Lee Marshall

What it does feel is a little cerebral, rather wary of engaging too deeply with its characters. The effect is both alienating and refreshing.

A rich, densely cinematic film, it is a stunning assured debut from young Filipino filmmaker Rafael Manuel.

Hardly a second too long despite its almost two-hour running time, this urgent, absorbing documentary should be required viewing for those, inside or outside the United States, who are struggling to make sense of the recent presidential election. It will also speak to anyone interested in the battle over books and gender issues that has been raging for some time now in the American educational sector.

If the film doesn’t always mesh its two main strands – tough family drama and reflections on the state of a nation – it does so often enough and passionately enough to impress.

Gavagai is refreshingly grown-up in the way it sets up satirical targets and then complicates them – pointing out, for example, that tensions around caste, exclusion of the ‘other’ and the guilt of privilege are not the exclusive preserves of white people.

Hadzihalilovic is a director who refuses to compromise her very distinctive vision and that is the case here, even if The Ice Tower, which bows in Berlin Competition, is her biggest film to date; utterly beautiful in every frame with a breakout lead performance by young French actress Clara Pacini.

To the outsider, Naples is often seen as a city of colour and life, a place of bubbling exuberance. Not so in Giancarlo Rosi’s strikingly melancholic documentary portrait of the southern Italian metropolis.

Francois Ozon’s adaptation is at its best when it sticks to the letter and tone of Camus’ enduring, enigmatic novella.

The director’s latest has a lot to say about families and generational relationships, but this is also a film of quiet charm, anchored by a scatter of joyful performances.

The main thing with a rousing cinematic experience like Architecton is that it wins the emotional argument.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to say what A Private Life is trying to say, but remarriage comedies don’t really need to be anything more than that – and the ending is winsome enough to make up for that second-act wobble.

Amrum is something of a departure for Akin, the kind of precision miniature work that can be achieved on a smaller canvas.

Packed with dazzling sets and effects, and touching on multiple genres and styles, it is a sometimes exhausting ride – especially when we’re struggling to engage with a changing cast of characters rooted in Chinese places, history, legend and religion. But it’s also a memorable and exhilarating one.

Reticence is also the keynote of The History of Sound’s two riveting central performances.

Street-shot, cluttered and claustrophobic, Left-Handed Girl is both fast and slow, moving along at a relentless pace yet taking time to advance a storyline that turns out to be about the precariousness of women’s independence and the perpetuation of male privilege – sometimes by the very women that suffer under it.

There’s a nicely intimate side to Ducornau’s urge to dig beneath the flesh here, a ‘soft body horror’ simulacrum of the hormonal changes this adolescent girl is going through.

This affectionate homage to a slice of urban French cool that has rarely been equalled is also a nostalgic tribute to a time and place of extraordinary creative ferment and cinematic sex appeal.

Lovingly shot in warm natural light, and accompanied by a gentle, lilting soundtrack, Holy Cow is shot through with compassion for its rascally yet vulnerable protagonist.

Blue Moon, which plays out on the night of the premiere of Rogers and Hammerstein’s first hit, Oklahoma!, is a romantic, funny, moving, life-affirming chamber piece that is itself a great example of a three-way creative collaboration – between director Richard Linklater, writer Robert Kaplow and actor Ethan Hawke.

Limber and thought-provoking, An Unfinished Film is an absorbing portrait of an unfinished era.

Writer-director Glasner’s control of tone in a potential misery fest that – believe it or not – contains a bunch of laugh-out-loud moments is pitch perfect, most of the time.

It is a sentimental journey to redemption but one that Boonnitipat grounds in understanding and empathy.

Director Jon Watts’ self-penned script possesses a faultless sense of timing, and it becomes the gift that keeps on giving in the hands of Clooney, Pitt and a fine supporting cast.

It’s both an elegy for, and triumph of, Hong Kong genre cinema.

The circle of life and death may be warped and buckled in Hounds, but nobody can stop it turning.

A suffocating slipknot drama, it embeds violence and extortion in a destructive ecosystem, showing that every favour is loaded, every gift poisoned, every debt unpayable. Brutality never cleanses in Kim’s impressive debut; it simply engenders more brutality.

