Jessica Kiang

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.

Very much to its detriment, Misra’s ambitious, overflowing soap opera of a debut is not content with being the character portrait that Byrne’s inherently interesting Donald deserves.

The unshakable perkiness of the whole endeavor, its blithe lack of topicality, edge or satirical intent (it’s not even a spoof, just a goof) would be irritating if it didn’t work so hard to remind us that you don’t have to be mean to be funny.

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.

Timing alone makes The Rape of Recy Taylor something close to essential viewing. But Buirski’s approach is oddly diffuse, lacking the clarity of rage that has informed so many recent touchpoints in social-issue documentary.

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.

We might lament declining attention spans in general, but more chilling than anything in Friend Request is the idea that anyone’s whole attention could possibly be absorbed by so flimsy and forgettable a film, one that seems made with the sole aim of being perfectly adequate background noise for something else.

It’s a lovely, gracious, soul-satisfying thing.

Filmmaking craft is not the issue here, it’s the timidity of the storytelling that sits in sharp contrast to the boldness of some of the visual and sonic experimentation.

As so often in biopics of famous, complex women, Dalida’s life is thus reduced to a parade of romantic intrigues and solipsistic heartbreak, with very little sense emerging of the real woman who lived it all, and less still of the talent that made her music and performances so meaningful to millions.

Mahaffy’s uncompromising approach, and the quality of its performances, make it a rare and valuable testament: to the terrible danger of believing in miracles, and to the cruelty of a world that might make such belief necessary.

mother! is something truly magnificent, the kind of visceral trash-arthouse experience that comes along very rarely, means as much or as little as you decide it does, and spits you out into the daylight dazzled, queasy, delirious, and knock-kneed as a newborn calf.

Uneven though it is, the film is peppered with enough cherishable dialogue tics and dummkopf punchlines to make it a enjoyable watch.

Without a single weak link in the exceptional cast...it’s a film that makes you feel a lot. But overridingly you feel lucky — lucky to be watching it, lucky that something so sincerely sweet, sorrowfully scary and surpassingly strange can exist in this un-wonderful world, and desirous of hanging on to as much of its magic for as long as you can after you reemerge back onto dry land.

Heady, bold statements about humankind are both the film’s best aspect and its chief flaw: There are just so many of them.

Wirkola’s film is set apart by its almost heroic lack of self-awareness: Not only does it not realize how dumb it is, there’s a real sense that it thinks it’s smart. In fact it’s a whirlygig of inanely convoluted plotting, deeply dubious philosophy and shots of Noomi Rapace sliding glasses across tables to herself. You should probably watch 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.

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.

A gentle but sharply defined story, brimming with grace, compassion and performances of perfect naturalism, it is unashamedly intellectual yet deeply human.

Harmonium builds to something peculiar and unusual by its close, and has a melancholic, discordant, uneasy sustain that lingers long after.

The various story currents move swiftly but don’t run particularly deep, so the film works better as a kind of best-foot-forward overview of modern urban Russia — “Moscow, I Love You” — than it does as a multi-stranded human drama.

What begins as a well-observed, quietly modulated study of teen pregnancy and the strains of young motherhood devolves abruptly into extravagantly nutty soap operatics.

Desplechin lashes storylines and filmmaking gimmickry in to the one ginormous stewpot with gusto, slams the lid down on it and promptly forgets to turn on the heat. [Cannes Version]

The entire, whippet-lean film feels like an experiment in impressionist condensation, as though Ramsay is testing the limits of how little she can give us, and how weird it can be, while still delivering a recognisable revenge thriller.

This serious-minded, ambitious oddity shoots for the moon of a far-off planet, but it really only finds the grace it’s looking for in its magnificent supple camerawork.

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.

An excoriating razor-burn of a movie that deploys drollery like an instrument of torture.

A high watermark in the fusion of genre and arthouse, and an anthemic, youthful blast of generational pop art, “Good Time” is a 100 minute-long string of fire emojis, that begins and ends with a heart.