Jonathan Romney

It’s an intelligent and involving film that successfully questions Hollywood cliches of war drama, while drawing knowingly on that tradition.

In the art-house cinema of enigma, there’s often a thin line between the mysterious and the murky. Arthur Harari’s The Unknown treads this line with varying degrees of daring and discomfort, but ultimately never feels quite confident enough to lead us compellingly through the labyrinth of its bizarre body swap narrative.

Nemes takes a much more direct approach in Orphan; a no less challenging film in its own way but one that yields more immediate appeal, even embracing the pleasures of melodrama.

Exarchopoulos’s performance is remarkable for being so undemonstratively naturalistic, perfectly in tune with the film’s anti-sensationalistic presentation of its theme.

An uneven mix of melodrama, eccentricity and hyper-male boisterousness never entirely convinces.

Alongside its verbal and intellectual content, Fatherland is immersively evocative, genuinely making us feel as if we are visiting the two Germanies in 1949.

While never quite predictable, The Electric Kiss lacks the knowing brio of recent French period pastiches such as François Ozon’s The Crime is Mine or Cédric Klapisch’s 2025 Colours of Time, similarly set in Paris bohemia.

Here, however, his bravura conducting of relatively conventional melodrama material doesn’t affect us as much as his best earlier works. In any case, it’s the actual music that often does the heavy lifting here – with selections from Chopin, Bartok and Bruch, not to mention Grégoire Hetzel’s score, spiralling saxophone capturing the vertiginous register of the whole affair.

Colours of Time nudges its audience a little heavily, if cheerfully so, with its historical references, and self-confessedly (as per an end title) plays fast and loose in its accuracy, but is genially inventive in messing with the codes of period cinema.

One thing that can be said for revenge thriller Serpent’s Path, by Japanese genre maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is that its French remodelling stands coherently enough on its own terms, although the result is a murky, over-extended affair.

Happy New Year… is vigorous and engaging as dark character comedy, but as drama it never quite builds or coheres convincingly.

It feels like a gorgeous, decidedly dewy-eyed heritage hagiography.

A story which might seem the stuff of high melodrama is given a very different charge by Franco’s characteristic rigour – an uninflected cleanness and clarity in Yves Cape’s cinematography, and a minimum of narrative frills, driving the narrative towards a conclusion that is one of this director’s starkest yet.

The drama’s underlying theme of social and personal conscience clearly lifts Exit 8 beyond the more mechanical aspects of its gaming origins, although Kawamura doesn’t quite handle it without a certain mawkishness.

Holding Liat is an emotionally rich, politically thought-provoking account of one Israeli-American family’s ordeal in the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas.

Landmarks may not strictly be the film that admirers of Martel’s formal radicalism have been waiting for: notwithstanding some eccentricities, it is a relatively conventional work. But it’s very much from the heart, and from the political conscience – a critique of colonial history and the enduring abuse of power in Argentina.

What Does That Nature Say To You may be a touch disappointing for lovers of the director’s wry understatement, as certain themes feel uncharacteristically emphatic and even, in a last-act discussion scene, too explicitly stated. Otherwise, a group of regular Hong players mesh with seemingly effortless grace in a way that is bound to click with fans and with the director’s regular international outlets.

While the three sections don’t tie up narratively, nor strictly conclude as such, they leave plenty of ideas in their wake – and a multitude of entrancing images.

Precision-tooled, ambitious in scale yet bracingly concise, this is Bigelow’s boldest and most assured film yet.

A screenplay dense with incident and ideological discussion is carried efficiently by fast-moving, sleek direction and sumptuous mise en scene that catches the tone of a changing society and its sudden explosion of capitalist excess. Yet it never quite comes to life as a character sketch.

What gives the film its emotional continuity is a commandingly downbeat performance from Servillo.

The Blue Trail is entrancingly unpredictable in its picaresque unravelling, tinged with magical realist touches.

Although the narrative ultimately goes off the rails, Amamra’s magnetically pugnacious lead gives Animale a consistent pull, while director Benestan’s work with cinematographer Ruben Impens – who also shot Titane – is bustling and kinetic, and intimate when it needs to be.

There’s no denying the film’s urgency, and audiences will certainly leave with plenty to chew over, but Peck doesn’t aid the thinking process by overloading us, where a more focused reading of Orwell’s key ideas could have yielded a much more cogent argument.

The result is bound to offend on a wide scale, but also exhilarate with its sheer rage and ebullient aggression. Not for the faint-hearted, and certainly not for fans of Israel’s political status quo, Yes promises to stir very heated debate.

The film subsides into piled-up shocks and reversals, leaving the actors to bolster the drama with emoting – not always in the most subtle of ways.

Enzo makes a low-key but resonant coda to Cantet’s work, while thematically also being highly consistent with Campillo’s directorial output.

Two Prosecutors is crisply fable-like in construction.