Jessica Kiang

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.

Jodorowsky throws everything and several kitchen sinks into the film, yet it all has its place, and the overall effect is not of the headachey mess it would be in anyone else’s hands, but of a kind of joyous, absurdist melange of highbrow concepts, personal memoir and potty humor.

mother! is something truly magnificent, the kind of visceral trash-arthouse experience that comes along very rarely, means as much or as little as you decide it does, and spits you out into the daylight dazzled, queasy, delirious, and knock-kneed as a newborn calf.

Whatever its frustrations, they are outweighed by the pleasures on offer in this scintillating example of film’s uncanny ability to transcend itself, to operate on planes above, below and in between the images and soundscapes of which it is composed.

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.

A Hard Day is a film that sets itself fairly narrow ambitions, achieves all of them and then some and yet has no pretensions to importance, weightiness or artistic self-expression.

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.

Millet’s expertly tooled movie is far from the first to derive its moral stakes from the desire to find some measure of redress for the victims and survivors of political violence, but it is among the best to also crossbreed this familiar archetype with the urgency and topicality of the Syrian refugee crisis.

“Ballad” is assembled with such peculiar, calm exactness that it actually resembles a series of experiments in simplicity.

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.

It is problematic that many of the film’s most powerful segments are its most prurient, and even more, that they are juxtaposed with the poetic and the prosaic.

An enigmatic and perhaps occasionally overly deferential documentary about one of the all-time great character actors, Sophie Huber’s Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, is slow out of the gate, but gently, ever so gently, builds to a thoughtful portrait of a thoughtful man.

A work of such unparalleled Andersonian wit, that at times the sheer level of detail – mobile, static, graphic and typographic – that bedecked the screen was enough to make your correspondent’s jaw slacken. Which meant curtains for the carpet as I was smoking a cigarillo.

If Benedetta is a joke that Verhoeven is in on, and that is designed to play to those in on it too, we can at least be thankful that it’s a good joke – not that there’s anyone up there to be thankful to.

Like any weird internet rabbit hole you might fall down when you know you should be reading a book or brewing kombucha or going to sleep, this thriller is almost annoyingly slick and moreish.

Kore-eda's trademark humility and humanism is here, and we do get glimpses, even stretches, that suggest the piercingly bittersweet vitality of his best work. But "Our Little Sister" feels like "Kore-eda lite."

Without overly romanticizing it or suggesting that, ultimately, it is anything more than a business built around the talents of some very singular men, Sunada's film becomes a love letter of a most unusual kind, because it is addressed to a place that is unremarkable in every way except for the spirit that flowed through it.

A gorgeously playful oddity glimmering with insight into ideology, photography, cartography, telegraphy, celebrity, solidarity, the flow of capital, the unruliness of time and the somehow noble lunacy of trying to tame such a massive concept into a brass doodad small enough to fit in a waistcoat pocket

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.

[Ginghină's] endlessly evolving ideas for revolutionizing football are not a blueprint for a real-world solution at all. Instead they represent that intensely relatable and human place inside, where any of us, however small our lives and crushed our ambitions, can be limitless, unhobbled by injury, unfettered by ordinariness, unbounded by physics: infinite.

Wilfully student-video amateurish in form, but impishly sophisticated in content, a gleeful cultural curiosity fairly crackles off The Plagiarists, and it is highly contagious.

For all its flaws, or rather for all the magnitude of its one massive flaw, it is more sincere than arch, and more earnest, certainly in its desire to get its makers onto the radar, than glib.

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.

This is a gorgeously realized popcorn movie of the most satisfying, comforting, restorative kind: full as its heart is, it has a lot on its mind, yet you’d also quite like to curl up on its belly and doze in the sun.

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.

Titane is bold in its reference points, no-holds-barred in its approach to some of the hottest-button issues of the day, and brash – and often very funny – in its deliciously grisly and inventive image-making.

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.

The really new news of Mandibles however, is, where in the past Dupieux’s surrealism always had a cynical, sinister, even murderous undercurrent, here, he lets himself be cheerful, as though infected by the sweet-natured bromance between his appealing, appalling idiot leads.

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.

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.

They may inspire near-religious fervour in some parts, but when it works, Made of Stone doesn’t tell the story of The Stone Roses’ resurrection or Second Coming as much as of their second chance: to play together; to reward the faith of their doggedly loyal fanbase; to be adored.

