Lee Marshall

Ben’Imana is a film that works by accretion, layering its stories, characters and themes like the colourful textiles seen in robes, scarves, curtains, bedcovers, school uniforms, or, in one devastating scene, the torn clothes of massacred children, unearthed in a garden.

Full Phil is a work of art masquerading as a B-movie, a film of depth and strange fascination – one that ends in a moment of body horror that turns strangely tender. It’s difficult to think of many other contemporary cineastes who could pull that off.

Everything is in flux in The Dreamed Adventure, even the genre of a film that shape-shifts between noir, western and romance. At its heart is the director’s extraordinary deployment of a cast of non-professionals who seem to carry their own stories with them in every line and gesture.

Smoothly executed throughout, Avedon displays some snappy editing allowing for flow. It may be couched in admiring tones but it is persuasive in arguing why the photographer mattered, and why he seemed most at home and in control from behind a camera lens.

More effective as an earnest, cumulative emotional journey than as a viewing experience made up of rather random parts, La Bola Negra does eventually repay some of the batter

Its cold precision thaws in a way that is uncharacteristic for Mungiu, leaving us with a thought-provoking drama about conflicting values that feels, in the end, a little bloodless and underpowered.

There’s plenty of food for thought here, but the script’s penchant for saccharine touches – one aided and abetted by a lilting string-led soundtrack that turns to treacle a little too often – undercuts the authority of the film’s philosophical musings.

Goodman emerges as a passionate advocacy journalist but also a well-navigated professional who is wise to the tricks of the trade and prepared to use them.

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

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.

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.

This spiky black comedy is smart, cool and occasionally funny, in a bleakly cynical way, but it’s also surprisingly dull for long periods.

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.

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

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.