Jessica Kiang

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.

Really a two-hander overall, Disorder is part home-invasion film, part bodyguard romance and part PTSD drama that delivers solidly on the first two fronts and and partially on the third.

Cities of Last Things has a puzzle-box structure that makes it seem complex and that tasks us with teasing out allusions and associations that a straighter telling would miss, but emotionally it is also simple: Nestled in the middle of this loop-the-loop enigma, skewering the slippery narrative to its timeline like a pin through the heart, it’s a love story.

Operating at a strange remove from modern reality, it seems to belong more to the teen experience of a couple of decades ago, the very era from which so many of its reference points hail.

Wéber’s writing and Kirby’s performance, working in concert with Mundruczó’s dazzling, multifaceted direction, Howard Shore‘s gorgeously mood-appropriate score and, again, Loeb’s drifting, searching, soulful camera together create, from so many disparate pieces, an entirely complete portrait, that even suggests further internal universes still to be explored, universes every one of us contains.

Mostly, watching these characters tease out their problems is fun but from a far remove, and satire at such a safe distance starts not to really feel like satire anymore.

Master ends up a genre film in which the outlandish generic elements — the witches and the maggots, the fizzing bulbs and out-of-sync shadows — are far less frightening than its portrayal of this real, everyday world in which racism isn’t a long-dead bogeyman; it’s alive, breathing, banal.

The film gradually thaws out the stark, frozen mystery at its heart, but the warm-blooded, breathing truth of Linda’s life is no less tragic than that of her cold death.

Man’s enormous inhumanity to man is reproduced in precise, characterful miniature, with a pared-back artistry that somehow earns de Heer the right to be thematically blunt, and deeply pessimistic.

Muntean is so careful to avoid any whisper of contrivance or manipulation that he doesn't even land on any particular conclusion or moral.

De los Santos Arias sends us on an uncategorizably odd journey down the river of his noodling, needling imagination in a rickety canoe that keeps on capsizing, upended by another sideswiping reference, another jarring change of scene and timeframe or yet another stretch of borderline incomprehensible narration from Pepe himself, a creature who is as surprised as we are that he has suddenly acquired language.