Jessica Kiang

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.

Taken individually, there are cherishable moments and performances scattered throughout “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” like so many flecks of gold amid the silt. But as a whole, the film has to be chalked down to a perplexingly minor addition to one of the most beloved cinematic canons of our time.

Too transitory and too undemanding to be termed a mindfuck, for Reality minditch seems about right, and it's one you even occasionally get the pleasure of scratching.

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."

Outside its value as a cautionary tale about introducing a power dynamic into a friendship between former equals, there’s an emptiness at the heart of The Nowhere Inn which might be part of the point (ah, the vacuity of celebrity! the hollowness of fame!) but the observation of emptiness is not the same as actual substance.

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.

Be prepared to be challenged by the glittering, allusive and often bewitching “Transit,” but also to be frustrated on discovering that even if you manage to piece it all together, in this particular crazy world the problems of three little people ultimately don’t amount to a hill of beans.

Despite some pretty vistas and a typically watchable performance from Wright, Land proffers rather too tidy a reiteration of things the movies taught us long ago, about how embracing life means embracing pain and how it’s only through connecting to others that we can truly know ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Entertaining though it is in parts, it can’t really be said to mark any particular growth for McDonagh as a filmmaker, being both less angry and more cynical that the brooding "Calvary" and consequently less memorable and relevant too.

Gondry’s film is really a huge Rube Goldberg machine, full of lights and buzzers and levers that ping and whistle endearingly but are connected to nothing and serve no greater function in the larger apparatus.

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.

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.

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.

Niccol’s film takes a somber, nuanced and compelling look at the War on Terror as it is waged by U.S. drone pilots, right up until a final five minutes that, in a shower of pat resolutions and conclusions, delivers something of a surgical strike on the its credibility.

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

While tears will be jerked, heartstrings plucked and throats enlumpened, it has to go down as a disappointment in the director’s catalogue.

Overloaded with too many ideas, it does scant justice to the more interesting ones that crop up, while regularly diverting from any sort of central narrative to follow tenuous and ill-explained threads that end up in a foggy limbo. But just when it threatens to wholly frustrate, someone cracks an enjoyable inside-baseball meta movie-making joke and we're back on side for a bit.

Levitas’ unusually even-handed approach works to balance the film’s inspirational true story with its tragic real-world context, by refusing to overstate Smith’s personal heroics, while sensitively outlining the everyday heroism of the ordinary men and women most grievously affected.

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.

In a way it’s a shame that film builds backwards, because while it adds layers of tricksy narrative intrigue, that trajectory somewhat simplifies the thematic texture as the movie wears on.

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.

Mektoub titillates without ever delivering the up-to-your-eyes immersion that the filmmaker’s best work deals in, and after three long hours, nobody’s changed, nobody’s learned anything and no one’s grown any older, except the audience.

Salvatore Totino's crisp 3D photography and Kormakur's way with a clear, fluid, thrilling action sequence show off the mountain in immensely impressive ways. But the humans involved get short shrift.

Marfa Girl is not going to convince Clark’s detractors, nor will it disappoint his fans, as most of what people consider his trademarks are in place.

The somewhat drab aesthetic and almost vanishingly understated performance style dull the potential pleasures of a good old-fashioned whodunnit to roughly the luminosity of an above-average feature-length episode of a TV procedural.

Nebraska is a small-scale quixotic adventure about the importance of dreams, no matter how pie-eyed, in which the outlined flaws could all be forgiven, if it just went somewhere a bit more surprising.

This film feels like one you discover late at night and watch for ten minutes before remembering you've already seen it, and yet we still kinda loved it.

It has warmth, it has flashes of insight, it even has moments of wit, all it really lacks is edge — which it lacks in large, whopping, huge amounts.

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.

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.

Lemon is too in love with being oddball to really have any connection to the real, non-quirky world. And so while scene-by scene its absurdism can be drolly amusing, it never coheres into anything more than a series of sketches.

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

It is certainly too long and too messy, too indulgent in some parts and too starved in others to be an unqualified success. But the surprise of it is that there are times, like the inspired first act, when it really does work, when it seems to have a kind of manic energy, a sheer joy at existing, which certainly makes it a far more engaging picture than Gilliam’s last.

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.

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

A film of surface pleasures, even joys, but those joys seem to be longing for a central idea around which to coalesce.

This is a film about a hole into which stuff gets sunk, yes, but it is also a film about a hole out of which new, unsinkable bonds of comradeship emerge.

It looks pretty, and is visually often a creditable recreation of times past, but it gives no substance to Stock and Dean's relationship, just circumstances. It lacks life.

It’s a beautiful, moving finale but it hardly needed all the digressions en route, which basically amount to Ceylan taking the very long (and often scenic) way round to arrive at the simple conclusion that the wild pear does not, after all, fall so very far from the tree.

There is always something of value in the sincere recreation of ordinary heroism. And Perez’ film does sincere if ordinary justice to the idea that where there is a will for it, resistance can find a way, be it so small as to be postcard-sized.

The amiable and undemanding Meyerowitz evokes so many other media — television, short story, theater — that it’s a little unclear as to quite why it’s a film.

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.

As a director, Colangelo has a firm if cautious grasp on the material, but as a writer her grip is less sure.

Lolo features long stretches of perhaps her most accomplished and enjoyable character-comedy yet. But as often with filmmakers for whom a certain register comes almost too easily, Delpy seems impatient with herself and her facility for spiky, verbal sparring and pithy self-deprecating put-downs.

As a work of deep, committed research into real history, that provides a very handy four-way primer on the most famous Black men of their day and the conflicting approaches to Black resistence and liberation that each personified, One Night in Miami is an instructive and absorbing watch. But as a film with the potential to do more, push further and explore and maybe even in some ways explode those legacies in order to get at the men underneath them, it feels too timid, too talky, too conceptual in content for being so classical in form.

While the sexuality is pushed far too far for mainstream audiences, it's also true that Noe's conception of sentiment and romance pulls the film back from being truly transgressive about its gender or sexuality politics.

By no means a classic in the Korean action-thriller pantheon, but a good enough stopgap for a rainy Sunday until the next one comes along.

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.