Sophie Monks Kaufman

If Lady is more successful as a series of interconnected vignettes, than as one fluid narrative, it has a moving ending up its sleeve. After presenting a morass of rich themes, Nwosu teases out a small, surprising finale that transcends the blinkered concerns driving her protagonist.

It is ironic that Richard Linklater has chosen to homage a film carved out of spontaneous new techniques with one so mired in contrivances that it is impossible for it to breathe.

Poitras questions him on the less glorious moments of his career, too, so that he emerges as a flawed human rather than a bastion of perfect judgement. This is not a perfect documentary either, with the breathless dash through his post My Lai journalism sometimes feeling overwhelming. Yet perfection is not the point when something impossible has been bottled: it’s something called the truth.

This is a deeply emotional film in high concept clothing, coded to resonate with those of us well-versed in the instinct to betray ourselves in order to be accepted.

Jacob Elordi, Oscar Isaac and Mia Goth rise to the extraordinary demands of the material, which asks them to access the deepest parts of their humanity.

Stone and Plemons’ verbal battles of wits are worth the price of admission, even if the script co-written by Will Tracy (The Menu) is overly reliant on culture war jargon.

Full of throwaway insights into the micro-climate of a particularly hellish economic landscape, At Work is an engaging story about a man trying to write an engaging story with a diamond of hard-won wisdom at its core.

The level of craft present in creating the mood is transfixing and the film works as a fever dream set in the tail-end of French colonial rule. But as an explicit adaption of the book by a mind in the process of birthing existentialism, it does not quite have the requisite courage or — dare I say it — strangeness.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is an invitation to a public mourning.

Along Came Love essays a type of bond where shared secrets eventually erupt, causing both tragedy and release.

There is a satisfying, compact completeness to their handling of the storylines of four different young mothers and sufficient grace notes are enabled in each case to stave off the cliches that occasionally threaten to engulf events.

A few structural issues threaten to tip the balance from cinematic melodrama into TV soap as the bad news keeps on coming, but Izadyar’s sustained emotional conviction carries the vision onwards.

Is this impressive, boundary-pushing, experimental cinema or an endurance test with no internal logic where the chief pleasure is leaving the theater afterwards? Could it be both?

Hermanus gestures towards a sweeping story and in the process loses the pulse of the material that is there. As the window dressing is lavishly built up, the love story itself slips away.

The moments when Moll lets the images reveal as much as the dialogue are the ones that linger.

There is simply no one for Lawrence to bounce off and no structure against which to craft an emotional trajectory. She is dancing on her own.

This is Aster’s funniest film to date, and makes use of an ever expanding and shifting cast to dot the 150-minute runtime with well-observed comic details and visual payoffs.

Last Breath depicts a workplace where instead of fabricated conflict coming from villainous colleagues, a team of people are battling with their own souls while under extreme duress. Their conscientious solidarity forms an undercurrent that breathes oxygen into the heart of this moving thriller.

This is Ross’s first fiction feature and its power comes as no surprise to those familiar with his 2018 calling card of a documentary. Hale County, This Morning This Evening announced a gifted photographer driven by sensitivity to his subjects’ dignity. Accordingly, Nickel Boys miraculously goes against the grain of the story’s devastating trajectory by leading with the same loving eye.

Although made up of many mesmerizing moving parts, “Harvest” ends up as feeling less than the sum of these. There are sparks of what makes an Athina Rachel Tsangari film great within this impressionistic period fable, even if — unlike the fires that bookend the film — it never fully takes the blaze.

The humble visual language is a vessel for a rich human drama. Bear with what sometimes resembles a television movie for the slowburn panorama of life it captures.

Queer may be flawed, but its naked approach to such a raw subject, coupled with a remarkable lead performance, makes it a trip worth taking.

Kill the Jockey is an elusive and sometimes frustrating watch. It elides interpretation in ways both intentional and undercooked, flirts with a greatness that isn’t fully earned, yet it has some glorious moments and never unseats the viewer.

Burton has thrown everything at the wall and then carefully sculpted what has slithered down into a rollicking yet disciplined supernatural caper with a heart.

The humour is merciless.

Better Things creator Pamela Adlon’s directorial debut deftly juggles fast-paced anecdotal comedy with rich, moving character work, while upending pregnancy myths with the ferocity of a woman stamping on her oppressive breast pump. Scene-stealing work from the likes of Sandra Bernhard, John Carroll Lynch and Elena Ouspenskaia layer up the sense that, in the world of Babes, every life is a tiny miracle.

Although it succeeds on its own terms in bringing to light the pathetic and exploitative behavior of plantation owners during the final era of Dutch colonialism, it succumbs to the same listlessness as Josefien, lying in bed, covered in mosquito bites, waiting for a climax denied.

To a Land Unknown is a tour-de-force of empathic storytelling, with its genre narrative bursting with an overabundance of humanity.