Jessica Kiang

It starts out less not-good than it ends up, to be fair, and for the majority of its running time, it’s engaging enough. Its chief issue in these parts seems to be that the director isn’t super sure if he’s making an action thriller with apocalyptic overtones, a family drama, or a character portrait/performance showcase, so the tone is all over the place.

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.

Despite all the craft and care it seems just slightly deflating that Fire at Sea can elicit a relatively complacent reaction when it is such a thoughtful, deeply-felt and exquisitely observed film, set right in the eye of a raging storm.

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.

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.

Jackie is what happens when two distinct sensibilities — the Goliath of the Hollywood prestige pic and the David of Pablo Larraín’s playful, idiosyncratic intelligence — throw down.

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.

The Age of Shadows has no pretensions to being a particularly deep or politically resonant piece of filmmaking. Its more that Kim Jee-woon has found in this era and this milieu the perfect inspiration for a blisteringly entertaining and exquisite genre exercise, one that may not be recognised as such only because we we have never expected genre films to be this good.

The very beauty of the pictures, and the exhausting knowledge of how much effort and care went into each peculiar creature, each liquidly expanding nebula, each belching mud spring, contributes to a kind of wonder fatigue, and soon it feels a little like you’ve slipped into a lukewarm bath of imagery. It’s soothing, comfortable, blood-temperature and it doesn’t quicken your pulse one iota or inspire a single thought in your mind that you haven’t had a hundred times before.

The perils of the broader-canvas follow-up to the sleek and economical indie debut are writ large: this is “Difficult Second Album: The Movie.”

This is a virtuosic piece of filmmaking art that also happens to be almost unbearably moving. Actually, there is no “almost.”

Along with screenwriters Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight, Gibson, whose lack of directorial subtlety but skill with action both reach an apex here, is not content to tell the true story of Desmond Doss and his unshakeable, courage-giving faith. He wants to convince us that his faith was, in fact, the truth.

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

Arrival, the shimmering apex of Villeneuve’s run of form that started back in 2010 with “Incendies,” calmly, unfussily and with superb craft, thinks its way out of the black hole that tends to open up when ideas like time travel, alien contact and the next phase of human evolution are bandied about.

La La Land is a film you simply never want to stop watching. It has wisdom and joy and sadness and such magic, from the evocative power of music to the transportative power of movies.

Though he gets fine performances from many quarters...the film is scuppered by an approach that sees it build on the bones of the novel without ever quite animating its heart.

Containing not one single jump scare, but building a disquieting atmosphere of dread that leads us to make some brilliantly gruesome inferences, it’s a classy take on the often trashy pregnancy horror category, with a subtle social critique underlying its neo-gothic texture.

Despite presenting an environment enriched to weapons-grade plutonium levels with potential for interpersonal drama, Vinterberg can’t seem to find any.

A true blue dark comedy that isn’t so concerned with its darkness that it forgets to be laugh-out-loud silly at times too, “In Order of Disappearance” is a bitter, bloody treat for the black of heart.

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.”

After the Storm is a film that invites you in, and clears a space for you at the dinner table while you shuck off your shoes in the hallway.

His new film Zero Days may ostensibly be an investigation of the 2010 malware worm known as Stuxnet, but over its swift-moving 116-minute runtime, Gibney does a much broader and more important job: relating the rather airless, abstract concepts of cyber-terrorism and internet espionage to their real-world consequences.

Braga is simply riveting in this gift of a role.

Even within Schrader’s own back catalogue, Dog Eat Dog feels like a lukewarm retread of elements he has achieved, as a writer and director, much better before. It’s just that here they’re mashed together gracelessly, with a kind of bullying undercurrent, as though designed to get a rise out of you, just so it can deliver two for flinching.

An excoriating, gripping, intricately plotted morality play, Mungiu’s film is less linear, more circular or spiral-shaped than his previous Cannes titles...but it is no less rigorous and possibly even more eviscerating and critical of Romanian society, because it offers its critique across such a broad canvas.

The list of the film’s transgressions against the culturally acceptable is almost gratuitously long. But the spine of self-aware intelligence that runs through even its most grotesque, exploitative, and offensive twists, and the basically incredible, irreplaceable central performance from Isabelle Huppert, make this queasily hilarious mass of contradictions just about cohere.

It’s less a convincing, involving narrative than an episodic picaresque that rambles loose-jointedly from absurdist encounter to vaguely fable-like incident.

Puiu scoops up storylines and arguments and revelations armful by messy armful and the inexplicably titled “Sieranevada” becomes by turns pit-of-stomach-sad, flight-of-fancy funny and pin-in-heart moving. And never less than wincingly true in its deadpan acknowledgement of the beautiful absurdity of family life.