Kate Taylor

The film's bitter exposé of life under a theocracy is unforgettable

Mainly the director’s decision to eschew the pulpit in favour of the parishioners pays off handsomely, creating an unaffected yet touching account of this civil-rights victory.

For all that Silence is a gorgeous film filled with imagery that is sometimes startling and often compelling, the director sadly fails in a passion project decades in the making: This is a long and dull costume drama that seems to think a contemporary audience can picture faith as easily as it does a cassock, cross or kimono.

If it weren’t for Binoche’s warmth, the film might easily sink beneath the stereotype of French culture as overly talky and sex obsessed.

Billed by the director as his tribute to cinema, One Second is affectionate and sweet – perhaps a bit too sweet, considering this premiere was much delayed after the film was held back by the Chinese government for supposed technical reasons in 2019.

Turtletaub has some difficulty ending the film, which resolves itself with one too many closeups of Macdonald gazing out at the world, whether from a lakeshore or a train window, as both the script and its director struggle to figure out what happens next.

The concept and the laughs hold strong amid all the craziness because Seligman has such affectionate sympathy for her mendacious protagonist.

This Spanish-language satire of the film industry, from the Argentinian duo Mariano Cohn and Gaston Duprat, is one big and delightful inside joke for the art-house aficionado.

Qu’s symbolism, including a giant statue of Marilyn Monroe in her provocative Seven-Year-Itch pose presiding over an empty beachfront playground, is big, bold and impressively cinematic, thanks also to cinematographer Benoît Dervaux.

And therein lies the difficulty of adapting Indignation for the screen; remove Roth’s prose from the equation and you don’t have much left. Writer and director James Schamus turns Indignation into a minor period piece, a precise but seemingly pointless evocation of the stultifying conventionalism of an American university campus in the 1950s.

It’s a film full of delicate metaphors and gentle humour – the locals have elaborate rules for giving a warning honk of the horn on their one-track road but refuse a simple suggestion to widen it – and meanders, sometimes a bit elliptically, to its conclusion.

What makes it downright offensive are all the romance-novel flourishes that Leonard and the melodramatically inclined director James Foley, also new to the franchise, bring to glittering three-dimensional life in Fifty Shades Darker.

Ultimately this political film’s sentimentality and transparency detract from its power.

Zootopia takes the cultural practice of posing animals as human characters to queasy new heights.

The story is running a bit thin by the end, yet the almost comic character of the investigative detective is underused. Still, the unlikely presence of Guangzhou, steamy by day, gritty by night, and the shifting viewpoints on the accident add an engaging originality.

The meta-fiction may be overdone, but that and the director’s feeling for tone create the expansive atmosphere in which a talented multiracial cast lead by Dev Patel can master everything from pure melodrama to high comedy.

By the time we make it to the present, oddly represented by a towering digitized city and a handful of white children playing in an idyllic American setting, it becomes clear Mallick has little space for the multifaceted human race in his gorgeous cosmos.

DeGeneres goes much further, though, maintaining a delicate balance between Dory’s optimistic personality and the hovering anxieties created by her imperfect memory.

Human Flow ventures further into pure documentary than Ai's previous work in that field but it's still an art film, with a circular rhythm to its scenes, lingering imagery and a prolonged running time of 140 minutes.

Director Jon Favreau (Iron Man) is highly adept at having his cake and eating it, too, throughout the film, wowing audiences with effects and amusing them with talking animals, all the while insisting The Jungle Book is a difficult story about a human whose presence threatens to disrupt the jungle’s peace.

If this doc is sometimes elegiac in tone, there is nothing mournful about it. Dorfman is too much the odd-ball optimist, telling funny anecdotes – a lifelong friendship with poet Allen Ginsberg began when she was a young publishing-house secretary and he asked for some mysterious thing called “the can” – and tossing off provocative insights into the nature of photography and life.

The key problem is the figure of Naomi, clawing her way to the top and desperate to stay there. Gunn plays her as mightily determined and potentially abrasive.

Whatever you think of Greenpeace’s less well-considered antics over the years, How to Change the World is a compelling story of one environmentalist’s remarkable combination of prescience, grit and timing.

Director Mouly Surya’s unwavering conviction in her material (co-written with Rama Adi and Garin Nugroho) and her star – Marsha Timothy plays Marlina as fearful and indignant but ever composed – create a film that is simultaneously charming and grisly.

As Herzog spirals from the achievements and dangers of the Net to topics such as communication with space colonies or the likelihood that solar flares will reduce the world to flood and famine if they knock out all connectivity, it is hard to know how much of this futuristic stuff to believe.

The brazenness of her actions and opacity of her emotions suggest a tragic heroine in the grand tradition – the novel is the basis for the Shostakovich opera of the same title – but the film lacks the propulsive drive to make her fate moving.

It is tempting to compare her to Princess Diana, a narcissistic media manipulator on the one hand and a sensitive woman deeper than the icon she has created on the other. But Corsage is a work of fiction, and its main character is, thankfully, far more complicated and interesting than the real thing.

This film, about a French war correspondent and the Kurdish Amazon with whom she is embedded, has the worthy intention of telling the story of the women’s battalions in Kurdistan, but it’s formulaic and melodramatic.