Jessica Kiang

The Perfect Candidate doesn’t burn the veil, but it does lift it briefly, allowing us a glimpse of Saudi womanhood that is idiosyncratic and individual — in short, as we very rarely see it.

This is the rare debut that derives its freshness not from inexperience but from a balance between compassion and restraint that most filmmakers take decades to achieve.

Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini is a frustrating film, despite vast stretches of compelling storytelling.

Perhaps most impressive is how, despite the nostalgia inherent in this kind of endeavor, "Sleeping Giant" never sentimentalizes its story, and never compromises on the essentially bleak idea that you can be transformed from a carefree child shading your eyes from the glare of a huge, wide future to a scarred and haunted young adult in a single moment.

When Tomorrow starts to make intellectual as well as geographical leaps and to draw macroeconomic, political, and social factors into its bright-eyed, approachable orbit, that’s when cynicism gives way to admiration, and admiration can flare into inspiration.

Sy’s film is a curious little fable, not quite fully formed in its final stages, and occasionally so sedate and opaque, under Bachar Mar-Khalifé’s melodic, piano-forward score, that it feels like it is drowsing. But it’s a striking debut nonetheless, especially as it revolves, with graceful poetry around the inner experiences of such a curious, unknowable woman.

Uplifting in a tiny, understated and very authentic way, Sworn Virgin shows us gently how its possible to be living in exile in the world you know best, and how it's possible to come home to a place you've never been before.

If as a thriller, the cryptic It Is in Us All, doesn’t thrill quite enough, as an examination of the kind of perverse death-obsession that unloved, unhappy, estranged boys can develop, it is a darkly provocative and promising debut mood-piece from Campbell-Hughes.

They All Laughed is certainly not a perfect film, but its homespun quality, palpable camaraderie, and playfully loose performances make for a movie that’s easy to harbor deep affection for nonetheless.

While Felix von Groeningen's film, which centers around a couple whose child is diagnosed with cancer, could easily have strayed into maudlin territory, the deft, non-chronological structure and the constantly surprising, beautiful performances -- both acting and the musical -- elevate it well clear of any Movie of the Week associations.

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.

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.

It’s an endless pleasure to see such exceptional, careful, considered filmmaking applied to such a gleefully generic set-up. Even when some of the tricks become apparent, each new repetition somehow delivers more than the last.

Beautifully shot, touchingly performed and delivered with a thrillingly atmospheric sense of place, Heartstone lets us meditate on these themes during that long last summer, when childhood seems like it’s going to extend, agonizingly, forever, only for it to be snapped abruptly away like a shout on the wind.

Lovely to look at, charmingly played throughout, and with a sense of fun that is more playful than subversive, The Brand New Testament is a bouncy treat: not so much heresy as whimsy, with a smooth matte finish and a mischievous grin.

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

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.

This is the downer as an art form, a feelbad film of gargantuan reach and effect, and a brave, horrified commentary on a whole nation.

“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 film's own spin toward a liberal audience means it chokes into ineffectuality when it tries to take a less ironic and more active stance on society's biggest current white whale, because the persuasive sermon it preaches, it preaches exclusively to the choir.

The grandest irony to emerge is that despite its unquestionable sincerity, soft-spoken iconoclast Martin Margiela’s insistent non-image may yet turn out to be fashion’s canniest bit of image-making of all.

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

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.

The odd rhythm of very fast and slick followed by very slow and arty is difficult to settle into, and the film ultimately frustrates, willfully obscuring the apparatus of what appears at first to be a promising film noir framework.

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.

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.

Kossakovsky doesn’t anthropomorphize the animals; if anything, he zoomorphizes us.

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.

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.

The star that is truly born here is Cooper as a director.

Monsoon is a graceful and truthfully irresolute investigation into the strange, often poignantly unreciprocated relationship that many first- and second-generation emigrants have with the far-off foreign country of the past.

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.

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.

An utterly bizarre, frequently grotesque, occasionally obscene singularity, Polish artist Mariusz Wilczynski’s abrasive animation Kill It and Leave This Town exists so far outside the realm of the expected, the acceptable and the neatly comprehensible that it acts as a striking reminder of just how narrow that realm can be.

With the themes of this play not exactly subtle or delicate, particularly at the climax, it all becomes a bit grating -- inescapable in its heavy-handedness.

