Jessica Kiang

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.