If such language seems charged, this is Nadav Lapid: All language is charged.

If its rueful, midlife nostalgia doesn’t carry quite the same current of vibrant, urgent empathy as “20th Century Women” or “Beginners,” the small, polished pebbles of wisdom it unearths are still a pleasure to observe as they’re sent skimming across the surface of a delicate, compassionate film.

As a magnificently unlovable art-house object, El Conde is perhaps best approached as a challenge: Run the gauntlet if you dare, and if, at the other end, you emerge dazed and disturbed rather than straightforwardly entertained, perhaps those are just the splinters you get when you try to stake a vampire.

First Love may be a fluffier, more eager-to-please bauble than Miike’s more challengingly outré titles, but like the cutesy mechanical toy puppy that turns up yapping in the middle of the film, it is wired to explode, and it is a blast.

It is a relevant, relatable and rewarding snapshot of how a society grows crookedly around its unresolved secrets, in the same way that a marriage can.

With the actors so convincing in their roles and with Xin especially able to command the screen despite the often miserable un-glamor of her surroundings, the film becomes a rich portrait of a connection that was once so tender and now just revolves in a slowly decaying orbit around the broken axis of his resentment and her guilt.

While Santoalla is a small story, its poignancy resonates, like an echo finding its way through the peaks and valleys of this windswept, eternal landscape.

The film gradually thaws out the stark, frozen mystery at its heart, but the warm-blooded, breathing truth of Linda’s life is no less tragic than that of her cold death.

Such wild zigzags in tone — between bumbling physical comedy and lightly stinging satirical observation, between heartbreaking vulnerability and bursts of gleefully vicious, slickly choreographed violence — ought not to work at all. And yet they do, thanks to Jensen’s calm, slightly wry command of the story, and a cast that have all understood the assignment, even when their respective assignments are all quite different.

Inshallah a Boy moves like a sleek thriller, but is full of the unsolved mysteries and dangling question marks of real life.

[A] lengthy but absorbing and illuminating documentary.

It requires a degree of commitment on the part of the viewer to join the sparsely placed dots of Glavonić’s harshly intelligent and uncompromisingly spare story, especially when the picture they form is so harrowing. But the elements that frustrate can also devastate.

None of this would work at all if it weren’t pinned to the unselfconscious gaze of Fuki (delightful newcomer Yui Suzuki), 11 years old and already an original.

With so many moving parts, it’s hard to isolate just one reason why Ben Hania’s film — a vast improvement on her terminally uneven, unexpectedly Oscar-nominated “The Man Who Sold His Skin” — should prove so gripping.

R.M.N. is a slow-motion snapshot of a deeply riven community flying apart in all directions, as though some bomb, detonated years or perhaps even centuries ago, has never stopped exploding.

Stately and serene from a distance, but up close riven with the fissures and follies of a friendship that costs both men so much but gives them even more, the movie, too, is a mountain.

Whether you view this illuminating doc as a portrait of an institution, a snapshot of a generation or a sketch of the dedication and stamina shown by those in the teaching profession, Art Talent Show bears sprightly comparison to the various styles and modes of artistic expression it showcases.

[A] scorchingly smart, superbly crafted thriller, in which the morality is blurry with heat haze, but the real lines that divide society are starkly defined: Out here, you are either corrupt or complicit, or collateral for those who are.

The mechanics of the operation boggle the mind, and in presenting them so elegantly, Vasarhelyi and Chin offer more edge-of-your-seat drama than most thrillers — certainly enough to make the Hollywood version in the works from Ron Howard feel surplus to requirements before cameras have even rolled.

It’s possible that the film’s passing pleasures are so rich that we don’t even notice how deep Okada has driven her storytelling dagger until she pulls it out in the end, and the tears come, adding, to the bitterness and sweetness of this moving and strange little fable, a hefty dose of salt.

As befits the son of the late Ryuichi Sakamoto (and director of acclaimed documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus) Sora displays a subtly fervent faith in music as perhaps the ultimate expression of nascent individuality, and therefore, ever and eternally, a threat to regimes that rely on conformity and obedience.

Daly’s characterful, slow-burn tale is a well-crafted experiment in grafting genre onto disregarded history.

If the mix of dead-serious themes and playful, why-the-hell-not approach gives off a youthful, almost film-studenty energy, the actual craft is well above amateur-level. Ohs wears well the hats of director, editor and co-writer (alongside the entire cast of four who also get script credit), but especially as cinematographer, he does a sterling job of maximizing a doubtless threadbare budget.

If some elements are more successful than others in achieving a balance between the public and the private, between the story of a nation’s ruination and that of a family’s annihilation, it remains a shocking, poignant and soulful tribute to lives ended and to innocence lost in the country’s notorious Killing Fields.

The exuberant life and liveliness that spills off the screen and the effortless sororal chemistry between these young actresses are compelling reasons to seek out Mustang.

Amulet is a horror movie which baits-and-switches cleverly—and angrily—about who is the horror’s innocent victim, and who’s its guilty cause. And as a haunted house film, its ornate mythology pulls the dingy rotting rug out several times from under our initial idea of who is the haunter and who the hauntee.