Some occasionally awkward performance moments aside, though, the film is very compassionate towards its characters and finds just about enough original insight within the well-worn family drama genre to keep things from feeling too familiar—it’s a just a shame there couldn’t have been a little more vitality injected early on.

The film is undeniably enjoyable, but its giddy grandiosity only serves to highlight the brittleness of its purported braininess.

This is exhaustingly exhibitionist cinema, that wants to be looked at for the sake of being looked at — for the crispness of its moves, not the complexity of its concepts, and that can get wearying after a while.

The Bastards feels like what happens when an undeniably great filmmaker stoops to sensationalism -- it’s a smarter, odder film than someone else would make with the same material, but it’s still smart, odd sensationalism.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is a blast.

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.

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.

As the movie dances right up to the conventions of this well-worn genre, then deftly slides (To the left! To the right!) to avoid them, you might just find yourself clapping along in spite of it all being terminally uncool. Uncool can be a lot of fun.

Crudely put: it is distancing to hear people cry for help or speak anguished, halting truths from their hearts in a second language, and for all the bruising effectiveness of the filmmaking at times, it’s a distraction which 22 July never quite overcomes.

No matter how pure your intentions nor how real your pain, these ancient myths all teach us, debts always come due, and the chilling denouement of Jóhannsson’s dark, deliberate debut suggests that is what Lamb is: a modern-day take on some ancient, pre-Disneyfication fairy tale or a nursery rhyme with a sinister history encoded into its Spartan melody.

However much fun the film’s high points may afford, there is also something faintly depressing about seeing a once-inventive filmmaker plunder his own legacy for easy props.

There is nothing underneath the glossy surface and no real insight into what made this man tick — and despite how creepy he looks here, Bulger was a man, not a devil.

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.

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.

Though this is a slightly unreal world in which no one looks at their iPhones or uses a computer...the sweet earnestness of the two leads makes their characters real.

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.

Nashville boasts some of the director’s most memorable and emotionally multifaceted characters —not to mention a first-class soundtrack of country, blues and gospel hits.

Columbus and Klein present a palimpsest of erratically overlapping perspectives. The results are untidy and unbalanced, but derive considerable energy from that eccentric approach.

Very well-made, very sweet-natured and very, very familiar: how strange that Philippe Falardeau‘s The Bleeder, a based-in-truth film about pretty much the definition of a confrontational sport —boxing— should feel cosy as a down comforter from beginning to end.

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.

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.

Bruckner’s elegantly crafted film falls some way short of its grandest ambitions, but still sends you out into the night with a chill in your bones and the hairs stiff on the back of your neck.

Farhadi’s genius is to be able to take the most ordinary of situations (say, a separation) and turn it into the stuff of gripping sociological drama. But largely, this time out, he’s rather done the reverse: given a gripping premise and a game cast he has engineered perhaps his most ordinary film.

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.

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.

“Bride” is remarkable for how honestly it earns every tiny tick of pleasure it gives — for it gives many.

Maïwenn makes no apologies for liking her characters and being invested in their problems, even though in the scheme of things, they could well seem insignificant. And Cassel and Bercot reward her faith with a believable portrayal of a couple who are either the best or the worst things to ever have happened to each other, and very probably both.

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

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.

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 very beauty of the pictures, and the exhausting knowledge of how much effort and care went into each peculiar creature, each liquidly expanding nebula, each belching mud spring, contributes to a kind of wonder fatigue, and soon it feels a little like you’ve slipped into a lukewarm bath of imagery. It’s soothing, comfortable, blood-temperature and it doesn’t quicken your pulse one iota or inspire a single thought in your mind that you haven’t had a hundred times before.

Aside from all its other virtues, this film is a truly inspiring example of committing to the bit.

One of the subtler strengths of Never Look Away is the canny evocation of a war-weary, defeated population who did not experience communism as a revolution but a substitution. The insignia and the catechisms changed, but the underlying attitudes remained grotesquely similar in their callous prioritization of dogma over decency.

Seidl uses the peculiar relationship of Austrians to their basements as a way to pick away at the cracks between our public and our most private selves. But it's an idea that is elevated further by his rigorous eye for composition and cinematographic portraiture that makes the even the most bizarre images beautiful, and fashions the film, which could feel very fragmented in that it jumps from subject to subject and back again, into a deeply engrossing whole.

