Jordan Mintzer

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.

Directed by first-timer Ben Jacobson, who also plays one of the leads, the film offers up nothing all that new under the sun, with a caper plot that’s too off-the-wall to be convincing. And yet Bunny successfully channels a downtown vibe that seems to be on the verge of extinction.

[López Gallardo] tends to eschew straightforward storytelling for something so elusive that her film nearly escapes us for its first half, until the pieces gradually fit together and we manage to make some sense of the plot, if not entirely what the director is going for.

Do stars Shea Whigham and Carrie Coon manage to make the material feel both fresh and engaging? Yes.

Benyamina has a hard time maintaining her film's pace and plausibility, especially during a third act that slides too far into genre territory and its accompanying clichés.

This superbly crafted yet intimate family drama is so realistic in terms of its setting and technical specificity, it sometimes feels like a documentary. ... It’s perhaps a tad deliberate in spots, hitting its central theme too heavily on the nose, but Proxima pulls off an impressive balancing act between the personal and the astronomical.

As a portrait of French youth ridden by angst and anger toward the powers that be...Nocturama makes an intriguingly cinematic case for showing over telling. But as a depiction of how, and why, terrorists (or anarchists or whatever they are) can take down a city, it falls apart in the face of what happens in the real world.

The issues come clashing together in an explosive package that, despite some snafus, remains fairly riveting to the end.

It’s a rather fascinating bit of artistic self-indulgence that’s both made by, and about, self-indulgent men, although one that can certainly grow taxing. [Unrated Version]

A riveting and often hilarious demonstration of the Slovenian philosopher’s uncanny ability to turn movies inside out and accepted notions on their head.

It’s an extremely honest depiction of adolescence, but one that doesn’t always make for compelling drama. The result is a film that fails to pack a sufficient emotional charge, even if it leaves us longing to know where Enzo will go next.