It’s a modern melodrama that dances through a moral maze, sometimes uncomfortably so. Yet, coming from a filmmaker who has always been preoccupied with the roots and the dynamics of male violence, it poses an intriguing central question.

Bird spreads its wings slowly, but ends up soaring away from its dingy broken-Britain locations in a moving flight of hope and empowerment.

Another End has a lot going for it, not least its command of audiovisual atmosphere and the way it makes the audience work to join the narrative dots before delivering a sucker punch final twist that will encourage lively post-screening debate.

With a running time of four hours, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros is a marathon, even by Wiseman’s leisurely standards. But it is an absorbing film, a forest full of trails for viewers to wander in.

Writer-director Andrea Di Stefano crafts a tense yet also rather moving thriller-melodrama out of the most cliched premise: a cop who is talked into running a favour for a gangland boss on his last night before retiring. It’s been a while since we’ve seen such a stylish Italian crime thriller.

The gritty realism of Io Capitano’s story is leavened throughout by recognizably ‘Garronian’ touches; pools of magic realism, theatrical set pieces of colourful intensity.

Set in Rome’s sprawling Cinecittà studios in their 1950s heyday, Finally Dawn is a rich, shape-shifting fairy tale, an odyssey of empowerment about a vulnerable girl navigating her way through a day and night of enchantments and dangers, using her weakness as a kind of magic shield.

It is an absorbing film of quiet power.

To reveal much at all about the film’s abrupt change of register around two-thirds of the way in would be unfair. Suffice to say that if The Mountain has been a very austere, mid-life-male variation on Into The Wild up to now, it soon feels like we are watching a Gaspar Noé movie, with a little dose of Miyazaki thrown into the mix.

Klondike is both despairing – sometimes in a blackly comic vein – and empathetic in the way it sees the incident from the ground up rather than from the sky down.

A welcome return ... The Book of Solutions is an ode to time-wasting distractions and shelved projects, one that suggests that perhaps it’s here, rather than in the boring finished stuff, that you can find an artist’s soul.

Kidnapped hides a bleak and bracing message inside lovely old costumes and sumptuous set pieces .

Featuring a compelling central performance from Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall takes a while to engage, but turns into a twisty, thought-provoking drama.

About Dry Grasses is a ravishingly cinematic piece of work that seems designed to spark animated, if not acrimonious, debate.

In the end, there’s something just a little too neatly constructed about Monster, something just a little trite about the message delivered after so many narrative twists and turns. Yet there is an emotional delicacy here too that keeps sentiment at bay, at least most of the time.

Ukrainian director Maksym Nakonechnyi’s debut feature is a sensitive, nuanced meditation on war and its effects on the psyche of individuals and nations.

Moretti has once again found a way to make a picture that creates edgy comedy out of a process of self-therapy. Some will find the exercise wearyingly self-centred, but that’s to miss the point of a film which turns one man’s obsessions into a comedie humaine.

An engaging, authentic, moving film about the way society persists in seeing monsters where there are none.

It’s an engaging drama, if not an especially resonant one

The film’s delicacy of touch comes through not only in the bittersweet love story at its centre, but in a wealth of seemingly marginal details.

The subtext of In Viaggio (which translates as ‘Travelling’) is that it is while on the road, away from the close confines of the Vatican, that Pope Francis is at his most uninhibited and, therefore, most revealing.

In the end, there’s perhaps just too much sheen to this heartfelt portrait for it to really bite. But it remains a touching tribute to a woman who, von Trotta suggests, pitted a radical desire to question everything against the comfortable certainties of the men who surrounded her.

Johnson and co-writer Matthew Miller turn the story of RIM’s brisk rise and meteoric fall into a kind of breathless tech fever dream, a relentless but addictive downbeat human comedy about the struggle to stay on top in a fast-moving industry.

Kohn constructs a thought-provoking film that is also an entertaining human comedy.

The resulting film is both warm and reticent at the same time, so keen to cleave to reality that it shuns dramatic fireworks – particularly in its gentle, muted ending.

