Jordan Mintzer

French feel-good filmmaking to the max. Yet a heaping pile of cliches doesn't prevent this touchingly simplistic tale -- from exuding a strong and universal emotional appeal.

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

Ameur-Zaïmeche remains vague, perhaps frustratingly so, about his movie's identity — per the closing credits it was mostly shot in the South of France — but what he says about fear and isolation in a totalitarian society has a universal tinge.

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.

A film that can be somewhat conventional in form, including a score that overdoes it on the pathos, but one that still provides a fascinating deep dive into organized failure.

[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.

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

The Ice Tower doesn’t grip you as much as it asks you to gaze at its hazy, nightmarish imagery, and either fall under its sway — or not.

Picture initially suggests a sort of Gallic "Damages," with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier in the Glenn Close and Rose Byrne roles, but the corporate catfight soon gives way to a cleverly designed whodunit.

The film maintains a certain level of suspense as it leaps between various epochs, often without warning. But, like many of Bonello’s movies, it lacks forward momentum and a sharp edit, lumbering along as it reaches into a grab bag of thematic and aesthetic concepts.

Barbet Schroeder offers up a touching look at unrequited love and neglected memory with the simpatico two-hander, Amnesia.

The fact that the director once again displays a true mastery of his craft, from Deffontaines’ exquisite framing to the decision to record all the songs live rather than having them lip-synched (apparently one of the only times this has been done since Straub-Huillet’s 1975 movie Moses and Aron), makes for a transfixing, if sometimes excruciating, cinematic experience.

With such well-tuned performances and scattered intensity, it's unfortunate that the technical aspects of the film are not always up to par.

Diciannove is unflinchingly honest about what it’s like to be 19, and, for the most part, totally lost. And Tortorici’s insistence on capturing that feeling while avoiding the usual narrative tropes is what makes his film both fascinating and somewhat impenetrable.

An aesthetically arresting hit man story that gets by more on its craftsmanship than on its minimalist, borderline ham-fisted narrative, Salvo nonetheless marks an impressive feature debut from Italian writing-directing duo Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza.

Good luck trying to make heads or tails of it, but as an eye-popping exercise in cinematic strangeness, 9 Fingers is a rare breed.

There are definitely more worthy endeavors than circling the globe in search of the perfect cut of meat, but French producer-director Franck Ribiere nonetheless delivers an absorbing, and often enlightening, quest for the world’s greatest sirloin in his exhaustive food documentary, Steak (R)evolution.

It’s a must-see for anyone interested in the mind of a major auteur, even if Thomsen tends to favor psychology over cinema.

The sadistic horror comedy Safe Neighborhood is the kind of film that’s tough to categorize but easy to enjoy, especially if you like watching teenagers do some very twisted things for the holiday season.

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.

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.

Most romantic dramas go from meet-cute to hooking up to some kind of major dilemma, but The Sun Rises on Us All heads more or less in the opposite direction.

Like the investigation itself, the meaning of Only the River Flows gradually finds its focus as the story progresses, leaving the viewer staring into the same abyss the detective does — an abyss that, as in any respectable film noir, stares back at him.

Despite some narrative cliches, the painstaking way that the movie documents a very dark period in Cambodian history is a noteworthy achievement.

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.

The painstaking work done by Kobiela and Welchman to turn some of the artist’s most prized canvases into animated scenes can be impressive to behold.

It’s definitely an over-the-top finale, and not everything ultimately seems real in King Ivory. But what makes Swab’s latest rise above your average drug thriller is how he tries to make each moment feel like it’s been drawn from a certain reality.

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.