Rory O'Connor

Moghaddam and Sanaeeha obviously have things to say about the state of their country, but at heart this is a romantic, even nostalgic film.

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

It’s a wonderfully gentle piece of filmmaking––something of a low-key triumph that offers a novel perspective on a topic that had become, if not entirely worn out, at least clichéd.

It’s a wonderfully inquisitive film, as searching as it is sincere.

It’s succinct, light on its feet, totally earnest, and––in spite of some indulgent conversations on art and writing––never feels like it’s trying too hard.

The Brutalist is less-than-perfect (for all his charms, Guy Pearce is no Philip Seymour Hoffman or Daniel Day-Lewis) but it offers an all-too-rare reminder of how it feels when this artform is at its very best, and that has less to do with the scale of its ambitions than how effectively it combines movement, emotion, and sound.

A cold thriller with a dark, satirical edge that shows the master filmmaker at his leanest and meanest.

Larraín keeps much of the film quiet, and as a result Maria can feel a little empty: a conceptual touch, perhaps, but one that leaves Knight’s script and Jolie’s performance (presence to burn, a bit limited for interiority) with a lot of heavy-lifting.

Though Wang never directly addresses the wider forces driving this manic industry––mass consumption, globalization, fast fashion, capitalism––they seem to linger just outside the frame. On the ground level, however, the director isn’t pulling any punches regarding the people responsible for all this struggle and strife.

All in, this is a brave piece of filmmaking that builds to a frightening climax: Nash’at creates an image of nervous ineptitude before pummeling you with the harshest of realities.

Like much of the director’s work, it’s the kind of thing you could have seen late night on television when you were much too young. It would have also left a mark.

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

Everything from the film’s humanist energies, down to the timbre of the dialogue, rings like an endearing, never-labored homage to Persian cinema.

This is a film that knows what it’s doing and does it very well

Taormina achieves a singular tone.

Having returned to form with Crimes of the Future, it’s surprising that so much of The Shrouds falls flat: the awkward sex scenes, the general incoherence, the uncharacteristically unimaginative tech (though I did like the gothic vibe of the blanket of cameras used to cloak the corpses). That said, for a meditation on death, grief, cancer, and libido, The Shrouds is funnier than expected.

There were times in Tides when I began wondering just how often one can go back to the well.

Costner hasn’t forgotten where to point a camera, and outside all the table-setting, Horizon has moments designed to astonish.

Even by the director’s meditative standards, this one cuts close to the bone.

The director has gestured toward magical realism in her work before (think of the white horse in Fish Tank or the elemental yearning of her Wuthering Heights) but this first foray into anthropomorphism feels strangely surface-level and does more to break the film’s spell than enhance it.

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.

It can feel a touch contrived, even on-the-nose, but there is more than enough quiet confidence and seasoned quality in performances and filmmaking to stick the landing.

Like the film’s many predecessors, Spaceman is a story of how far a person might go to escape their traumas––a journey outward that leads to one within––yet even if Renck is out to give us his Solaris, the director knows better than to take this conceit too seriously.

Dumont’s space oddity might not always land on the right side of its jokes and provocations, but every now and then it takes the breath away.

A Traveller’s Needs is just the tonic: a film that passes through you like a breath of fresh air.

It is a story about power and it needs to be told.

As Cuckoo moves to its final third the fragments of its ideas never quite form a convincing whole. Luckily, Schafer is there to guide us through.

That the plot points are familiar and conventional is less the issue than a nagging unevenness along the way.