Jordan Mintzer

If Penn’s point in visiting Ukraine, meeting Zelensky and co-directing Superpower was to make himself heard, then it’s mission accomplished.

The film is so refined and filled with good taste, not to mention poetry citations and dialogue rendered with quotations marks, that it often feels inert.

Take the plot of one of Richard Linklater’s Before movies, combine it with the eye-popping aesthetic of Wes Anderson, then set it within the ethnically diverse, highly photogenic South London enclave of Peckham, and you’ll wind up with Rye Lane.

It’s more like the kind of standard Sundance-bound dramedy we’ve seen lots of times before, albeit with a charming cast and some sharp bits of commentary on race, identity and gender that come courtesy of screenwriter Adrian Tomine, who adapted his 2007 graphic novel of the same title.

Many cinephiles are nostalgics at heart, and the story of how Kim’s Video was founded, lost and eventually found again seems to reflect a greater story about how the cinema, whether consisting of Palme d’Or winners or Z-grade slashers, has been pushed to the margins of popular culture — to be fondly remembered in documentaries like this.

Tantura finally attempts to get the record on that incident straight, but as a movie, it serves an even greater purpose by bringing it to a wider public than ever before.

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.

The Last Out is a moving reminder of how hard it is to make it to the big leagues.

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.

There’s definitely some gas in its tank in the opening sections, which are somewhat promising, but then the story takes a predictable route that fails to deliver enough suspense or interest to go the full distance.

Like the previous Kirikou movies, the combination of classic animation and straightforward storytelling provides a welcome antidote to the kind of overcaffeinated cartoons gracing today’s screens.

There’s lots on the menu, and León de Aranoa brings it all together in a smooth manner. But the jokes tend to be too broad, and the themes too tritely handled.

What makes his story particularly compelling is that most of it is true.

Paris Memories is a mystery movie, with Mia, like Guy Pearce’s character in Memento, following various leads and fractured memories to get to the truth. It’s also a story of emotional renewal, chronicling the phases of recovery that follow in the wake of a major catastrophe, with all the ups and downs that entails.

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.

Mysius goes all out here, but her film overshoots its target by a few miles, even if the mise-en-scène is inspired and lead Adèle Exarchopoulos excellent as always.

It’s a great movie both in scope and in what it’s trying to say about Iran through the story of one family’s countless hardships. As a filmmaker, Roustaee aims so high and wide that even if he misses his mark at times, he manages to find his own stirring voice.

It’s far from subtle filmmaking, but Holy Spider is equal parts gripping and disturbing, and not always for the squeamish.

Despite a shred of story that’s told episodically, EO, which clocks in at a concise 86 minutes, can be an engrossing experience.

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.

This is masterly understated filmmaking marked by a few stand-out sequences, particularly a one-shot town hall meeting that lasts for an entire reel and throws all the issues on the table before erupting into chaos.

Overlong and overdramatic, the two-hour-plus biopic does feature some exquisite filmmaking, in scenes where the romanticism of Tchaikovsky’s music is met with flowing camera movements that capture the action in artfully staged tableaux.

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.

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 subtleties and vagaries of human behavior sometimes get lost in the sheer mundanity of the action, although the film gradually builds toward a meaningful depiction of what charity actually means — and it’s far from what the volunteers set out to do in the first place.

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

[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.

The result is a somewhat uneasy mix of social critique and bizarre sex drama in which Guiraudie seems to be spitballing different ideas without making all of them stick.