Lee Marshall

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.

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

This sprawling, meandering compendium of dispossessed people in transit is a profoundly human film, a heartfelt call to empathy, but also something of a politicised nature documentary.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It’s a nice premise, one grounded and lent empathy not only by a series of strong performances but by the script’s point-of-view shifts.

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

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.

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.

If A Quiet Passion grows in stature as we watch, it’s partly thanks to Cynthia Nixon, whose account of a witty, intelligent, rebellious but also reticent and emotionally confused woman takes the edge off Davies’ sometimes grating formalism.

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.

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.

A genuine, likeable, loose-limbed buddy dramedy about impending death.

If it doesn’t tie many (or any) of these thematic strands with a neat bow, that’s in the nature of a film that chooses raw dramatic power over narrative finesse.

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

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.

There’s an air of well-oiled, made-for-TV efficiency about the exercise that extends from Lunchbox director Ritesh Batra’s safe hand on the tiller to Stephen Goldblatt’s golden-light photography.

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.

Staying just on the serious side of funny, Feng’s Mr Six is a fine, savoury creation.

The result is a fascinating but also in some ways frustrating film, a game of tag that looks resoundingly cinematic but feels like more of a cable or VOD prospect - not least because it lacks the killer punch, the Bannon stumble or revelation that would make American Dharma newsworthy.

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.

The film also has plenty to say about male stubbornness and the casual misogyny that lurks behind the apparent equality of Lebanese society.

Shot and edited with Wiseman’s customary poetry and precision, Ex Libris is structured as a series of forays from the Library’s Fifth Avenue heart to its orbiting satellites, and back again.

Like the film, the soundtrack doesn’t quite know where it’s going, but it takes us on a curious and often engaging stroll.

Although it breaks no new ground, there’s heart, humour, charm and even a little healthy mischief in a film that re-imagines the rapprochement between the two former foes.

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.

Singh busts rhymes with the best of them in this energetic, entertaining film that smuggles some urgent social themes in under the cover of a hoary old fable about a handsome pauper who gets the stardom and the girl.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

An enquiry into the brutal rape of a black woman in 1944 Alabama broadens into an alternative, female-gaze civil rights documentary in Nancy Buirski’s latest.

Kechiche has developed an almost unique ability to give surfaces depth through his manipulation of dramatic beats and a quality of empathy that seems built into the roving camera eye.

Rambling but strangely compelling, Oh Mercy!’s documentary bedrock gives the investigation at the heart of the film a real authenticity. From around its midpoint, this uneven film becomes a riveting, compassionate interrogation drama.

Haneke’s magisterial control of tone, actor and shot is not to be underestimated: there are scenes of quiet, nuanced authority and menace here that, true to form, compel our attention with their glacial brilliance.

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

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.

If the intimate frame and dour, matter-of-fact aesthetic suggest a return to the raw territory of La Promesse or The Son, what is new here is a flirtation with genre that lends an extra dose of resonance to a finely-scripted story.

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.

A little too jaunty and picaresque at times, Bye Bye Germany is nevertheless, when it hits its stride, an entertaining, watchable take on the oppressed-minority-comeback genre (“We’re the Jewish revenge”, as one of the salesmen bitterly quips), shadowed at every turn by an unspeakable horror.

A Gentle Creature is a grim state-of-the-nation fable, a bitter mix of tragedy, farce and road movie soaked in the bleak sardonic spirit of Gogol and Dostoyevsky, not to mention gallons of vodka.

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.

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.

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

There’s something for everyone in Downsizing - just not a full meal.

The humanity of the enterprise, hovering between sympathy and ironic detachment, keeps the script on course, delivering a story that for all its motley-band-of-brothers clichés feels as authentic as many more pious takes on the Bosnian conflict.

Gatta Cenerentola is on one level a noirish spin on a popular fable, but its real resonance derives from its stimulating contribution to a long-running dialogue...about the good creative and evil destructive demons that pull southern Italy’s largest city alternately towards hope and despair.

It is, in essence, the celebrated ‘cosmic’ sequence from the Tree of Life expanded into a full-length feature, and many of the audio-visual tableaux it weaves are astonishing, mesmerising, delightful. The problem is that they are not also informative.

Miike is on fine form, never losing his sense of humour, or sense of character, even as yet another axe is embedded in yet another skull.

There’s plenty to admire in this trim, nearly dialogue-free 97-minute drama, not least Mads Mikkelsen’s raw performance as a downed airman waiting for rescue in the Arctic wastes, and the widescreen majesty of the Icelandic landscapes that stand in for the film’s polar setting.

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

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.

How To Talk To Girls at Parties shouldn’t work, as it feels at times like a film made by a talented student collective who overheard a ‘punk vs aliens’ elevator pitch. But work it does: it’s all a bit mad, but ultimately rather moving.

As fragmented as its title suggests, Pieces of a Woman contains parts of a good film, possibly a great one.

Vaughn brings a tenderness to the role of a man forced into animal violence for the sake of love and the miracle of birth, and the rangy anarchy of Zahler’s deeply kooky film gets under the skin at times. But in the end, you wish some big bad studio boss had been there to cut this director’s cut.