Dead for a Dollar is a revisionist western served up in a traditional twine-tied package.

By the end, loving and eating, wanting and devouring are made to converge in ways that are both gruesome and fascinating, thought-provoking and oddly touching.

Visually inventive, wryly satirical, White Noise the film leaves viewers to apply DeLillo’s sometimes prescient visions of a morally and physically diseased America to post-pandemic 2022 as they see fit. But it still has a lot going for it, much of it entertaining.

It’s a tragedy of sorts, one that at times is almost too dark to bear. But there are moments too when Hold Me Tight achieves something quite remarkable, blurring the line between reality and imaginings to burrow into the heart of grief and loss in ways that are also life-affirming.

In the end, this is a film that is more emotionally than sexually voyeuristic.

For resilient audiences, it provides a truly original cinematic experience. ‘Cinematic’ is a key word: the film was lavishly shot using three 4K Canon Black Magic Pocket cameras and comes with a rich soundscape that pushes the oneiric envelope and takes certain scenes into paranoid-thriller genre territory.

Martone crafts a passionate, angry film that is full of atmosphere and great performances, but never fully convincing or compelling as a drama

It’s tribute to Mungiu’s bravura as a writer and director that, despite the fact that he never quite finishes unpacking a suitcase full of themes and ideas, R.M.N. is never less than an absorbing watch.

Bouzid’s film is also warm, passionate and sexy in a well-read kind of way – a surefire route to wider arthouse acceptance.

A minor but still fun-in-parts addition to his wacky oeuvre.

Making a great documentary is half finding the right story, half knowing what to do with it. Ramin Bahrani hits the jackpot on both counts in this slyly entertaining but also morally and emotionally resonant investigation.

Courage becomes not so much a study of a brave political theatre troupe but a portrait of a country at the crossroads, one that is likely to resonate with audiences worldwide.

Perhaps the most persuasive aspect of this hopeful parable of failure is the way casting, acting, script, and camerawork conspire to usher us into an immediately believable world which is observed with a painterly eye yet never seems staged.

While it smoulders with indignation for the injustice that was perpetrated for so many years, Great Freedom is also a love story, a remarkable character study, and an absorbing meditation on what long-term imprisonment for a crime that is not a crime does to the soul.

It’s a lean drama that cuts no slack.

This tense, memorable study of one man’s breakdown and the unreliable stories it generates may not live up to the promise of its first excellent half hour, but it is still an audacious piece of filmmaking, one that imprints a memorably skewed worldview on the ears and retina.

Il Buco proves that cinema still has the capacity to astonish in a very innocent, childlike way as a medium in which light illuminates a black screen and creates beauty.

There’s a slight lack of dramatic tension in much of the lead-up to its harrowing finale, with too much weight placed on the capable shoulders of the French-Romanian actress Anamaria Vartolomei.

There are moments when, like the gaudy lights of Acapulco, Sundown flickers into something rather special when seen from the right angle, in the right mood: a film about a goodbye to life which is also a film about a kind of afterlife.

Its odd meld of drab suburban casinos, wrapped motel rooms, nightmarish Iraqi torture sequences and military correctional facilities where the furniture is bolted to the floor, all build to a video-artist vision that comes bursting surprisingly out of an old-school box – and results in one more male-slanted Paul Schrader script about a haunted man at a crossroads.

This comfortable armchair of great, old-school cinematic craft is made all the more embracing by Iglesias’s nuanced soundtrack. But we’re jolted out of that seat, and made to stand in admiration, as the film deftly weaves together two tales of removal – one maternal, the other political and historic.

It’s a film that rises above a few heavy-handed directorial touches to weave, over its admirably lean running time, a tapestry of sisterly bonds and fissures that also has plenty to say about the film’s setting, the dense, oppressive urban Palermo.

The nothing much that unfurls over the following eighty or so minutes feels like everything.

There are times when the crunch of the gears can almost be heard as the director shifts up to this new expanded allegorical register, moments when we yearn for a little more depth in the film’s exposé of the inner workings of the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta, and scenes in which the freshness of the director’s improvisational work with actors doesn’t quite disguise a lack of character development. But the intensity of Swamy Rotolo’s central performance and the story’s fiery commitment to her character sweep most of these quibbles aside.

