Jordan Mintzer

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.

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.

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.

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.