Wendy Ide

Subdued in tone and stoic in its approach to the dangers that can decimate an entire community, Identifying Features is admirable in its restraint, and all the more powerful because of it.

This is an archetypal Anderson film: mannered, fussy, obsessively designed – normally irksome traits, but in this alchemic instance it’s an utterly delightful combination.

With this seductive, serpentine neo-noir, Park Chan-wook raises the bar on the 2022 Cannes competition programme and reasserts his position as a peerless visual stylist. But there’s nothing superficial or superfluous about his style here: it’s all in the service of the film’s mercurial and at times disorientating blend of crime and passion.

The dance is the picture’s climax, a glimpse of joy and optimism. But the film’s coda, shot three years later, shows the cost of prolonged separation. Hope is a spark that can be easily extinguished.

From the intimate restraint of the early scenes, Delpero’s direction becomes more fractured and abrasive. It’s a remarkable work.

The realisation that her husband is gone for good is a gradual process that plays out, largely without words, on Torres’s face, in a performance of extraordinary intelligence and emotional complexity.

Josef Kubota Wladyka’s third feature film is a playful and whimsical confection, a deft blend of escapist kitsch and the real emotional heft that Kikuchi brings to the role.

The Eternal Memory is a restrained, respectful piece of film-making that takes its lead from its two subjects. It’s wrenchingly sad, but also a testament to the love that endures, even as Augusto increasingly struggles to recognise his wife.

The film manages the tricky feat of both staying true to Waters breathless, page-turning prose, and creating a wholly persuasive new milieu for the story.

The early potency of this macabre fairytale becomes increasingly diluted however, as the film progresses and the story broadens.

It is, at times, harrowing. The film doesn’t shy away from grief at its rawest, fear at its most paralysing.

With a smile that frays a little around the edges, and a peppy enthusiasm that can’t quite hide the doubts, McAdams wrings every last drop of pathos from her scenes, almost upstaging her screen daughter in the process.

If it’s a love letter, it’s the kind tinged with the grasping anguish and stab of bitterness that comes from knowing that the object of affection is almost certainly eyeing up a new favourite.

Like Kore-eda’s 2008 family drama Still Walking, this is a film which is interested in the architecture, both emotional and physical, of the family home.

If you pick apart the story threads, Sinners is a little messy, but Coogler’s assurance and vision holds everything together.

Like McQueen’s designs, it is thrilling, troubling and tinged with tragedy.

It’s bleak at times, but there is a defiantly celebratory aspect to the film, which finds hope in the solidarity of Black women and dignity in Gia’s quiet stoicism.

Bellocchio’s motives for making the film are in part to make sense of the events, in part, one suspects, to exorcise a lingering sense of survivor’s guilt. Yet for all the laudable intentions, Camillo still gets slightly lost in the rambling anecdotes, padding and extraneous details.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig may not be his most elegant picture – it has pacing issues and a laboured final act – but it is without doubt Rasoulof’s most important film to date.

It’s not just Nicholson’s performance that makes this film a masterpiece; it’s the fact that Forman was able to prevent that performance from capsizing the whole enterprise.

Unfortunately, for all its daring, Eureka is often stultifyingly slow.

The film’s empathetic approach allows Dixon to explore her decision, peeling back the layers of complexity that racism brings to the burden of sexual abuse. A must watch.

Armin seems to get less interesting as a character rather than more as his quest for survival takes priority. Ultimately you wonder whether, dramatically speaking, it was worth wiping out a planet full of people just so that one useless bloke could finally get his act together.

It’s an appealing little charmer of a film, captured with a pleasingly lithe and lively animation style.

Perhaps a more potent political statement is the way that Christopher Scott’s choreography claims and owns every square inch of the block. Reclaim the streets (with fabulous shoes and glorious Latin dance routines)!

The film’s approach skirts around the actual science of the Kraffts’ work, but it does explore the psychology of a shared passion, of a couple who melted their boots together on smoking lava flows and danced by the craters in a confetti of volcanic bombs.

There’s a real emotional heft to the storytelling and Caine, at 90, is a knockout.