A cinematic symphony more than a classic narrative film, Terrence Malick’s long-awaited The Tree Of Life has moments of breathtaking visual and aural beauty, but in the end it has us longing for the days of Badlands, Days Of Heaven or The Thin Red Line, when the Texan auteur also knew how to spin a good yarn.

It’s a small, worthy, film that works reasonably well, although there’s something a little too linear about its structure.

The script puts artsy effect before character credibility.

Strip the neo-noir style and attitude away from Stefano Sollima’s latest, and you get a not particularly original tale . . . But there is one very attractive bonus, aside from the moody Roman settings: the casting of Pierfrancesco Favino and Toni Servillo.

War On Everyone is essentially a clothes hanger for smart one-liners, verbal and visual, and its success will depend partly on how folks like the look of the clothes hanger.

The script may be a litany of cliches but there’s grit here too, and the vein of documentary truth that pulses behind some rather brazen nationalistic French virtue-signalling keeps us watching.

It’s a strange film, one that feels its way through Hasna’s story, changing tack, trying out different methods – including the casting of three different women as the adult Hasna, one of them the director herself, and a final shift into documentary.

Starting sedately but promisingly, it sails (literally, in one respect) into a perfect storm of heavy-handed symbolism and sentimentality.

Does the alternation between documentary inserts and sci-fi superstructure work? Not always – more than once it’s a wrench to be dragged back to Ghost’s basement. But Kapadia and his co-scribe Tony Grisoni seem to understand that the pummelled audience can take only so much cinematic doomscrolling.

Close Your Eyes finally builds a head of emotional steam in its last half hour, while exploring questions of identity and what remains when memory has gone.

Marcello and his committed, compelling lead actor Luca Marinelli deliver an always watchable take on the hoary old story of the struggling artist that is more interesting in its shape-shifting style and texture than in its rather conventional dramatic core.

As with babymaking, the conception is more fun than the delivery, which comes perilously close to turning our knocked-up heroine’s kill list into a series of very dark alt-comedy sketches.

Although Lost In The Night parades certain familiar Escalante obsessions and contains scenes of striking beauty with something of a Mex-Western feel, it is, at its heart, a fairly conventional crime movie.

What power it has derives from the knowledge that this shocking story actually happened. When that’s the case, it’s maybe good to have it served straight.

Buoyed by two outstanding performances – from Adèle Exarchopoulos and first-time child actress Sally Dramé – and shot in ravishing 35mm, The Five Devils is a finely-crafted drama-genre hybrid, let down only by the fact that the story is a lot less interesting than the themes it carries.

Audiences will likely approach the film a series of sketches linked as much by mood as by theme. Some hit the spot, two or three are laugh-out-loud funny, but others seem little more than space-fillers in a film that is both enjoyable and frustrating.

The Worst Ones is trying to be both a kind of documentary about its own making and a drama about a guy making another film. Unfortunately, the two don’t mesh.

Although There Is No Evil is a brave and impassioned work, the seams show.

Beautifully shot, with a deft command of period detail and a starry ensemble cast, Costner’s Civil-war set epic offers an old-fashioned celebration of the pioneer spirit – and a clutch of storylines that never quite have time to engage before the film moves on.

Only in certain scenes do story and ideas really mesh

The temporal leaps don’t distract us from the fact that the plot is threadbare in places.

It stretches character credibility, and resorts too much to criminal-underworld cliché and the driving pace of its own perpetual motion, which curiously does nothing to paper over the longueurs in certain over-stretched sequences. You come out on a high of sorts – but it soon fades.

The latest film from the prolific Olivier Assayas’ makes for a genial, lolloping ride, but it’s also one that will frustrate those with little patience for the script’s casual attitude to coherence.

Undemonstrative but at the same time oddly compelling - rather like its eponymous main character - Felicité is a challenging, perhaps overlong, but also quietly resonant slice of new African cinema.

Mixing tough US social realism with butch femme poses is an intriguing exercise, although this small, sincere drama never quite resolves the awkwardness of the meld.

There is no faulting the radiant performance of Celeste Dalla Porta in her feature debut. It’s the objectification of her character that’s the issue – plus Sorrentino’s trick, here indulged even more flagrantly than in The Great Beauty, of privileging flashy audio-visual tableaux over narrative coherence.

A meandering, sluggish tale that offers moments of great beauty but ultimately feels like a ragbag, take-your-pick bundle of poetic and spiritual suggestions inspired by China’s great Yangtze River.

A film that, after its initial promise, descends, at times, into TV-historical-drama mannerisms.

We never shake off the feeling we’re watching a filmed play, one whose dramatic crescendos and lulls are relentlessly stagey and stylised.

In the end, for all the plot tension and genre tastiness –underlined by some acidic colour photography and lighting that plays up sickly yellows and purples – there’s just something a little too mannered about the exercise.

Ultimately, all we have to hold on to in a story that lurches inexorably into CGI absurdity is our emotional connection with Stewart’s lost, lonely character.

It’s the tone that’s off here, as it is throughout a film which seems to wink at what it perhaps wants us to see as irony – its soft porn tropes like bondage and flagellation, its over-saturated sci-fi view of a comet’s passing, its horror-influenced vision of the plague – while keeping both eyes firmly open.