Sheila O'Malley

Directed by Belgian filmmakers Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen, The Eight Mountains works slowly and patiently. It doesn't rush. This may be frustrating for some viewers, but the film works because of its slowness and patience, not despite it.

Ritch's script is thoughtful and intense, making The Artifice Girl a mentally engaging and challenging work.

Lisa Cortés uses the Big Bang as a visual motif throughout, with stars and galaxies exploding, hurtling out into the darkness. It is an apt analogy.

Based on the autobiographical book Everything Went Well by the late Emmanuèle Bernheim (a frequent Ozon collaborator), Everything Went Fine is an emotional and complex portrait of a family in crisis, the father's stroke exposing underlying cracks, old pains, new anxieties.

There's something a little too neat about the structure of Showing Up, and the pigeon wears its symbolism on its broken wings. But the piercing specificity of Reichardt's vision, and her insights into the dynamics of an art scene like the one in Portland, are spot on.

I was riveted by every moment of this haunting weird film. Enys Men made me legitimately uneasy.

The Lost King gets sidetracked. Still, it's a great story!

The film doesn't burden pinball machines with more meaning than they can stand. Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game is strictly low stakes. This is part of its knowing charm.

Some of Unwelcome is legitimately creepy and upsetting. Some of it is hilarious. Whether or not the hilarity is intended is unclear.

The characters never take shape, not even as caricatures. There are elements of parody, but Operation Fortune is not broad enough to be a spoof. It's weirdly empty.

Foster is masterful in evoking a child's point of view.

What Emily does so well is establish a mood. The mood is flexible enough to contain multitudes.

As it is, Seriously Red sneaks up on you.

Baby Ruby operates at a high-pitched melodrama-horror level, and the constant frenzy becomes exhausting. The film's nerves become so frayed there's almost no feeling left in them; the terror is monotonous and repetitive.

When You Finish Saving the World floats uncertainly on the edge of satire. This is a big problem. Satire can't be uncertain. Satire needs a sharp bite. When You Finish Saving the World is toothless by comparison.

Alice Diop understands how silence, when allowed to exist, vibrates with echoes, and it is these echoes that are trying to speak to us. They have a lot to say. "Saint Omer" shows us how to listen.

Gottlieb (the director) uses a very light touch throughout. This is a family affair.

Sarah Polley's trust in the material—and her actors—allows for the performances to flourish, and the performances drive the story along with the barrage of words.

Retrograde is about many things, but it's really about the faces. The cameras linger on the faces, allowing the expressions of suffering, tension, nerves, and desperation, to take root.

The Eternal Daughter feels like a first draft, or a sketch to be filled in later. This is perhaps reflected in onscreen Julie's struggles to even write an outline. Hogg's outlines, though, are more interesting than other people's finished products. There's always so much to think about.

You feel you are running alongside the characters, trying to catch up with them on their journeys forward.

There There doesn't come to life, even as an intellectual or artistic exercise.

Something in the Dirt has the gritty DIY-vibe of the no-budget world from which it sprang, and is both thought-provoking and crazy-making, just like the mood it presents.

Brandon Dermer's I'm Totally Fine is a funny and charming movie, with two entertaining performances from Jillian Bell and Natalie Morales at its center, but where it really works is in its understanding of grief, and how grief can turn someone's world—and mind—upside down.

Call Jane is about an important subject, but it's also a character study of one woman waking up, not just to her own strength, but to the fact that she's hidden in the suburbs for too long. It's time to help others. It's a very satisfying character arc.

Consciousness operates on multiple tracks and Aftersun understands this. The multi-level awareness is not in the dialogue, but it's there in the film's gentle rhythms, the editorial choices, the patience and sensitivity of Wells' approach.

Not enough happens in The Loneliest Boy in the World. There's not enough conflict. The film relies too heavily on cliche and hopes the audience won't notice.

Baghadi and lead editor Grace Zahrah piece together the footage into a collage of yearning, ambition, and what can only be called gumption. It's inspirational, of course, but it's also thoughtful and meditative.

Everything in The Justice of Bunny King—the clothes, the car, the decor, Bunny's sharpened eyeliner pencil, the plastic cake box, the worn-out bra—hasn't been carefully placed in the frame. They were there before the camera started rolling, and they will be thereafter.

For those of you who miss films made by adults and for adults, films which treat things like sex and loneliness with respect and honesty, "True Things" isn't to be missed.

We Are as Gods works best as a history lesson as seen through one man's journey: from Haight-Ashbury bacchanals to early computer labs to the Siberian steppe.

The Cathedral marries form to content in a striking way.

This is Owen Kline's first feature, and he knows this world—the world of comic book obsessives and hopeful comics artists—very well. Nostalgia is probably at work in the film—somewhere—but it's buried under layers of grime and bitter disillusionment.

