Jordan Mintzer

The difference here is how explicitly that tragedy appears, whereas the director built much of her best work on nuance and suggestion — on the viewer experiencing events rather than fully grasping them. The Fence features some of that moody allusiveness as well, but ultimately plays like the minor work of a still major filmmaker.

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.

For a story primarily about the dregs of modern life, what’s most admirable about At Work is how it never succumbs to pure miserablism, leaving us with the feeling that if Paul somehow managed to adapt to this brand new, horrible world, perhaps so can we.

Time stands still and leaps across the epochs in Below the Clouds, which reveals how much our world has been transformed over the millennia, while also remaining the same.

Remake is certainly a movie about memory, especially bad memories, but in a Proustian sense it’s a movie in search of lost time — both the time McElwee spent with his son and the time slipping away as the director and his peers grow old and die.

Camus’ formidable antihero may be lost to his own demons, as well as to the demons of colonialism, but Ozon boldly suggests that the memory of his Algerian victim may live on as a harbinger of what’s to come — that is, of a time when rebels like Meursault no longer exist, in a country finally free of them.

Neither Baranov nor Putin — nor the many oligarchs, whether dead or alive — are the protagonists of The Wizard of the Kremlin, whose main character is ultimately Russia itself. In that sense, Assayas has crafted an ambitious chronicle that serves up plenty of compelling facts, but never turns them into the stuff of legend.

The Smashing Machine’s greatest attribute may be the way much of it doesn’t feel fake at all.

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.

Matarrese may be capturing a tiny utopia in one public hospital in northern Italy, but his movie leaves us with the hope that, sooner than later, such a place may not be so unique.

Shot in grainy 16mm to better capture the mood of the epoch, Broken Voices keeps its drama grounded in the social and cultural realities of its time. Provaznik coaxes strong performances from the young cast, whether in their chorus rehearsals or behind the scenes.

Going way, way back, at least to The Great Train Robbery in 1903, the western remains one of cinema’s oldest genres — and certainly the one where it feels like everything’s already been done. It’s therefore all-the-more disappointing when a brand new western, like Richard Gray’s gunslinging geezer flick The Unholy Trinity, brings nothing original to the table, rehashing movies we’ve seen before and doing it in a way that feels altogether generic.

We don’t always know what, exactly, we’re watching in Architecton, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is how the movie offers us a new way of seeing — not only seeing our planet of stone and cement, of rocks and ruins, but seeing movies in general.

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.

The film isn’t a total misfire, and it conveys a strong, at times moving message about the sacrifices required in love and marriage, especially during a period as chaotic as the post-war era. But it does so in ways that can feel overcooked and clichéd, relying more on melodramatic tropes than on the subtle drama found in Quillévéré’s previous works.

Yes may be purposely over-the-top and unsettling to watch — at two and a half hours, it won’t win over audiences looking for light arthouse fare — but Lapid is trying to show us that it’s hardly an exaggeration of the truth, or at least his own truth about his homeland.

As unwieldy as this melodrama is, much of it proves that Roustaee remains a gifted young director who surely has more stories to tell.

There’s a hopefulness in Bi’s enigmatic concoction, not necessarily in what it’s saying but in how it’s being said, finding exquisite new forms in old and dead ones so that the cinema can keep on living.

It’s a thought-provoking subject that probably plays better on paper than on screen, urging us to seek out the writer’s books once the movie is over.

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.

Once again navigating a labyrinth of corruption and bad behavior inside contemporary Egypt, writer-director Tarik Saleh delivers another solid, thought-provoking thriller with Eagles of the Republic.

Bonnin, who adapted the script with Dimitri Lucas from her César award-winning short, offers up a boilperlate coming-home scenario bolstered by a few keen observations and a fair amount of charm.

Panahi’s latest feature is a straightforward 24-hour narrative staged with his usual attention to realistic detail, and backed by a terrific ensemble cast. Subtly plotted like a good thriller, the movie slowly but surely builds into a stark condemnation of abusive power and its long-lasting effects.

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.

Impeccably directed and impressively acted, this slow-burn story of political injustice is filled to the brim with atmosphere — specifically the stifling, claustrophobic atmosphere of the U.S.S.R. at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge.

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.

It can impress with its utter originality and technical know-how, but there’s so much going on for so long that many viewers will be exhausted by the midway point, if not earlier.

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.