Rory O'Connor

Belle is the most ambitious work yet from Hosoda.

It is a film of two contrasting halves: Solange’s warm and fuzzy naivety and her cold coming of age.

It will sound like sacrilege, but Days could be the rare case of a Tsai Ming-liang film that doesn’t ever quite connect up and one that might even benefit from some cutting back.

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.

It is a boiling-hot provocation: funny, revolting, spicy as hell, and with a striking subtext of gender fluidity and sexual identity.

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.

Playing out at breakneck speed, it is awash with flights of fancy: outbursts of sex and violence; aliens and murder; sepia-dripped nostalgia; jarring temporal and spatial uncertainty; homoeroticism; etc. That sense of dizziness is only further confounded by Vlad Ogai’s shifting sets and richly detailed production design, and cinematographer Vladislav Opelyants’ long roving takes. Its cast has the sense of a troupe. The frame is always packed.

Hansen-Løve’s cinema has reached higher ceilings than this, but it is a restorative sojourn just the same.

It’s a graceful, aching film that sculpts and stretches Murakami’s story into an enchanting three-hour epic (my, do the minutes fly by) about trauma and mourning, shared solitude, and the possibility of moving on. The narrative also doubles as a lovely ode to the car itself, and the strange ways that people open up when cocooned inside them.

A blistering work of meta filmmaking.

Though ambitious in reach, its tone is one-note, stilted, and saccharine sweet; its ideas as disjointed as they are ultimately unsatisfying.

Verhoeven, as always, is more interested in playing games and is always at his best when needling an audience’s ideas of good taste.

A daring work of meta-filmmaking in which Hogg loops backwards to re-reexamine her own past.

Carax has delivered something gloriously gnarled and uncomfortable: a bludgeoning rock opera that takes aim at the entertainment industry and the dregs of toxic masculinity; that flourishes just as it drips with self-loathing; and that gestures toward such far-flung places as Dadaism, A Star is Born, Pinocchio, and even the director’s own life.

Chen is never blatantly forthright in showing the prejudice at work in Ling’s day-today, allowing it instead to subtly seep into the film; we need only sift the tea leaves.

Contrary to the setup’s illusions, Brühl distances and thus absolves himself by making Daniel a nasty caricature–arrogant, speaking in brooding actorly tones, eager to pose for selfies and flirt with fans. Had he played it straight, Next Door might just have been vital.

There are plenty of laughs but also, of course, moments to trouble the tear-ducts.

Nagy’s is a story of bleakness, a test of endurance, and a reminder that war is a hell that, atypically, refuses to rely on gratuitousness. And it ultimately, just about, earns that overbearing solemnity.

It feels a complete whole––a wry intertwining dialectic on modern desires––yet each scene is uniquely bracing: beautifully poised, exquisitely observed, and even erotically charged––rife with unabashed seduction, though always close enough to farce to keep things kösher and to keep you guessing (it’s telling that we barely glimpse a kiss).

It is an incendiary, playful, and wonderfully exasperated piece of filmmaking that shows a director trying to draw some threads of sense from our current malaise.

The director’s charms and gamely energy make foreknowledge something of a moot point here. The passion has clearly remained, most keenly pronounced in the moments when the octogenarian reveals his own influences.

Indeed, the strangest thing about Mainstream (and it is a strange, strange film) is just how out of touch it feels. Granted, if it were easy to make a viral video we would all be doing it; yet what Coppola and her team have come up with is just so lame and off the mark and nauseatingly self-satisfied.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in Hopper/Welles is that you can’t quite tell if the battle-scarred veteran is looking to wrap an arm around the younger man or is trying to defeat him.

It is a thoughtful, unquestionably moving piece of work with much to say about the inner lives of the women at the center, but it could have used another gear

The protagonists of Wife of a Spy often act out of character, which all bodes efficiently well for the film’s slippery web of conceit, but ultimately quells a great deal of something the film is otherwise lacking in: feeling. It is, for my money, Kurosawa in low key; an interesting inclusion to a wonderfully idiosyncratic career.

It is not a flawless achievement, but The Disciple has that feel of a burgeoning master: the patience and sureness of touch; the controlled surrealist flourishes; the sheer ambition and scope.

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.

It is a staggering film; one that defies categorization and a unique achievement that must be seen to be believed.