It is both a passionate exposé of a serious injustice and a big emotional ride that is also prepared to take some interesting risks in its journey towards a old-school tear-jerker finale.

Nobody is quite perfect here, nobody fully the villain; and as our suspicions wax and wane about Rahim himself, we, the audience, become the emotional repositories of these constantly shifting grey areas.

The writer-director’s evident anger is tempered and fragmented by both fatalism, games of truth and lies, self-doubt and frequent reminders, in this Biblical landscape, of the historical and geological long view. Ahed’s Knee also works, perhaps surprisingly, as a drama that crackles with a never-consumed sexual energy.

Natural Light is a tough, slow film that makes demands on its audience – though much of the real horror is as just-off-screen for us as it is for Corporal Semetka. But it’s also an absorbing, beautifully crafted, thought-provoking addition to the new Hungarian cinematic wave.

This is a ‘minor’ Hong compared to some of the sixteen films he has premiered since 2010 . . . But it’s still a delight, a wistful, smart, chamber piece that gently teases out questions about whether you can love someone without controlling them in some way, whether acting can be sincere or sincerity can be an act, and how much of our life in the present and future is conditioned by our life in the past (a lot, as it turns out – but we knew that already).

The energy and passion of Zbanic’s fresh, new, direct gaze at the conflict comes through in every frame.

It’s the empathy Syversen and her lead actress evoke for a free spirit battered into submission that is this tough little film’s greatest achievement.

Wiseman’s true subject here is arguably off-screen, shamed by example, guilty in absentia: the erosion of democratic values and civil, civic debate in an increasingly divided country.

Access is all in Rosi’s documentaries, and the access he achieves, winning the confidence of his subjects so that it’s as if he isn’t there while filming their most intimate moments, is astonishing. But access has its limits. While our hearts open up to these traumatised kids, being there with them in the room at this delicate moment doesn’t feel quite right.

This is an atmospherically shot film about African oral culture, about riots, street musicians and storytellers. But it also uses the space and denizens of the prison as a metaphor for the divisions and tensions within Ivorian society.

Mandibles is far from derivative, and Dupieux goes beyond the usual “Love you bro!” buddy-film clichés to draw something genuine, even heartwarming, out of the friendship between these two idiots.

What is so compelling is the picture I Am Greta pieces together of Thunberg herself.

Its old-school charm shades into tired plotting more than once, and the moral lesson concealed in the film’s central story about a gang of tykes’ search for buried treasure can feel a little preachy.

The Truffle Hunters is a film as distinctive and lingering as the scent of the rare tuber that inspires it.

This taut, accomplished film recounts a dark episode in Guatemala’s history as a suspense-laden ghost story based on a myth deeply rooted in indigenous Latin American culture.

Weisse puts her own, distinctive spin on this film, keeping the audience guessing about whose story this really is, feeling its way slowly towards a bracing, risky dramatic conclusion that suddenly reshuffles the cards we’ve been dealt.

The film’s most rewarding strand is the inventive, pointed way in which clothes and textiles are used as metaphors both for female constraints and female defiance.

In a film lasting a shade over two hours, consisting of just 46 separate shots, the undisputed emperor of Taiwanese slow cinema crafts a ravishing, wordless story of urban loneliness.

Petzold’s lean, crisply-shot tale is a deft shape-changer, switching mood and register, interlacing romance with suspense and sudden jabs of humour.

The pleasure of watching five fine actors feed on each other’s crackling dramatic energy drives this sensitive if not exactly groundbreaking Swiss cancer drama.

Babyteeth is a funny, affecting group portrait, a comedy-tinged family drama.

A very European film of charm and wit that hits the occasional emotional high note, and sees Catherine Deneuve embracing her tastiest role since Potiche with verve and gusto.

There’s a discourse going on here about family and memory, about what we lose if we turn ourselves into work machines who can “pull a 48” (go for 48 hours without sleep) that leeches subtly into the fabric of Kreutzer’s psycho-drama, buoyed by a fine use of setting, camera focus and colour.