Leslie Felperin

Director Pete Ohs and his screenwriting-cast deftly manage the transition from creepy to comic by slow degrees. The two female leads hold down the fort with dry delivery and somewhat haunted-looking expressions; they are bright attractive women who have had to put up with crap like this from leering men all their lives.

Noblezada has great pipes and a natural screen presence that augurs well for her future career.

In another filmmaker's hands, this might have become a message-heavy morass, but Sauper and his co-editor, veteran Yves Deschamps (Bruno Dumont's The Life of Jesus, the 2018 restoration of Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind) work the material with a remarkable fluidity and gracefulness that's consistently engaging and surprising.

Despite those based-on-a-true-story bona fides, the script is taut as piano wire, strings of inciting incidents strung like steel cables between concrete coincidences, ironies and tragedy.

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.

Akhavan elicits finely layered performances from her cast. Moretz digs deeper than she has in years for a sensitive lead turn that harmonizes especially well with her co-stars.

One of the flaws that keeps the film being as engaging as it might be is the way every shot seems to last about the same amount of time, producing a monotonous visual rhythm that only serves to make the plot seem even more episodic.

As fun as a night in the mosh pit with your best mate ... Directed by Coky Giedroyc with a fizzy vibrancy and supercharged by Feldstein's intense charisma, this crowd-pleasing comedy has smart things to say about class, sex and female identity.

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.

It’s clear that they want to run it as meritocratically as possible, but what’s interesting is how the criteria for what talent is and who gets to judge it come up for debate.

Ultimately, it's mostly a mood piece where not much really happens apart from the inciting incident, but as a study of childhood and adolescence (it makes a great companion piece to Richard Linklater's Boyhood) it's ripe with telling details and atmosphere.

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.

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

What saves this from being just best-of list bait for upmarket film critics is the sincerity of the performances, especially from the core trio of Wu, Lee and Panna, each of whom projects a profound loneliness that’s never more apparent than when they’re in the middle of a crowded place. Which, this being Singapore, is just about everywhere.

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.

Tenet makes you feel floaty, mesmerized and, to an extent, soothed by its spectacle — but also so cloudy in the head that the only option is to relax and let it blow your mind around like a balloon, buffeted by seaside breezes and hot air.

Similarly to his writings, Franz the film is interested in a distilled, abstracted meditation on power, the law, control and desire that transcends the banal borders of realism.

The film-makers never probe psyches very deeply, not even the parents’. It’s just one contemporary travelogue cliche after another, admittedly beautifully shot in super high definition.

This is a fan-servicing but not necessarily hagiographic documentary.

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.

Thanks to inventive camerawork, mesmeric performances and incisive yet elliptical editing and storytelling, the claustrophobia becomes a feature instead of a liability.

The cast commit enthusiastically to the material, walking that fine line between comic exaggeration and an almost earnest dramatic sincerity.

This is another film about a white European mixed up in a Middle Eastern war they barely seem to understand, but on its own terms it’s a story well told.

It has its own peculiar spirit and casts a very witchy spell, thanks particularly to Gregg's adept handling of both experienced and young, less proven performers.

In some ways, it’s one of Hopkins’ best performances from the last few years, beautifully underplayed, eschewing mannerisms or silly accents. It’s just a shame the film itself, directed by James Hawes, with a script by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, is a bit worthy and diagrammatic.

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.

Intriguing formal noodlings can’t disguise the cliches in the script. Even so, it’s clear that Abbasi has talent and ambition.

Half of a Yellow Sun is the kind of ambitious literary adaptation that wants it all kinds of ways, not all of them compatible.