Leslie Felperin

The film lucks out by having an intrinsically compelling story, likeable underdog protagonists, and an exotic South Pacific location.

Cookie Queens serves up an eminently accessible and easily meme-able serving of American-girl cuteness, featuring a diverse cast of well-chosen young women.

Without taking any particular stand on whether the Russians decisively swung the result of the 2016 election or just nudged it along, the film makes it clear just how insidious, relentless and brazen their propaganda effort was, seeding memes that metastasized virulently throughout the world.

Like the best comic fantasies, Rumours has more than a grain of tragic truth to it.

Steeped in the gory look, grimy feel and transgressive spirit of the so-called "video nasties" from the 1980s, British meta-minded horror movie Censor offers an admirable pastiche, spiked with black humor.

The whole collaboration feels undeniably stagey, but it’s still an empathic and frequently moving work that touches on the sheer volume of callers that workers like Thompson’s character, often unpaid volunteers, must contend with every day.

It's a film awash in scrupulously researched vintage production design, costumes and above all music, all rendered in a Technicolor palette that will send grandparents and fans of Golden Age cinema swooning with nostalgia.

Even the most racing-averse auds will have to agree this entertaining whiz around the 2010 Isle of Man TT racing event puts across the thrill of the sport.

An utterly fascinating experiment that apparently blends real and faked material to examine notions of celebrity, mental stability and friendship.

The long, unbroken rhythm of Wang’s filmmaking somehow casts a spell, and he certainly has a good eye for characters. That’s a blessing considering how slow and considered the takes are here, watching with equally intense absorption whether the subjects are sleeping on a train or constructing seams or making food. But overall, the lack of differentiation can be wearisome.

Ultimately, Loznitsa builds up a portrait of a bitter clockwork world where the faces of the doomed are above all part of a landscape.

In the end, it plays a little too often like an academic pastiche of horror tropes even though its emotional core rings with resonance.

Downton 2.0 is literally bigger, broader, more gem-encrusted, punctuated with more drone shots and monarchist pomp, and has all the major cast members back in place.

Zero-to-60 speed crazy is pretty much right in Cage’s wheelhouse, and he offers up a perfectly amusing comical workout of the madman shtick he could pretty much do in this sleep at this point. More impressive is Blair, a chronically underused talent who gets to demonstrate her already established flair for comedy and more besides in a role to which she brings a surprisingly level of nuance.

The portrait of a nearly vanished rural way of life remains compelling, and the melodrama engaging enough to suggest this might have been improved by being spread thinner as a TV series.

Despite the strain of what they go through together, Beatriz and Stahl-David have a combustible chemistry together that adds credibility and Thompson clearly has a knack with actors, coaxing sharp, believable performances from all involved — even from actors with relatively small roles.

The jocular, amiable tone helps deliver the more serious social history lesson throughout, even if sometimes it feels like it’s shouting just a little too loudly to wake up the dimmer students at the back of the lecture hall.

The Kitchen also has plenty of inventive ideas, creates heady atmospheres in both its dark and lighter moments, and features vivid performances with a large ensemble.

Although some of the film’s many twists are not that surprising, they’re satisfyingly delivered, and with a strong supporting cast ...plus striking dream imagery, this adds up to arguably the best in the franchise so far.

Brugger ensures it's a fairly entertaining excursion, especially when he starts to enjoy getting into character as the nefarious white man in Africa.

Although the narrative is structured through a highly unbelievable instigating conceit — Zain is trying to sue his own parents in court for giving him life in the first place — Labaki lures such outstanding performances out of the almost entirely non-professional cast and sketches such a credible view of this wretchedly poor milieu that the flaws are mostly forgivable.

Despite it’s entirely predictable, cliché-embracing script, executed with a shrewd mix of forelock-tugging rectitude and cheekiness by director Julian Jarrold (Brideshead Revisited, Kinky Boots), it remains an eminently watchable diversion.

There is a palpable sense that this was made by someone who knows Mumbai backwards and truly loves its ochre-colored streets, cluttered sidewalks and peeling billboards advertising old movie releases, right down to every frayed shred of paper.

