Leonardo Goi

After the Hunt aims to tackle our so-called cancel culture, but wrestling with that weighty topic isn’t the same as meaningfully reckoning with it; if there’s anything genuinely uncomfortable about Guadagnino’s film, it’s not button-pushing issues but the reactionary way it squanders them.

Queer’s hollowness––its inability to fully flesh out its hero’s psyche––feels all the more conspicuous: a failure of the imagination.

Besson hopscotches from slapstick comedy to lachrymose junctures where Landry Jones is asked to conjure a sense of catharsis Dogman never really earns. His performance is a showcase of primal gestures and bare-breasted torment, but what the actor’s tasked with embodying isn’t a character, only the chrysalis of one.

A Brighter Tomorrow may be soaked in nostalgia, but it’s a nostalgia with a reactionary twang. Its title, in retrospect, feels oddly ironic. This is a screed from a director unwilling to look at the future with more than just contempt, where the “tomorrow” is really just a rose-tinted fantasia of long gone past.

Blanchett gives a committed turn as the conflicted nun, but all her emphatic exertions cannot resurrect a story that forsakes its mysticism for a calculated parable, as well-intentioned as it is turgid.

There’s no denying the affection Winocour pours into Mia’s healing. For a drama dealing with a wound that’s still unbearably vivid, Memories is both tactful and heartfelt. But as time went on I found myself wondering how much more affecting the film might have turned out had Winocour chosen to complicate some of its heavy-handed metaphors and cliches.

A Girl Missing feels just as lost and hapless as its lead–more than on a quest for vengeance, a woman in search of a fully shaped self.

Take it as a real-time thriller, an intelligently crafted study in cinematic minimalism, and 7500 works. The trouble starts when Vollrath’s feature debut (a follow-up to his 2015 Oscar-nominated short Everything Will Be Okay) attempts the landing.

Matthias & Maxime lacks the raw, blazing energy Dolan can excel at.