Baena is obviously having fun presenting the familiar tropes and then subverting them, but these pieces don't really fit together, nor do they lead to a satisfying conclusion.

This is John Patton Ford's directorial debut, and it is an extremely impressive piece of work.

The family trauma is so clotted-thick, a faster pace and tightened-up editing might have eradicated the slow-motion underwater feel of the whole.

Written and directed by Andrew Semans, Resurrection is a diabolically intense psychological thriller, with two riveting central performances from Hall and Tim Roth, neither of whom shy away from the dark nutty territory they are required to enter.

There's a little Magic Mike XXL in the mix of How to Please a Woman, with its merry band of eager-to-please strippers, although How to Please a Woman also hearkens back to The Full Monty in its surprisingly profound look at pleasure.

She Will isn't exactly a horror movie. It has its creepy moments, particularly in the visual collages and Clint Mansell's unnerving score, but it's more thought-provoking than scary.

Both Sides of the Blade is a romance, a love triangle, a marriage drama, an infidelity narrative, all familiar ground, but Denis' approach is her own.

This is Mesén's debut feature film, and it's a powerful and intuitive piece of work.

Everything depends on the feel of the moment, the way the actors look at each other, or listen, or react. Directed by Sophie Hyde, with a script by Katy Brand, these risks more than pay off, and often in very unexpected ways.

Xavier Giannoli's film adaptation of Balzac's book leans heavily on voiceover, so much so that some sequences are practically an audiobook with images attached. This could be seen as a negative, but in practice the voiceover-heavy sections are some of the film's most successful.

This is a stylized affair, and the care taken with every choice—the apartment interior, the furnishings, the color of the curtains, Julia's red sweater and red tights, etc.—is meticulous. The film crackles with icy dread.

Dinner in America, written, directed, and edited by Adam Rehmeier, is a movie with anti-establishment anti-social quicksilver coursing through its veins, but at its heart it is a sweet love story, one of the sweetest in recent memory.

The film resonates with deeper messages: the damage done by gentrification, the abyss between the haves and the have-nots, the poor treatment of workers by elites. You don't expect a romcom to explore these issues. But The Valet does. It works.

All My Puny Sorrows has all the elements to pack a devastating punch, but there's no real sense of urgency. It's like people are just marking time, like the end has already been determined, it's just a matter of resigning oneself to the inevitable.

There are some similarities in all of this to Joachim Trier's "The Worst Person in the World" (particularly the women’s hairstyles, as well as all that running), but the mood and tone is entirely different, less meditative, less mournful.

"Stanleyville" is part Stanford Prison Experiment and part MTV's "The Real World." It's part Milgram experiment and part "Squid Game."

Even with the excellent central performance by Karen Gillan, playing a "dual" role—herself and her own copy—Dual makes for a strangely tepid viewing experience. Deeper exploration is not on the table.

My soul rejected what I was seeing. My response was: What in the Uncanny Valley is going on here?

The film is best in its embrace of the random, its moments when the talented and funny cast goof off with each other, responding to one another's eccentricities.

The final sequences are the only "stock" moments in this very specific family drama, and something about the last scene left me cold. But the rest is so effective and emotional, a dedicated portrait of trauma passed down through generations, it doesn't matter.

An engaging and sneakily profound film.

Huda's Salon does not stop for one second to take a breath, and the subjects revealed have enormous and urgent philosophical reverb.

Cyrano gets the big things right, and Dinklage embodies it all.

Strawberry Mansion sacrifices nothing. It's whimsical but it's poignant, it's light-hearted and it's deep.

Catch the Fair One is a revenge-thriller, and a satisfying one, since the evil on display is so total. However, the satisfaction is hollow. Hopelessness is the dominant mood.

Last Looks works best in its twisted often-incoherent plot, where no character is generic. Everyone has a secret. No one is on the level. Surfaces lie.

It's a vast understatement to say that Vonda McIntyre's book deserved way better treatment than this.

Borrego, an awkward thriller pasted onto a moody strangers-forging-a-connection drama, doesn't allow itself to be what it so clearly wants to be.

Harrowing, unpredictable, painful, confrontational, this is a movie for grown-ups.

Cinematographer Samuel Calvin is to be commended for his striking work, and Reece shows an intuitive understanding of when to move the camera, and—more importantly—when not to move the camera. It's all very elegantly put together.

Writing with Fire is a powerful piece of work, although it moves at a mostly slow and steady pace.

Of all of the things Tatiana Huezo captures in Prayers for the Stolen, her first narrative feature, the terror of the night is most unnerving.

Cusp, with its dreamy imagery of golden sunsets and thunder-y twilights, empty Dairy Queen parking lots, and birds taking flight, is a mood-driven piece of work, sensitive to landscape and environment, and the girls' casual comments about rape (just one example) stand in stark contrast.