Kore-eda keeps the tone mostly light and frothy, infusing the proceedings even at their darkest moments with humor. Although at times it feels like two or three characters too many have been crammed into its two-hour running time, every one of them is likable to some degree, maintaining the generosity of spirit Kore-eda displayed in his previous films.

While there’s no doubt this is the work of a filmmaker entirely in command of her craft, there’s something a trifle academic and dry about the whole exercise, and slightly lacking in narrative cohesion given the nature of its origins.

Like so many of his other movies, it’s pithy, punchy, a little shouty at times, but made with brio and swagger.

It's certainly atmospheric and cool in a new-New Wave way, but really, what's the point?

An amiable comedy about young Glaswegian roughnecks discovering the world of whisky, The Angels’ Share finds helmer Ken Loach and long-term screenwriting partner Paul Laverty in better, breezier form than their rebarbative prior effort, “Route Irish.”

Like the lemon meringue pies and shrimp cocktails it features throughout, Brit comedy-drama Toast is tasty, hearty and rather conventional.

The plot gets itself tangled up in multiple villain strands, but in the main this installment is emotionally weightier and more satisfying than its predecessor.

While managing to deliver enough suspense and bloodletting to appease gore fans, steadily improving helmer Christopher Smith ("Severance") and screenwriter Dario Poloni smuggle in a merciless critique of religious delusion.

Like most Sono pictures, too long. But its gleeful humor and dare-you-to-watch aesthetic will help it rack up kills at specialty fests.

Assembled with seemingly deliberate disjointed editing that scrambles the time line, and shot through with unsettling shock cuts backed by Oliver Coates discordant, droning minimalist score, The Stranger definitely feels like an elevated genre exercise — more challenging than the average crime drama but also more interesting.

Stuffed to its statement earrings with celebrities, fashion folk and comedian chums making cameos, this breezy blast of bawdy jokes and Bollinger product placement should lift spirits in a post-Brexit Britain.

If you prefer to riff on the garment-making angle central to its story, the film is flatteringly and economically cut from fine cloth, cleverly constructed, and only a little marred by flaws in the finishing.

Those who might be able to put aside despair and absorb this strictly as a work of persuasive rhetoric will be impressed with its intellectual scope, the economy of the storytelling in its fictional narrative, the bravura editing and visual panache as it builds a world full of dust, detritus and debased morals.

Denise Ho — Becoming the Song presents a thoughtful, if surprisingly reserved portrait, of Hong Kong-born, Montreal-reared singer Denise Ho, the first Cantopop superstar to come out publicly as gay.

It’s a relief to report that the final film is actually quite charming, thoughtful and as cuddly as a plush toy, albeit one with a few modern gizmos thrown in.

There’s much to admire in the film’s elegantly classical tempo and the way Omirbayev achieves so much with so little.

Along the way, parallels with key characters from the children's stories and their adventures are gestured at vaguely. But the film doesn't particularly require in-depth knowledge of Moominism and can be enjoyed for its bright performances, on-point costumes and sets, and empathic portrait of young love.

Sleeping With Other People is a brittle, bawdy, frequently funny romcom that might be too smart for its own good.

Playing off intense, uncomfortably tight close-ups where the actors show off finely tuned displays of flickering emotions with long shots that emphasize the plush interiors and tidy suburban gardens that surround them, Sud ratchets up the tension expertly.

Helmer James Watkins ("Eden Lake") and scripter Jane Goldman judiciously combine moves from the classic scare-'em-ups with new tricks from recent J-horror pictures to retell Susan Hill's oft-adapted Victorian gothic pastiche.

Although Hill certainly puts in a few sly tips of the hat to canonical and cult favorites and is clearly enjoying exploiting the audience’s expectations of the genre, Dead for a Dollar isn’t an empty nostalgia exercise. Nor is it a revisionist postmodern deconstruction. It’s somewhere between the two, built on a narrative architecture as classical in its vernacular as Doric columns on a bank, but with details that will surely remind audiences of the future that it was made in the 2020s.

Eminently entertaining ... Sure, it shamelessly panders to our collective sense of duty to support the troops — and, of course, also support the families that support the troops — and maybe it's more than a little manipulative and formulaic. But gosh darn it, it's hard not to warm to a film that features an a cappella version of Yazoo's "Only You," a near-derelict car that may or may not be called Shite Rider and Kristin Scott Thomas having a verbal catfight in a parking lot.