Retreading "Prisoners" territory to an extent that at times makes you wonder if they’re two parts of some sort of Canadian auteur experiment that no one else is in on, what is lost in the transfer, however, is any of the Villeneuve film’s subtlety or shading, and we are left only with its most lurid, credulity-stretching highlights, with all other textures blasted out to snowy blankness.

Lindon's performance is so perfectly judged, so inspiring of an avalanche of sympathy and empathy without ever seeking it out, that we are on Thierry's side immediately, feeling every slight and every instance of condescension perhaps even more strongly than he does himself.

There are wit and wisdom and a kind of “Before Sunrise” wistfulness in this slight little film, and it’s shot through with an unobtrusively lyrical affection for being young and aimless in even the less obviously lovely quarters of lovely Lisbon.

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.

This affectionate portrait avoids the major pitfall of comparable docs like Asif Kapadia‘s “Amy” or Kevin Macdonald‘s recent “Whitney” in that it steadfastly refuses to make Williams’ death the defining aspect of his life.

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

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.

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.

On both a political and a personal level, the film is pessimistic, yes, but it feels truthful, and never lapses into easy cynicism.

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.

It is simply a great, traditional Western: the language and cultural details may be different, but the sparse elegance and moral conundrums are familiar and as resonant as ever.

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.

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.

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

A true blue dark comedy that isn’t so concerned with its darkness that it forgets to be laugh-out-loud silly at times too, “In Order of Disappearance” is a bitter, bloody treat for the black of heart.

You could dine on nothing but lard for twenty years and still not develop the hardness of heart necessary to avoid being won over by Roger Michell‘s The Duke, a ridiculously charming British comedy that dunks a gamely accented prestige cast into an appealingly milky true story like so many digestives into a warm, well-earned, early evening cuppa.

Whatever flaws it has are ones of over-enthusiasm and over-ambition and are therefore easy to forgive, especially because when it works, it really works.

There are ups and downs and soapish highs and lows, but what stops this from ever becoming a telenovela is the riveting wonder of the performances and the sheer brio of the filmmaking.

It takes place on a sugar plantation, but Ena Sendijarević‘s magnificently composed, eerily satirical Sweet Dreams has something more like acid flowing through its veins.

Vigas' grip is so tight that even if you do get to the heart of his meaning, there's a chance it will have had the life squeezed out of it.

There is an energy to The Party, and a kind of rejuvenating bouncy glee that we haven’t seen from Potter in a long time. And after “Ginger and Rosa,” a film that felt better directed than it was written, being undermined by some very stilted dialogue, the fact the Potter also wrote the screenplay here comes as another pleasant surprise.

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.

While Vitali is frank about the nature of his demanding and subservient relationship to the man, his warmhearted, dazzled, Everest-high respect for Kubrick’s talent remains undimmed even now. It is truly inspiring and touching just how little bitterness Vitali has in him, and it stems from his having no regrets over a life dedicated to something he believes in with utterly selfless purity.

As a superbly crafted, thematically rich fable, it administers a potent dose of #MeToo vengeance, all while wearing its nasty sense of humor like a red-lipstick grin applied to a perfectly masklike face.

The film is the most formally experimental, and probably the least approachable, of the director's titles to date. But it's further proof of Wheatley's singular sensibilities as a filmmaker.

13 Minutes is an elegant, expensive-looking, respectful history lesson that finds just enough interesting texture in terms of the religious, social, moral, and personal circumstances that led to the creation of this rogue ideologue, to save it from becoming dry.

It may amount to less than a hill of beans, but Hill of Freedom is an amiable way to spend 66 minutes learning how even cultures that seem closely related to Western eyes, like those of Japan and Korea, can clash. And also how cultures like these, that seem so far from our own, can be trumped, by love, longing, friendship, sex and drunkenness, the same universal experiences we all share.

These are strong performances, committed to the truth of the scenario however grim that might be but Young’s talents extend beyond that. Having also written the script, he clearly designed this film to allow him to show off some impressive, expressive visual storytelling.

Although arranged around a fulfilling, life-changing connection The World to Come is a deeply lonesome lovesong.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is Lanthimos with the gloves off, and it makes the absurd, amazing “The Lobster” seem like a warm and cuddly experience by comparison.

Strangely old-fashioned in its construction and requiring a Golden Gate-level feat of engineering to achieve the suspension of disbelief necessary to unironically enjoy it.

