Rory O'Connor

Best of all, Lojkine’s film comes with a refreshing generosity of spirit.

Al Rasheed’s film has traveled the festival circuit from Mumbai to Toronto, the kind of whistle-stop global tour a politically oriented festival title occasionally enjoys when its message is as clear as this and, better yet, when it doesn’t forget to entertain.

Petzold’s latest, Afire, unfurls with all the page-turning seduction of a gripping novella.

At 145 minutes, few locations, and very little dialogue, this unflinching look at the fate that awaits us is anything but expeditious—yet it demands to be seen, a radical film with as much capacity to shock as it does to burden the tear ducts. It is amongst his very best.

It all comes together beautifully, a film to stimulate curious corners of the mind and adventurous parts of the spirit.

With notable patience, Mielants (who directed Murphy in six episodes of Peaky Blinders) allows the darkness to gradually seep in.

One does not necessarily have to be fond of canines in order to love Isle of Dogs, but it helps. It may also help to have a fondness for the meticulous craft of stop-motion animation itself or, even more interestingly perhaps, for Japanese cinema. It is a delightful, exquisitely-detailed production.

For better than worse, Covino directs it to within an inch of its life, presenting the modest narrative as a series of meticulously choreographed vignettes; each shot in what appears to be a single take.

A Hero is perhaps a touch too sinuous and convoluted to be considered alongside his great early works, but it plays to his strengths and sensibilities—a clear return to form.

In The Realm of Perfection is in essence about that most slippery of topics: the beauty of the game. Sport might tell the truth, but perhaps only cinema can capture it.

Woman Who Ran looks and feels like a pleasant farce in comparison to much of Hong’s recent output.

Brunner’s doom-metal vibe isn’t always easy on the eye, and while images in Luzifer shiver with portent as early as the opening frames–all muck, rain, and knackered-looking bodies––there is a clarity from cinematographer Peter Flinckenberg that saves it from being too sullen.

Denis Villeneuve ponders the ramifications and possibilities of a potential first-contact between human beings and an advanced alien race and comes up with a sporadically incoherent film, but also some interesting ideas.

Much like his beleaguered lead character, Jude manages to maintain a rousingly lewd sense of humor for the duration of the film’s substantial running time.

With all its sex and brutality, and the allegations surrounding its megalomaniacal creator, Khrzhanovsky’s project might not be for this world. However, it remains that rare thing: an artwork with the capacity to tap into our fears and even our hatred; to live in the imagination and to astonish. A shock of the new.

This is remarkable stuff from a director on the cusp of the mainstream. You sense an American filmmaker might not have managed it.

Its dizzying culmination of ideas proves more feature than bug.

As indebted to the mood and visual language of Game of Thrones as it is to the Bard’s texts, Michôd provides finely worked entertainment with a compelling and significant central performance from Chalamet–who frankly hasn’t had to carry a film in quite this way before.

The concerns that met the trailer––suggesting Miller had traded in his predecessor’s practical effects for CGI––are, I’m sorry to say, not entirely unfounded. But Furiosa can still boast moments to take the breath away. Did we need it? Probably not. Are the chase scenes still phenomenal? Absolutely.

As darkly comic as it is foreboding–and boasting an outrageously rich and nuanced central performance from the great Icelandic actor Ingvar Sigurdsson, who plays the larger than life Ingimunder, a man more than capable of living up to the scale of his own name–A White, White Day takes the tropes of a psychological thriller but presents them with a virtuosic and austere visual flare.

Thomas’ Bravo, recalling both Mikey Saber and Mickey Rourke, has a protruding gut, slicked-back hair, an alcohol problem, and some deep-rooted mommy issues. The film is all his.

It’s an immersive poetic-realist dive into the artist’s fractured memories of his parents during the time he spent growing up in Birmingham in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

The film is still recommended viewing; they still know how to draw a good performance and nail an emotional beat. All four of their young stars are given the opportunity here and duly rise to the occasion. In each sequence is the audience is left to consider questions with no easy answers; all it ultimately asks for is a little empathy.

For all its grandeur and dazzling tableaux, I left the theater a touch agnostic. Unwavering fanatics, no matter their rationale, do not always great protagonists make; even with Seyfried’s remarkable voice, presence, and energy, the music starts to skip.

It is a remarkably vivid and fresh piece of filmmaking, one that builds on the directors’ previous outings without being overly familiar.

With The Mastermind, Reichardt has made a unique film, even amongst similarly cryptic genre exercises. . . I left the cinema gripped and unusually rattled.

Ad Astra is, for all other intents and purposes, as straight faced as they come, a film that considers the big questions of interplanetary travel and contact but signposts its conclusions too early–and can’t help getting bogged down by them.

On the Beach at Night Alone, a bittersweet tone poem from South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo, thinks many a thought about the universe and the future, mostly expressed through nature and the characters’ anxieties about growing old.