Jordan Mintzer

It’s perhaps less flamboyantly enjoyable than Finley’s first feature, but it also digs deeper into the souls of its characters, asking how a few people meant to ensure the pedagogy of hundreds of children could flunk out so badly.

Franco-Belgian actor Worthalter, who’s perhaps best known for his role in Lukas Dhont’s Girl, is riveting every time his character takes the stand. He convinces us of Goldman’s innocence, not to mention his commitment to political causes, far before the trial is over, and we’re only hoping that the jury will wind up agreeing with us.

An engrossing depiction of severe occupational hazards, with most of the action set in drab, purely functional offices and conference rooms where Philippe has to contend with an impossible task.

Despite all the swagger, this is not style for style’s sake. It’s more about Lapid inventing his own language: one that’s highly personal, but also tries to expand horizons at a time when films tend to resemble TV shows more and more, especially in how they’re directed.

Those who believe that all Buddhists respect their religion's core principles of peace and tolerance should take a look at The Venerable W (Le Venerable W), director Barbet Schroeder’s eye-opening chronicle of one Burmese monk’s long campaign of racism and violence against his country’s minority Muslim population.

The film slowly but surely works its charms, painting a rich, emotionally complex portrait of a woman who, like Denis herself, will not let herself be boxed in.

Reteaming to play a duo similar to the one in A Prophet, Rahim and Arestrup maintain the film’s tense and sinister tone – the former providing a convincing mix of fragility and machismo, and the latter looking and acting more and more like Brando in the latter half of his career.

The story’s twists and turns maintain our interest throughout, with the narrative taking on a cleverly deconstructed play-within-a-film format reminiscent, at times, of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.

Heavy-handed and predictable in spots, yet engrossing and provocative in others, it’s an impressive if somewhat unruly debut

Naturalistic and a bit on-the-nose in spots, the film is also a moving tale of real-world strife — a sort of low-key, contemporary take on Visconti’s neorealist classic La Terra Trema, with EU officials and regulations undoing seafaring practices that have existed for generations.

At its heart, the film is really a classic story of redemption, taking lots of unexpected turns as it follows a down-and-out hero toward recovery.

Moss tackles the idea from a more intimate and feminist perspective, questioning how far mothers are willing to go for their children, or simply to become mothers at all. If what happens in her movie seems altogether extreme, maybe it’s because the world we live in tends to push such women to extreme places.

This isn’t Hiroshima Mon Amour. It’s more like Need for Speed Mon Amour done on a modest scale, with an effectively simple plot and nonstop action scenes that find a daunting number of ways to wreck and destroy cars.

Where director Yamada excels is in depicting the interior worlds of the two main characters, paying particular attention to details, whether visual or sonic, that seem to place a constant divide between Shoya and Shoko.

The auteur seems to be squeezing everything he can into a personal manifesto in which cinema, history and real life become interchangeable, and in which he tries to situate his output within film’s larger trajectory.

At a time when people feel obliged to choose which side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they stand on, Holding Liat takes a thoughtful middle ground that exposes the situation without exploiting it.

As tough as it is, France is also warm and subtly heartbreaking, offering a moving vision of life for those stuck in legal and emotional limbo.

Somewhere between Hayao Miyazaki and Terrence Malick lies Away, a gorgeously made minimalist cartoon that’s long on beauty and breathtaking scenery, if somewhat short on traditional narrative.

Without Denis’ typically transfixing aesthetics and with a storyline that lumbers along in places, High Life is not always an easy sit, even if occasional outbursts of violence spice up the action in distressing ways.

Toback does a great job introducing the non-initiated to the sticky job of getting a film funded outside the studio system.

Building her narrative around a pair of deadpan performances that yield dashes of humor amid a deep sentiment of human longing, Enyedi can sometimes revel too much in her depictions of modern solitude...without taking the theme much further. But she manages to introduce a few welcome surprises.

Flamingo goes overboard on the surrealism at times, but by ultimately focusing on how Lidia comes to terms with the reality of the AIDS epidemic, it delivers a solid emotional blow by the end.

Vibrantly helmed and performed, with co-director and Cannes best actress winner Zar Amir Ebrahimi (Holy Spider) playing one of the leads, the film is a win both behind and in front of the camera.

Beautifully directed and performed.

Aurel’s artwork is less detailed and more cartoonish than Bartolí’s, but no less evocative, especially in his choice of colors.

Despite its title and wayward protagonist, the film actually cares quite a lot about portraying the world that Cassandre, and most of the rest of us, now live in, but rarely look at so carefully.