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.

Light of my Life is not a bad film, instead it’s a heartfelt, intelligent and earnest one (if a little tidy).

Wrapped up in Portman’s like-it-or-loathe-it-you-cannot-ignore-it performance (I love it, for the record) and Corbet’s astonishingly confident filmmaking chutzpah — all fast-motion montages, off-kilter framing, and bravura soundtrack collisions between Walker’s score and Sia/Celeste’s pop tracks — it somehow becomes a jagged, messy but endlessly intriguing whole.

Ford’s attempt to synthesize the two halves of his film into a coherent whole is what sells it all short.

Beneath the film’s soapier turns, and despite its more strident moments, there is a small dose of bittersweet wisdom here about the dangers inherent in entrusting one person — whomever it might be — with sole custody of your self-worth.

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.

Kill Boksoon, like its heroine, could do with learning that there’s more to life than being highly efficient in execution.

For all the film’s chatty insights into modern dating mores and its casually pointed discussions of racial identity, the formula to which Shortcomings mostly adheres is a familiar one, as though someone has given one of the Apatow-esque man-child comedies of the aughts an Asian makeover.

The supporting cast, fine craft, and the appealingly idiosyncratic approach to history, legacy, and storytelling summon as much energy as they can and fling it Tesla’s way. Whatever he’s made of in Almereyda’s film, it’s a perfect insulator and generates no sparks.

In the Aisles is unusual in its compassion and respect for its blue-collared characters.

The absorbing and entertaining Detention works well enough as a primer on a traumatic period of history, and as a story of semi-supernatural salvation for sins past, that it earns its surprisingly moving final moments, and even its heavily on-the-nose exhortation to modern-day Taiwan to remember and honor its ghosts.

The respect that the film mostly has for Aria’s personhood, even at such a young age, gives it a keener edge than many other entries in the rather overpopulated coming-of-age genre.

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.

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.

The three leads summon lovely chemistry, re-creating a dorky-kid dynamic in later life that feels like the perfect summation of the film’s almost Spielbergian belief that at 10 years of age we are our best and truest selves.

Riley, Nighy, Lowe and Agutter all find some truthful, moving place to work from, despite the ever-present threat of being upstaged by a kitschy sconce or an eye-jangling turquoise-and-pink color scheme.

The House by the Sea feels like the work of a filmmaker gazing back over his own filmography as one might across a sparkling blue sea, and observing its tides.

With no sheen of reflexivity, and no in-jokey admission of its hokiness to hide behind, can this non-ironic un-re-invention possibly work? Actually, yes it can, and does surprisingly well, by approaching the story with a sincerity and sweetness that defy cynicism, and by casting Cate Blanchett.

Mr. Holmes is not so much the story of Holmes' last case, as the story of his last choice: whether to go gentle, or whether to rage against the dying of the light.

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.

Horror hounds may find themselves getting a little impatient with “The Wind,” especially when Tammi begins on such an unflinchingly nasty note ... but then elects to keep the gore to a minimum until the grisly climax. The film is much more successful, however, as a feminized reworking of the western mythos.

With pitch-perfect performances across the board, and boasting crisp photography and editing, the film never ceases to twist, turn and surprise, taking wicked joy in constantly switching us back on ourselves and our expectations of the characters.

Nina Wu is a thrillingly complicated sort of corrective, living out the progressive ideal of giving the victim back her story, even when that story, told with lacerating self-criticism and a deep undercurrent of dismay, includes a great deal that falls far short of progressive ideals.

Gitai rightly trusts in the fascination of material that needs no sensationalism or gimmickry to command our whole attention.

Before a final act dealing with the fascinating social fallout once Saeed’s crimes are known and he becomes, in some quarters including his own household, a hero on a righteous moral crusade, Abbasi’s film hews close to this established template.

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

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.

The fact is that both actors are very good, even if trapped in the amber of Hooper's overweeningly tasteful direction.

It is so lived-in and authentic in its real-world detail, and so enigmatic and mysterious in its diversions and sidelong glances, that it's difficult not to see it as overridingly personal, not just to the director but to the viewer. It's a true act of the most optimistic communication and communion.