The inevitable North American remake will no doubt pump more technology into its iteration, but a more efficient, streamlined approach toward pace and editing wouldn’t have hurt this original and striking work.

Robert Redford’s unabashedly heartfelt but competent tribute to 1960s idealism.

Co-director Starzack was one of the guiding hands behind the series version of Shaun the Sheep, and that experience in the kind of brisk, skit-based comedy that makes the series so charming shows through here in stand-alone scenes.

With its brainy scientist heroine, and surreal, super-kitsch imagery, above-average Japanese anime sci-fi pic Paprika has a better chance than most Nipponese toons of breaking out of the specialty ghetto by appealing to femme auds as well as the genre's core constituency of fanboys.

Amusing, uplifting and about as sugary and teeth-sabotaging as caramelized popcorn, The Beautiful Game celebrates the healing power of team sports for those who might feel more pushed to society’s margins by misfortune or choice.

At heart, it’s a story that shows no clear ending yet, and Noam makes for a fine guide to this purgatory.

Sacrifice is practically a chamber piece, and duly draws its strength from its performances, especially those of Ge and Wang.

Jaunty but thought-provoking.

Dvortsevoy deserves praise for making a film willing to show a woman ready to do anything she can to live, unafraid if those choices make her character unsympathetic.

Perfs, by a mixture of non-pros and little-known thesps, are impressively naturalistic and spontaneous. Ostlund has a knack for comedy, although his script, co-written with Erik Hemmendorff, is a little opaque about where it stands on the morality of each strand’s situation.

Salty, sweet and fun to chew over — sort of like taffy, but not so hard on the dental work — Fun Mom Dinner is a palatable addition to that growing subgenre of bawdy, female-centric comedies.

Curtis ends up making a virtue out of the narrative’s episodic quality, a tendency that’s been criticized in his previous work; the film, like life, is just one damn thing after another, and that’s really the rather lovely point.

As a teaching and consciousness-raising tool, it will be an indispensable resource.

Picture's tone is far more poetic than polemical.

Pic is a little too pleased with its own evenhanded presentation of liberal moral conundrums, but there’s no gainsaying Ostlund’s remarkable achievement in coaxing entirely naturalistic perfs from his young core cast

With acute sensitivity, Brit writer-helmer Joanna Hogg’s third feature, Exhibition, explores the difficulty of telling inside from outside, intimacy from estrangement, and revelation from concealment.

The animation punches well above its weight with properly Looney Tunes-standard sight gags, polished, highly expressive character design, and rendering so intensely computed nearly every barbule and rachis on each individual feather is visible.

Borenstein and Talankin keep the focus mainly on the kids and the slow creep of authoritarianism, rather than the adults, but Pasha’s voiceover and occasional address to camera hint at qualities the filmmakers seem hesitant to discuss.

Bolshoi Babylon explores the bizarre case in more detail, but grows even more interesting when it examines how this storied cultural institution struggles to survive tempestuous politics both inside and outside the theater walls.

Seductive and repellent by turns, it’s a title that will provoke fierce love-or-hate reactions, but there’s no question it augurs the arrival of a powerful, audacious new directorial talent.

The performances make this worthwhile.

In the end, the film feels too rollicking and self-parodying to be taken seriously, but it strikes just the right tone to make it a fun Midnight movie.

Setting most of the action in a mocked-up theater emphasizes the performance aspects of the characters' behavior, a strategy enhanced by lead thesp Keira Knightley's willingness to let her neurotic Anna appear less sympathetic than in previous incarnations.

The film comprises an impressive directorial debut for Adler who demonstrates a confident grasp of pace, place and thesp handling.

Although beautifully rendered throughout, with delicate, elegantly drawn watercolor-like illustrations, the picture may seem too plain and simple for the oversophisticated tastes of kids in Europe and North America, while Arrietty herself reps a slightly insipid heroine.

Sinuous sequences where one object morphs into another are his stock and trade, and that strength is on ample display in Cheatin’.

Premo’s commitment and grit are palpable — especially when one notes how close to the action he gets during the Capitol insurrection, so that the camera shows every jostle and bump. The sequence, full of shots and footage never seen before , is as chilling, horrifying and disgusting as the many other clips we’ve already seen shot by others.