The film has its upbeat moments but can also be a tad gloomy — or maybe just classically Romanian, for anyone familiar with the recent cinematic output of that country — for what’s essentially a movie aimed at children. But the colorful animation helps to liven up the atmosphere.

With her sophomore effort, Evolution, the writer-director delivers another disturbing mélange of experimental genre filmmaking and adorable, tortured French kids, offering up a trippy visual feast that satisfies on an aesthetic level, if not always on a narrative one.

The jokes are often ridiculous, as is pretty much everything else that happens, but there’s a palpable energy and visual inventiveness on display that keeps things watchable.

Writer-director Rachel Lang and star Salome Richard manage to craft an intriguing feature debut filled with keen observations and slices of dark humor.

What emerges is not only a depiction of psychiatric treatment administered with plenty of warmth and enthusiasm, but a portrait of several individuals who, despite their noticeable disabilities, are capable of producing original and moving works of art.

Imagine the rise of the machines prophesy made popular by the Terminator franchise, but done as a freaky sitcom that’s part Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, part French sex farce, and you’ll get an idea of the bizarro concoction that is Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s new film, Big Bug.

Working with a terrific cast — first-timer Nero is a real discovery — Muylaert makes all the traumatic twists in the story feel both natural and almost casual at times, as if we’re watching everyday people whose lives have suddenly been transformed into a telenovela plot.

At a time when the fate of Black men and their bodies has risen to the level of a national emergency, what happens to the characters in Two Gods takes on added weight.

Muayad Alayan coaxes excellent performances out of the two leads and their supporting spouses, and even if the drama can seem heavy-handed in a few places, it remains quite believable throughout.

Guediguian's lengthy period yarn features a wide array of characters filmed with his habitual simpatico eye, but loses the dramatic thread in too many plots, too little action and not enough originality.

Is any of this believable? Not really. Is some of it plain silly? Definitely. But it’s mostly enjoyable to watch, even if the film flies so far off the rails that there’s less suspense here than in the director’s stronger works.

Girls of the Sun (Les Filles du soleil) is at once mildly harrowing and completely over-the-top, intermittently intense yet so unsubtle it winds up doing damage to its own worthy discourse.

A film that doesn’t hit you like a tidal wave as much as it gradually washes over you, leaving in its wake a series of memorable set-pieces and a dense, dark web of violence and fatality.

What makes it quite fun, and definitely funny in spots, is how realistically Dupieux depicts events, turning the outlandish into something entirely credible, at least for the main characters. We never doubt the sincerity of their actions, which makes us believe things even when they can’t be true.

September 5 doesn’t skimp on any of the technological details — we also learn that Jennings reported events over a telephone, with the receiving end rigged to a studio mic — but Felhbaum steps back often enough to help viewers see the bigger picture at play.

[Perry's] approach is one of a consummate enthusiast and completist, and he does manage to convey that dedicated fan energy on screen. But he doesn’t necessarily make it feel contagious enough.

Director Marie Losier ... chronicles the wrestler’s twilight years with affection, humor and gravitas.

Music seems to be more of a tribute to the director’s unique aesthetic — her specialized use of image and sound, of character and landscape — than anything resembling a narrative, even if there are bits and pieces of story scattered throughout.

Like his erratic protagonist, Gilroy doesn’t always know when to settle down or call it quits, and the film’s constant shifts of tone can grow tiring, even if the action as a whole never gets boring.

Writer-director Xavier Giannoli offers up an amusingly entertaining portrait of fortune, infamy and severe melodic dysfunction in the polished French period dramedy, Marguerite.

It’s a cinephile’s film through and through — a making-of that won’t make much sense to anyone who hasn’t seen the original movie. But it’s also breezy and relatively entertaining, never taking itself too seriously while highlighting an extremely serious moment in film history.

An episodic coming-of-age story whose plot holes are paved over by strong performances and a few emotional highlights.

The Order is the kind of tense reflection on American violence that Hollywood rarely puts on the big screen anymore.

The Count of Monte Cristo is the kind of movie where, after 180 minutes and many, many more plot points, you walk out of the theater without having felt the time pass. That’s a good thing if you’re looking for a fairly entertaining, swords-and-puffy-shirts revenge tale — and Dumas’ novel is probably the mother of all revenge tales.

The result feels like two incomplete movies in one, neither of them fully satisfying in the end. Still, there are some graceful moments scattered throughout, especially in the Haitian sequences, while it’s also rather refreshing to see a brand new take on a subject that’s been worked to death elsewhere.

