Rory O'Connor

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.

Ruizpalacios’ film has style to burn but little interest in subtlety, and even the most high-grade hammers can lose their sheen after 139 minutes of hammering.

Assayas, who has dotted his ever-surprising career with brisk, self-aware, sophisticate-centered comedies, has rarely played things quite so close to home.

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

Where the film succeeds in drawing you into all that life, however, it does so in a patchwork of moments that never quite suggest a whole.

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.

Moral quandaries aside, Evolution‘s beginning (which, significantly, is almost dialogue-free) is a well-executed nail-biter; yet the project soon buckles under its own self-importance, and I found it difficult to stomach the queasy neatness of Mondruzco and Wéber’s parable.

Devos’ films can feel overly studied, slick to the point of being contrived, yet with each passing work––each reduction to the most potent flavors––he edges closer to something truly great. Here is his finest yet, an almost-perfect little film.

Menu Plaisirs is not amongst his masterpieces but it’s a fine late addition to the Wiseman canon––even in a media landscape so saturated with food shows and celebrity chefs, the director’s made a film that feels both fresh and artistically stimulating, unmistakably his own.

The director of Astrakan is David Depesseville (frankly just a touch too close to Depressville for comfort). Astrakhan is his first film and suggests something of a stylistic calling card, not least at film’s close: a late flurry of exposition and offcuts that are less in service of plot or character or even mood and more an artist showing what else they can do. It’s not entirely a turn-off.