It's one of those rare films where the title has real meaning, one that grows in power the moment the credits roll.

The Souvenir Part II is more, though, than Julie's progression towards a completed film. It could be called, with apologies to James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.

The movie may be hard to explain, but it's very fun to watch. It's a fast-paced delirious movie about a very slow unchanging world.

Luzzu is a moving portrait of a world in flux, and one man attempting to survive the changes thrust upon him by a baffling outside world.

Written and directed by Aharon Keshales, whose debut (2010's Rabies) was an attention-getting nail-biter, South of Heaven—with a couple of exceptions—is inert and unimaginative.

Titane, this year's Palme d'Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival, is an extreme movie, violent and pitiless and funny, but the space it provides for not just tenderness but contemplation makes it an "extremely" thought-provoking film as well.

The Mad Women's Ball is part psychodrama and part melodrama, and it wears those mantles proudly and confidently. Each scene throbs with urgency and emotion. Nothing is unimportant. At the same time, the film is highly controlled, with a taut assured script.

Blue Bayou is sunk, on occasion, by its own symbolism, and how it wields said symbols. It's not enough to use a symbol visually, and let the audience put two and two together. A character needs to have a long monologue where they explain the symbol and pontificate on how the symbol is relevant to the circumstances.

The script is often very witty, peppered with sharp observations and two very entertaining performances, but there are underlying problems the movie cannot overcome.

The montage of footage—New York street scenes in the 1950s, 1960s, the press conferences, speeches, footage of the men getting off airplanes, surrounded by a crush of people, or laughing together, talking together, is mesmerizing. Individually and together, both men “shook up the world.” Blood Brothers shows why.

The film weaves a spell with its rhythms, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, all accompanied by a vivid and haunting sound design.

Burns' filmmaking is confident and his attitude is anti-sentimental. He captures the atmosphere of a town where a person can leave for five years and come back to find that nothing much has changed. A visit to a local pub means you run into half your high school class. I grew up in a beach town like this. Burns gets it right.

Anchored by four very good performances, Ma Belle, My Beauty unfortunately suffers from inertia and a lack of conflict. There is conflict, but it's presented in such a languishing way that it leaves the film grasping for something solid to hold onto.

Eventually, the documentary turns into a more traditional investigative narrative, as genealogists and wolf experts and Holocaust historians put different pieces together in an attempt to determine what was and was not true about Misha's tale.

Annette is an exhilarating and exuberant experience.

The strength of Nine Days is not so much the scenario (although that is imaginative and well-constructed) but the mood Oda sets, the clarity with which he establishes this world, how it operates, its rules and traditions.

Unfortunately, The Evening Hour falls back on clichés, telling its story with a palpable sense of distance from the characters, from their struggles, and from the world they inhabit.

What works so well in Mandibles is how it's set up as a basic heist movie, using very familiar elements, so familiar they're almost tired cliches, before going completely off the rails into random demented territory.

"D-Man" is one of the most eloquent works of art to come out of the AIDS era, and it continues to be done by dance companies around the world. Can You Bring It shows the challenges inherent in this, but is also an essential reminder—to people who sorely need it—of just how bad it really was "back then"...

This is the kind of film that tells its story well while simultaneously showing the joy of the creative act, in Bravo's filmmaking, yes, but also in Zola's decision to take to Twitter and tell her story in the first place.

Gaia does not feel like homework. It's a thought-provoking and disturbing experience rather than a lecture.

I Carry You with Me is a complicated film, in many ways, and it covers a lot of ground, but the emotions portrayed are simple and human-sized.

There may be one too many obstacles placed in Prerna's way (the pet goat is a prime example), stacking the deck against her so there will be an even bigger payoff. But overall Skater Girl is so gratifying it doesn't matter.

Caveat is a masterpiece of understatement for a title, and a witty opener to Damian Mc Carthy’s directorial debut, an impressive and often terrifying film, taking place almost solely in one location, with two people trapped in a moldy dimly-lit house.

The timing of Oslo is less than ideal, current events being what they are. The framing, too, is blinkered and naïve.

Part of the joy of The Dry is watching this excellent cast in action.

It's been some years since Jolie did an action movie, and she carries the center of Those Who Wish Me Dead. Unfortunately, it's a film with no real center.

Children absorb everything, good and bad, all the stresses, heartbreak, anxiety of the adults around them. Children can handle the difficult things. Oyelowo knows this and respects it.

A film like State Funeral is a warning. History has lessons for us about what does, and does not, work, in politics, in leadership, in culture itself. We would do well to listen. We would do well to watch.

More than anything else, Mekas' footage gives a glimpse of the fascinating aura that Tiny Tim projected.

In Jakob’s Wife, the classic vampire theme is looped into an insightful and often very funny commentary on marriage and the limitations placed on women.