What’s fascinating about Martin Brown’s keenly observed and amusing debut is the twist it offers on the famous Big Apple adage that, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.

In terms of drama, or melodrama, or just bad drama, Freed rarely delivers the goods while trying hard to give fans what they came for.

It’s intense if somewhat choppy filmmaking, although the passion of the amateur cast and vividness of the Kinshasa locations help make up for the narrative shortcomings.

We may never know if Benedetta was sincere about her visions in the end, just as it’s impossible to judge how sincere Verhoeven is when he’s indulging in the erotic visions that have made him famous. The beauty of Benedetta is that it never provides a straightforward answer to all of our questions, making it mostly a matter of faith.

Clever and giddily entertaining ... Hazanavicius is smart enough to apply an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it approach, keeping nearly everything intact except for the language and cast.

While the drama never exactly ignites, Schäublin keeps us constantly fascinated with his detailed historical recreations and keen observations on science, manufacturing and technology, and how they weighed upon the souls of workers and owners alike.

Mayor is a study in politics both micro and macro, showing what happens when the two come fatefully crashing together.

2 Autumns often lets its cute and eccentric stylings get in the way of the story itself, which, once you strip away all the accouterments, feels rather underdeveloped.

There’s a carefree spirit about everything that happens, including all the talk about girls and masturbation, that makes the story as breezy as the summer air,

Unlike John Boorman's trippy 1967 L.A. noir of the same title, frenetic Gallic suspenser Point Blank provides few existential thrills but plenty of heart-racing action as it follows one man's marathon dash to save his kidnapped wife from execution.

National Bird hardly offers any counterpoint to the arguments presented, nor does it attempt to show how drones could possibly save the lives of U.S. soldiers either on the ground or in the air. But it does reveal a program whose international reach and seemingly limitless surveillance powers are extraordinarily difficult to keep in check.

Filled with the director’s typical operatic flourishes — cameras floating down corridors or over balconies as characters race toward disaster, emotional crescendos set to a racing score by Fabio Massimo Capogrosso — it can also be a rather stuffy affair, with lots of dramatic speeches and religious symbolism that runs the gamut from satirical to heavy-handed.

Not everything on screen ultimately works here, with certain characters and situations more credible than others. But the director manages to spin a clever modern-day morality tale mixing art, social class and big bucks.

It’s not groundbreaking stuff, but Marcello has a talent for making such material come alive through his inventive direction, whisking us away to a time and place that we experience as if we were actually there. It’s not enough to make Scarlet a great movie, but it’s one that manages to puts us in its shoes the way few films nowadays do.

Highlighted by an all-consuming lead performance from Lindon – surrounded here by an excellent cast of non-pros – this third collaboration strays further into Dardennes Bros. territory than previous efforts, although its depiction of an Average Joe scraping by in contemporary France features its own unique voice.

Featuring sharp performances from Marina Fois (Polisse) and promising newcomer Matthieu Lucci, the film shows Cantet returning to form...with a story that pursues the themes of his best work while underscoring some of the issues currently facing his homeland.

It manages to put a friendly, mostly female face to all the technical exploits and celestial theorizing, underlining how much the desire to uncover the secrets of the known universe is something that's all-too human.

At a time when many question whether art should be separated from the artist — whether it’s the movies of Woody Allen or the songs of Michael Jackson — this revealing documentary shows how, when it comes to hip-hop, prosecutors across America have been conveniently refusing to distinguish one from the other.

Lafosse administers the tension like a seasoned anesthetist who knows exactly what dose to deliver, keeping us on the edge of our seats but never resorting to cheap tricks or unlikely twists. It’s stressful and harrowing because it all feels so real.

Acevedo deserves credit for crafting something so audacious – along with the photography, the sound design by Felipe Rayo is also boldly conceived – though there are moments when the style really dominates the subject matter, in a film that’s a pleasure to watch but not always one to follow.

The results aren’t always convincing, with the film’s mannered acting and heightened aesthetics keeping the viewer at arm’s length from any real emotion. But the director also displays a fine sense of craft and a deep understanding of the skewed European attitudes of the period.

Utama is very much a pessimistic film, never shying away from the realities faced by those who still inhabit the highlands of Bolivia. And yet it’s also convincingly, and sometimes movingly, optimistic.

Made with the same laser-cut precision as his previous work, but with a greater emphasis on procedure than before, Moll’s new thriller puts the viewer in an uneasy place — between law and order, good cop and bad cop, protester and rioter — raising questions for which there are no easy answers.