Although rich in ideas and always compelling to look at, writer-helmer Patrick Keiller's latest semi-experimental pic Robinson in Ruins reps a minor disappointment after his outstanding, same-veined previous works, "London" and "Robinson in Space."

Like its flight-challenged parrot protagonist, Rio takes a while to get off the ground but manages to soar by the end.

If the emotional mathematics don’t quite add up, enough diversion is provided by pic’s broader comic setpieces to paper over the cracks.

This challenging, extremely violent, ravishing-looking, intricately plotted adaptation by Kitano of his novel is of interest for its fresh take on a musty genre. That said, it could feel like a slog to watch for viewers who aren’t fans of sword-wielding, screaming samurai movies.

Enigmatic but oddly entrancing feature debut.

Stillman proves he still knows how to write crackling, articulate dialogue for quirky preppie characters whom he loves laughing at as much as with.

Clearly, these films are the work of people who love animals. More importantly though, going beyond the pat eco-conscious message that every kids’ film has to have, HTTYD2 touches on how complex the emotional bond between a person and an animal can be.

The picture still tells a riveting story about contempo Russia's darkest side.

Paradise: Hope has humor and warmth, and shows more genuine affection and kindness toward its characters than Seidl usually allows.

Although some might argue that not mentioning anyone's difference is a kind of erasure in itself, it's hard not to get swept up in the cast and crew's joyful insouciance. Plus, the cheeky showtunes, co-written by onscreen villain MuMu and executive producer Peter Halby, are a hoot.

The script may hum and buzz with twists and require concentration, but that's not exactly the same as being intellectually satisfying and rich the way Porumboiu's earlier work was. They were closer to profound; this is just clever.

It’s entirely to the directors and the two lead actors’ credit that what sounds like a bunch of overextended body humor gags of the most juvenile variety evolve, by sheer repetitious attrition, into something bizarrely poetic and strangely touching.

The powerhouse cast is so capable, the actors just about manage to play the picture as if it were a "Midsummer Night's Dream"-style frothy farce, with marigold garlands and picturesque poverty.

A very fine if not exactly groundbreaking film about, as the title hints, perspective and distance.

An officially sanctioned but pleasingly gush-free cinematic monograph.

Due to the fact that the canvas is broader this time around — and the subjects Lears has chosen to focus on don’t have four discreet, parallel narratives that we can see through to the end — there’s inevitably less coherence to this film strictly in terms of storytelling. Instead, each of these women is trying to make a difference in the climate crisis in very specific ways, but for all of them history keeps interfering.

[It] will evoke comparisons for many with The Babadook, and while this is more generically conventional than Jennifer Kent's breakout thriller, it still taps potently into parental anxieties and primal fears.

A chirpy, tween-skewing, snowboarding-themed romantic comedy, Chalet Girl slaloms exuberantly down a predictable path, kicking up regular flurries of fun along the way.

What’s particularly admirable here is the way the cast and filmmakers illuminate not just the wit and charm of young men, but also the callow cruelty of youth, driven by a killer combination of naïve idealism, solipsism, poor self-esteem and raging hormones.

Newton’s storytelling is skittish and a bit too on the nose at times, but his palpable generosity toward his cast is rewarded with committed, passionate turns from the ensemble. However, Nicholson, a performer all-too seldom given a chance to lead, is the big door prize here, offering an intricately layered performance that lifts the whole film up a notch.

Saucily thumbing its nose at the insipid teen love of the "Twilight" franchise, Kiss reimagines its bloodsuckers as horny, supercilious Eurotrash with addiction issues, sucking the life blood from naive American thrill-seekers.

The dominant note is the warm but quotidian realism of Giant rather than the experimental daring of Arbor, yet Dark River yields a perceptive study of family dynamics, unfolding in a changing landscape as prey to economic forces and demographic shifts as any urban center.

Some may find this a path too well trodden by other movies, but what's refreshing is to see it through the eyes of a female protagonist for a change.

At heart, it's more concerned with capturing the feel of the early '80s, the paranoia but also spirit of communal life in crowded apartment blocks.

A fraction less gut-bustingly goofy than its predecessors.