Jessica Kiang

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.

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.

A hypotensive urban fairy tale with not quite enough “tale” to justify the tag, it’s a collection of impressions, in often striking imagery, of a New York borough imagined as a faraway land of rooftops and distant lights and corner bodegas where every day—every moment even—seems to start with “once upon a time.”

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

Rasoulof’s film, while understandably angry, is nothing if not singleminded . It’s a saturnine morality tale that unfolds in shades of rainy gray beneath leaden, overcast skies, gritting up the nation’s cinematic tradition of humanist drama to an almost unrecognizable degree.

Your mileage will vary on Genius, depending on where you place Law’s performance on the irritating/entertaining spectrum and your tolerance for somewhat formulaic tales of creative ego and “The Price of Fame.”

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.

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.

There's a kind of helpless humility to the presentation of these urban impressions, almost a kind of democracy, that allows you to engage as much or as little as you like with them.

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.

What little shock of the new the film can provide us with comes from the honeyed cinematography by Vittorio Storaro which uses silhouettes, graphic compositions and glowing closeups in an often genuinely breathtaking manner. But it also comes from the performances.

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.

For a good hour of the film’s running time, Kranz’s restraint is admirable, his script allowing his four superb actors to find and flesh out their characters, so it feels like we’re watching people, not merely a situation. Each of the four manages the changing colors of their monologues.

Using its characters' memories, loyalties and resentments as vehicles, Return to Ithaca gently expands our understanding of life within a society that, in contrast to our own, did not even pretend to cultivate the idea that its citizens were free.

It’s a film that requires you to indulge its patience-testing pace, monotonous dialogue delivery and frustrating anti-characterization for a very long time before you earn the right to unwrap the borderline transcendent gift of its absolutely beautiful ending.

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.

Hitchcock is essential; Truffaut is essential; the book is essential; Kent Jones' Hitchcock/Truffaut is not quite so, but it's a very enjoyable appendix.

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.

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

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.

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.