With an acute style marked by lengthy tracking shots and crisp natural cinematography from Laurent Desmet (Shall We Kiss?), Leonor manages to convey emotions through purely visual terms.

The film, which is just over an hour long, dishes out some smart twists and a few good laughs, as well as a decent level of suspense. But like many of Dupieux’s movies, it’s also a strong concept in search of something more.

A no-nonsense, soft-spoken chronicler of conflict, especially from the point of view of the victims, Fisk is the centerpiece of a film that can sometimes feel more laudatory than necessary, but provides a comprehensive portrait of a man who has become essential reading.

McKenzie deserves credit for revealing such a troubling facet of her homeland, and even if the shallow focus — both literal and figurative — of her movie can be frustrating at times, she bravely never turns away.

Renner and Imbert spend more time dishing out jokes than they do weaving the kind of meaningful narrative that made Ernest & Celestine so special, yet while Fox is more of a slaphappy romp than a morality play, there’s still a method to the madness.

A fresh and uncompromising feature debut ... Kline has a true gift for portraiture, and it’s what makes this sad and scrappy portrait of the artist as a young cartoonist feel new and yet strangely familiar.

A student-teacher romance that’s so slow-burn it almost never flares up, Wet Season marks a skillfully observant if somewhat tepid and overwrought sophomore effort from Singaporean director Anthony Chen.

The movie captivates early on with several scenes of physical and mental mayhem, before settling into a more classic comic formula — albeit one with plenty of twists to come.

It’s a surprising and often thought-provoking effort from a filmmaker who has never chosen to take the simple path, confirming Larrain as one of the more genuine talents working in cinema today.

Megalopolis, the film, may not be lots of fun to sit through, but its making-of, Megadoc, is a blast, offering a rare inside glimpse at a major movie artist at work.

What Demoustier has done here, and done quite successfully, is taken a basic mystery plot, like something out of a TV movie, and used it to ponder how each one of us could react to a ghastly crime, and how we expect others to react in turn.

This impressionistic chronicle of the war is, at first, more concerned with household chores and family matters than it is with soldiers on the battlefield, but its harrowing third act reveals what can happen when civilians become targets as well.

While this may be the actor-director’s most polished feature yet, it’s far from a traditional suspense movie.

Combining the mystical and the military in ways that can seem fresh compared to other recent war flicks, this feature debut from writer-director Clement Cogitore could nonetheless use some more adrenaline to make its premise work.

It’s a tough balancing act that the director, whose previous works dissected teen movies (Beyond Clueless) and horror flicks (Fear Itself), pulls off with a mix of earnestness and cheekiness.

Fanny is definitely a worthy companion to Marius, although it’s also more claustrophobic in terms of staging, confining the action to a handful of interior sequences that feel less like a movie than like filmed theater, albeit of a rather high order.

The film playfully critiques certain Muslim customs, but never in a demeaning way, while providing a heartwarming coming-of-age narrative that’s a tad predictable.

This terrifically performed piece of filmed theater is filled with twists, turns and underhanded schemes that show how history sometimes lies in the hands of a selected few, not to mention a good glass of Chardonnay.

Kahn never offers an easy way out for Thomas, even if the finale tends to wrap things up in ways that seem a little too conclusive. But his film mostly explores, with steadfastness and moments of raw emotion, the crude uphill battle faced by junkies on the path to recovery.

It’s a familiar template, and Saleh’s direction can veer toward the heavy-handed in places, but it’s also an intriguingly damning portrait of the corruption currently hitting Egypt on all levels.

Despite an initial forecast of smart laughs and witty tete-a-tetes, the French dramedy Let It Rain winds up being a partly cloudy affair that lacks the cohesiveness of Agnes Jaoui’s two previous features, "The Taste of Others" and "Look at Me."

With no commentary beyond audio clips and visuals composed almost entirely of historical footage, Periot uses the radicals’ own images and words to show how their discourse evolved over ten years from progressive to militant.

It’s not really a movie at all, but more like a cross between a movie, a video game and a flow of hallucinatory images that could play in the background of a live show by rapper Travis Scott — who co-stars here as a gun-toting, philosophizing killer surrounded by a swarm of twerking booties.

In a genre movie climate marked by cheap thrills and easy scares — whatever gets us not to click on something else — it’s nice to see a film that sustains a strong ambiance of dread simply via someone looking out the window and shopping for groceries.