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's Arquimedes who emerges as the film's most indelible character, aided by Francella's fabulously icy performance. Lacking even the warmth of a Don Vito, Arquimedes comes across not as a man who does everything for his family, but as a man who expects his family to do everything, even damn themselves, for him and his twisted, heartless, self-centered worldview.

All of Wong's undeniable visual flair can't conceal the haphazard nature of the story.

If the resulting film, Julieta feels neither wholly Munro nor typically Almodovar in final execution, there is still a very compelling energy given out by the collision.

An excoriating razor-burn of a movie that deploys drollery like an instrument of torture.

A bold, blunt, yet clinically intelligent film that provokes as much for its dark humor as for its righteous outrage, it's all at once a gripping thriller, an incendiary social critique and a mordant moral fable.

Marie never seems particularly interested in either man except for how they are interested in her and is revealed to be so self-centered in her pursuit of amours both fou and entirely rational, that she is far less likable than Binoche’s disingenuously bright-eyed and forthright performance can account for.

By turns moving, absorbing and downright rage-inducing.

Zlotowski has turned in a beguiling film that impresses as much for its oddly specific and well-researched setting (the ragtag community of lower-grade workers at a nuclear power plant), as for the romance, and maintains impressive narrative and tonal control right up until an ending that falters just at the final hurdle.

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.

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.

It’s a meticulous and tightly coiled cautionary tale, but it’s hard to imagine any of its characters having life outside the narrow confines of its stagy plot, or the edges of its carefully composed frames.

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

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.

A potent if unbalanced mashup of social-issues polemic and haunted-house horror.

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.

There is beauty here, and exquisite craft in both the pictures and the minutely designed soundscape, and there are some truly chewy ideas thrown up about the porosity of the boundary between public and private that would have lent terrific, atmospheric texture to a film... But there is little connection to the characters.

Tyler Taormina‘s delightful stocking-stuffer Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is as alive to the domesticated magic of the season as a classic carol.

For all the peril that darkens its fringes, there’s an indomitable youthful exuberance that thrums through Catalina Arroyave Restrepo’s debut feature “Days of the Whale.”

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.

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.

Rather than use his trademark raw style to expose and eviscerate social injustice, here Escalante puts it in service of a kind of cautionary fable about both the healing power of sex and the harming power of sexual hypocrisy, and he uses a tentacled alien to do it.

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.

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

Watcher, if it has an agenda beyond being a fun, shivery, fish-out-of-water chiller, is not so much a manifesto to Believe All Women as it is a reminder to all women watching to at least believe ourselves.

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.

The formal rigor that made Oldroyd’s “Lady Macbeth” such a striking debut is in evidence here throughout, but this time that directorial precision is applied to a narrative of bold, even garish ambition, which “Eileen” conceals, along with its unhinged heart, beneath a controlled, placid exterior.

It’s a long, deliriously filmic, primal banshee-howl of macabre imagination that leaves us hormonal and drunk on delusion: the beautiful, thrilling, lurid lie of cinema.

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

Uneven though it is, and downright shaggy at times, Prevenge is valuable in that it plots so unexpected an expectant-mother story — one in which pregnancy is actually ultimately minimized in terms of its impact on the story.

Wonderstruck lives in the glory of its filmmaking — its photography, its costuming, its set design, its brilliantly variegated Carter Burwell score.

Along with screenwriters Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight, Gibson, whose lack of directorial subtlety but skill with action both reach an apex here, is not content to tell the true story of Desmond Doss and his unshakeable, courage-giving faith. He wants to convince us that his faith was, in fact, the truth.

Like the game, which is popular as kind of a one-off without much replayability, Exit 8 is designed to divert for a short time and does so enjoyably, with Kawamura proving a most judicious assessor of just how little backstory, plot explanation and character development he can get away with and still keep us engaged.

We expect nothing less than conversational pyrotechnics from two such outsize personalities, and there are many confrontational moments. But what emerges more strongly is a sense of mutual admiration – sometimes even envy – and a fascinating snapshot of a period in time when movies could really matter, as experienced by two men whose movies were among those that mattered most.

We Are What We Are is just a great yarn, well-acted, elegantly shot and put together cleverly so that even its more visceral delights feel well-earned.

If you are in need of more reminders of the most extreme of the potential evils of internet interaction than you get every time you fire up an app, by all means, smash the like button on “Spree.” For the rest of us, the best advice might be to mute, block, vote down, unfollow or simply log off and go look at a tree.