Jessica Kiang

A docufiction that tenderly, wordlessly and rather too obliquely recreates a 1961 speleological expedition to measure the depth of an unexplored crevasse in Italy’s Calabria region.

It’s really rather heartening that Affleck, Damon, and Driver are all on such good form in betraying their gender to this degree, as they conspire in illustrating, in a fun, undemanding, slickly made way, how men are now and have always been, the absolute fucking worst.

After a genuinely promising beginning, Halloween Kills, already somewhat robbed of potential suspense by the fact we all know that another go-round, “Halloween Ends,” is on its way, seemingly doubles the body count of the previous installment while roughly halving its IQ.

Given all that it’s got going for it – and it has Taylor-Joy descending a night club staircase in a pink halterneck swing-hem dress and sashaying across a dancefloor while Cilla Black croons “You’re my World,” which is not nothing – why the hell isn’t it more fun?

All the right people are going to hate Spencer. That’s just how good it is.

In a world turned careful and considered (not by choice but by necessity) this extravagant, exuberant, magnificently messy movie, punch-drunk on story and delirious with drama, is the antidote to a cinematic lethargy you may not even have known you were feeling, until one of its legitimately insane plot pirouettes forcibly reminds you just how much dimension and chaos and vitality a flat beam of light projected onto a wall can contain.

The film is most effective when its narrow focus on a single, desperately poor Yakut couple allows it space to be fascinated by the straightforward ethnographic details of this little-seen time and place. But its value as human drama wanes as its allegorical impulses become more insistent and the characters are reduced to ciphers in the end, more important for what they represent than for who they are.

We are unusually invested in a middle-aged professional woman’s interior life, which is a refreshing place to be. But we are never sure of his heart the way we are of hers and so Le Prince feels entirely truthful to her story, and maybe just a little unfair to his.

Mesen’s delicate yet earthy, thoughtful yet sensual movie never tips its hand as to whether Clara’s abilities are real or imaginary — indeed it makes the line between fact and fantasy seem as nonsensical as it might to a horse — and it pays off in one of those obscurely uplifting endings.

Like this extraordinary, ordinary family, latticed together by love yet supremely alive in their own individual hearts, Panah Panahi is not just part of a tradition, but his own filmmaker, finding new resonances in territory so familiar its power to surprise should have been thoroughly exhausted by now, but that here feels like a whole new universe.

Without any modulation in the brazen, head-on-collision presentation, once the story takes a turn for the sappy, there is really nowhere for any subtlety or subtext to hide.

Hníková’s absorbing, intelligent, subtly provocative film resolutely avoids passing judgment on the wisdom of raising a boy in the bubble of his parents’ undivided attention; just see if you can do the same.

To imagine the decades-long catch-and-release sweep of a single lifespan and condense it into one sub-90-minute film is a feat; to do so about multiple interconnected lives without losing definition is even more impressive.

Anne at 13,000 ft might look like mumblecore, but it plays as a psychological horror and a ticking-clock thriller that morphs into a wild, windswept tangle of incipient, but never quite arriving tragedy.

The intellectual take on the pandemic here is oblique. Still, the mood feels extraordinarily direct, like speaking on a telephone to a version of yourself from maybe half a year ago in lockdown number two or three, before there were vaccines and hope, when the winter nights were long and dawn seemed very far away.

Here, no one seems capable of envisaging even the most immediate consequences of their increasingly vicious actions, and so where “Ida Red” wants us to thrill to the idea of criminality as almost a genetic inheritance, a trait carried down a bloodline like blue eyes or freckles, in fact, all it really suggests is that this family might be really dumb, and actually quite bad at crime.

The relationship between the two women is gorgeously drawn and so deeply felt in the performances of both actresses that the first in a string of gentle surprises is that it will not form the entire story of the film.

This is a film about a hole into which stuff gets sunk, yes, but it is also a film about a hole out of which new, unsinkable bonds of comradeship emerge.

For a film in which John David Washington lurches, staggers, stumbles, shambles, flounders, falters, wobbles, scrabbles and totters across an entire Greek province . . . Beckett sure is dull.

Thanks to some truly original, very striking imagery and the vague sense that Sargsyan knows what he’s getting at, even if you don’t, if you’re willing to commit resources to the tense ground war between frustration and revelation, the latter just about wins out.

No matter how pure your intentions nor how real your pain, these ancient myths all teach us, debts always come due, and the chilling denouement of Jóhannsson’s dark, deliberate debut suggests that is what Lamb is: a modern-day take on some ancient, pre-Disneyfication fairy tale or a nursery rhyme with a sinister history encoded into its Spartan melody.

Hong’s film and his radiant star are not made for melancholy, and so instead they laugh — at the absurdity of hoping for some castle in the air when there’s so much life all around you, always, right in front of your face.

Doubtless, due to Noé’s own real-world experiences, “Vortex” is a success, if a dolorous one: a dignified, sometimes desperate tribute to, as the dedication reads, “all those whose minds will decompose before their hearts.”

Divided into seven quirkily titled chapters which are only useful as a kind of interminable countdown, “Story” falls into every trap of the over-reverential adaptation: individual scenes go on too long, there are far too many of them, and everyone sounds like they’re reading when they speak.

Petrov’s Flu is fascinating partly because of the chunky muscularity – the inherent masculine brawniness – of Serebrennikov’s filmmaking, in which dreams are as solid and hard-edged as reality, and reality is a blockish, jostling thing.

In its quiet respect for the victims’ dignity, its uniformly outstanding performances and in apportioning responsibility only to those who shirked their responsibilities, and deploying a grief-struck compassion toward everyone else, Nitram may come to be recognized as one of the finest exemplars yet of the mass-shooting movie — inasmuch as we can stomach having an entire genre built around the phenomenon.

It’s perhaps a little glib to make a choral event of a hip-hop musical when hip-hop is so much a medium for individual creative expression — for a single voice to speak its truth — but it’s hard to argue when the results are this energetic, this empowering and this irresistibly youthful.

Titane is bold in its reference points, no-holds-barred in its approach to some of the hottest-button issues of the day, and brash – and often very funny – in its deliciously grisly and inventive image-making.