The intellectual take on the pandemic here is oblique. Still, the mood feels extraordinarily direct, like speaking on a telephone to a version of yourself from maybe half a year ago in lockdown number two or three, before there were vaccines and hope, when the winter nights were long and dawn seemed very far away.

Amazing to look at, amazing to listen to, yet just a bit underwhelming to really think about, Sicario Denis Villeneuve's Mexican drug cartel drama is superlatively strong in every conceivable way except story.

The film might not have quite learned how to communicate visually rather than verbally, but the words are enticing ones and Sean Price Williams‘ serene, airy cinematography is fluid and varied enough that it never feels stagebound.

It’s not like “The Artist” was gritty, but Populaire is so cotton-candy breezy it makes the Best Picture-winner look like “The Panic in Needle Park.”

Fruitvale Station is impressive for a debut, and displays the unimpeachable intent to involve us all in the human story behind a headline. And it certainly displays great promise from its director and accomplished performances from its cast.

There’s the potential for melodrama, but despite the misleadingly grandiose title, The Truth is not in the business of the grand, tormented revelation. Instead, it’s an accretion of little moments, often very funny, sometimes a little sad, but always embedded in the reality of these sharply drawn, idiosyncratic characters.

There are occasional laugh-out-loud moments, for sure, and the winningness of the leads makes the inevitable climactic clinch actually rather affecting, but Grabbers could have been so much more than the derivative me-too it turns out to be.

One is caught between appreciating Jenkins’s soulful, empathetic performance, and just thinking “fuck that guy,” and wishing the unexpected swerve The Last Shift made was to turn to McGhie’s Jevon, to make Stan an incident in his life, rather than the other way around.

It is slow and it is ambiguous but it is supremely sure of itself, as it moves, with singleminded grace from chilly to all-out chilling.

Refn has consistently delivered films that have subverted our expectations, and has proven himself a master at stylistic self-reinvention, but this feels like the first time he’s gone back to any particular well.

The Beguiled only ever lets its freak flag fly at half mast, and until the end where some very enjoyable archness is allowed to creep in, this Southern Gothic tale of female sexual jealousy feels surprisingly dated.

Gould and Zwann’s film runs along perhaps too familiar formal lines to have many tricks up its sleeve.... Yet that does not rob the inevitable meeting of its simple, sweet power, and the gentle revelations, mellowed with time, that punctuate the excited chatter are truly moving.

There is little more to Kon-Tiki than a fun, handsomely-mounted, old-style adventure story. And as impressive a feat as that is to achieve, especially outside of Hollywood, which kind of specialises in this sort of thing, those looking for something with more depth from this category may come away a little disappointed.

Its very wonkiness is one of the things that makes A Bigger Splash a good time — the sense of a filmmaker, perhaps aware that the story he's telling is not terribly deep or philosophically provocative, allowing himself to go off the rails every now and then in how he's telling it.

It’s really rather heartening that Affleck, Damon, and Driver are all on such good form in betraying their gender to this degree, as they conspire in illustrating, in a fun, undemanding, slickly made way, how men are now and have always been, the absolute fucking worst.

Franco has finally delivered a side project that does at least some justice to his eclectic artistic ambitions.

The low-key nature of what's come before simply serves to render all the more effective the final shootout, when the film careens completely, and bloodily, off the rails.

The last quarter of Child's Pose is so remarkably strong that it makes a sometimes grim journey worth sticking with to its destination.

It’s a sequel that, over a tighter running time, kicks against the law of diminishing returns, and only succumbs to it after a fight.

Mostly, watching these characters tease out their problems is fun but from a far remove, and satire at such a safe distance starts not to really feel like satire anymore.

It Follows worked like gangbusters as an exercise in atmosphere and allusion, but a little less so as an out-and-out supernatural horror, and only at certain times did it achieve a perfect synthesis of the two.

Erlingsson has delivered an attractive slice of Icelandic oddness that confirms many of the cliches about that country’s offbeat outlook, but in a good way.

Saint Jack is probably Bogdanovich’s loosest film, the one that feels most Cassavetian in execution, in which classical plotting, let alone the kind of manic screwballishness that characterizes the director’s comedies, is entirely absent in favor of a low-key, episodic character portrait embedded in a gritty, exotic, and relatively little-filmed locale.

The film is undeniably moving at times, and there are moments of metatextual elegance that feel as though they tremble on the brink of genuine insight.

For the most part an assured film, confident in both the drama and the truth of the scenario it observes, this ground-level view of the immigrant experience feels both pinpoint specific and all too representative of the obstacles and attitudes that face so many illegals, in so many parts of the world.

It’s a charming, modest glimpse into a rarefied world that, lit with so much humble affection for its characters, manages to make it seem not so rarefied after all.

We can't help but feel that by comparison with the meaty and compelling issues he takes on so fearlessly, so scabrously in the other entries, Paradise: Hope ends up somewhat toothless.

Tale of Tales is magnificent, the way a performing bear can be magnificent.