Steve Pond

At a breezy 90 minutes, Copa 71 makes its case succinctly, dropping interesting tidbits while letting the event itself serve as a revelation.

The film is defiantly unconventional even if it does provide enough of the usual beats to give its audience a solid footing.

American Symphony is about the creation of art in the face of pressure, tragedy and heartbreak, and about the tension between the glory of creation and the pain of living. It manages to capture the glory but it never ignores the price.

Evolution is less about healing than about haunting; it’s an odd, small and moving work that asks disquieting questions about identity after decades of trauma.

In its happiest moments, The Movie Teller is glorious and yes, a little corny; in its darkest ones, it’s still lovely and sad.

The gender-driven power struggles in Widow Clicquot are in some ways the most conventional part of the film, which can soar in one moment and feel routine in the next.

There’s nothing flashy about the way these stories are assembled or told, but the cumulative power becomes overwhelming.

Things come to a head in a way that is simultaneously slapstick-y and touching, and entirely in keeping with a movie that has never lost its sense of charm through an hour and a half of twists and turns and engaging mountain escapades.

Mixing familiar stories with fresh insights, Zimny’s film is a portrait in restlessness, a picture of a man who has been both wildly successful and thoroughly dismissed — sometimes simultaneously.

Knox Goes Away is a character study of a disappearing character or maybe a thriller that stays away from actual thrills. However you label the film, it’s low key but satisfying.

The movie leans into the melodrama, taking its time and milking the situation for all its worth.

The result is a wide-ranging dialogue that manages to be both philosophical and playful, a personal portrait that goes exactly as deep as Cornwell wants it to go but never feels as if the author is getting away with obfuscation.

Kendrick manages to make her film both weirdly entertaining and thoroughly disturbing.

There’s no real tonal conflict between the lightness of the comedy and the import of the issues it is addressing; American Fiction runs on serious conversations that are never bogged down by being treated too seriously.

Quiz Lady spends most of its time being loud, broad and silly. That’s sort of the point, but it can also wear thin when the second most heartwarming scene in the movie comes from Will Ferrell.

Arcel has created a film that is big, bold and over-the-top, but it has the right guy at its center to hold everything together – and, in a touch we didn’t know we needed, that guy has the right person by his side.

The film is as exhausting as it is disturbing, and it’s relentlessness is in many ways the whole point as viewers spend 212 minutes looking at circumstances in which these young people, most in their late teens and early twenties, spend their daily lives.

Throughout, Kaurismäki shows his usual complete control of a delicate tone that could easily go awry if it didn’t work so well.

Paints a rich picture of full lives using little more than pauses, glances and a frozen landscape that says volumes without speaking.

It looks amazing, of course, but it might well be the least involving movie he’s ever made, with an amazing cast providing little but momentary distraction.

There’s not a lot of clarity here, but there is a terrible, strange beauty in the film’s mixture of ritual, magic, faith and the dark side of colonialism. By the end New Boy has a name, but his identity remains elusive.

Part thorny family story, part whodunit, part courtroom drama and part meditation on the nature of truth and fiction, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall takes two hours of conversations and makes them both provocative and propulsive.

Impressive in its single-mindedness, this is nonetheless a movie that dares you to try and like it – and most likely, few will take Sauvaire up on that dare.

At an hour and 27 minutes, the film has the feel of an exquisite miniature, succinct and evocative.

If this is the final Indiana Jones movie, as it most likely will be, it’s nice to see that they stuck the landing.

Despite its access to the words of its subject, this is a low-key, stylish film of interest mostly to Kubrick devotees – but since that includes an awful lot of the people who have any interest in the art of film, there should be an audience who want to hear what the guy had to say.

Kiss the Future is a portrait of a city and a people who used culture to fight back; it’s also the story of a rock ‘n’ roll band exploring the limits of how its music can impact the real world. Above all else, though, it’s a rich and moving chronicle of the use of art as both a weapon and a means to salvation.

It’s both a tour de force for a cast led by Thomasin McKenzie and a sign that Oldroyd hasn’t lost his unsettling touch in the seven years since his last film.