The latest picture from husband and wife team Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji is an engrossing and thoughtful, if slightly meandering, portrait of contemporary China which straddles the impact of Tik Tok, the self-commodification of a whole generation of ambitious young people and the social and shadow of the pandemic.

The storytelling is so deft and slick, it almost feels scripted at times. But there are certain elements that you can’t dictate in advance, like the almost spiritual connection that grows between Nikola and the gangly, damaged bird that he rescues from the dump, and which, in turn, reaffirms Nikola’s bond with the land.

There is no questioning the angular complexity of the central character study, with all its unexpected harmonics and discords.

It’s a fascinating and enraging film and a timely reminder of the courage of members of the feminist vanguard.

It’s a gentle piece of Arabic-language storytelling, one that softly, slowly enfolds the audience rather than propels them on a journey.

This is subtle, unshowy film-making that is entirely in the service of the screenplay and the performances – and what performances.

The culturally specific elements that Iran-born, British-based first time writer-director Babak Anvari brings to the picture makes this a distinctive spin on a familiar premise.

What’s most interesting, although it gets slightly buried under a few too many almost identical musical performances, is the film’s account of the fractious symbiosis of the guru-disciple relationship.

This oppressive, atmospheric Austrian drama takes the kind of alpha female high achiever familiar from Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, but undermines her with splinters of Hitchcockian paranoia.

The latest film from the acclaimed writer-director Pema Tseden casts a typically wry eye over the collision between modernity and tradition in 1980s Tibet.

The poignancy and low-key desperation of the situation in which the men find themselves is balanced by the film’s warmth and gentle humour. In a market crowded with migrant stories, this is something special.

Visually glorious, frequently very funny and genuinely profound, this is a picture which cries out to be seen on the big screen.

It’s powerful and profoundly moving stuff.

Turning Red is a fizzing, squealing adolescent explosion of a movie that nails a fundamental truth about growing up.

In its own rather clunky way, the film strikes a blow for feminism in central Africa, and Amina, who strikes several literal blows on the man who impregnated her daughter, ends the film unexpectedly empowered by the experience.

The film’s narrow visual focus – much of the drama plays out in the face of police officer Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) – accentuates the crackling cleverness of a screenplay that allows us to unravel a mystery in real time.

It captures the wary, precarious nature of a community that relies financially on the same forces – the rampaging drug cartels – that also terrorise it. Huezo taps into the intense vibration between young female friends who treasure each other above all else.

It’s a propulsively intense piece of filmmaking – at times a bit like watching a highwire chainsaw juggling act about to go horribly and catastrophically wrong.

A must watch.

Greene is terrific – her Rosie is a force of nature. When she cracks, briefly, under the strain, her voice is a raw blade cutting through the bubble of safety she has created but no longer believes in.

While not as satisfying as the director’s two previous films – a jarring ending knocks the picture off balance – this uneasy eco-parable is still very much worth your time.

Rothwell uses the language of cinema – macro lens closeups, distortion, off-kilter framing and an evocative blend of sound design and score – to convey the autistic experience of the world.

The latest feature from the Bristol-based animation studio is an absolute delight.

Sirocco And The Kingdom Of The Air Streams is a beguiling and surreal story of sisterhood and survival.

The combination of a unique personality and a fascinating place makes for a beguiling and poetic film, which blurs the lines between science and art.

While the film lacks the bravura flourishes that characterised Powell and Pressburger at their peak, it’s an engrossing celebration of two of British cinema’s most distinctive voices, and their creative harmony.

Surface similarities to Groundhog Day are relegated to background noise, thanks to the crisp writing and the nihilistic bite of the humour.

There is a bruising authenticity to the picture that comes, in no small part, from a lengthy and meticulous casting process.

A winning, if whimsical, account of an ordinary woman achieving the extraordinary.

[A] silly, shallow romcom, which is as thin and predictable as Kat’s tinny pop songs.

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s generous documentary is a fitting tribute to the late, great author.

This is not just a visual treat, it’s a rewarding and unexpectedly engrossing piece of female-led storytelling.

What’s particularly striking is an inventive sound design that tunes us in and out of the blood-pounding fury in Roman’s head – a place, we soon realise, which is not somewhere that’s comfortable to linger.

There are charismatic figures fronting the movement, but the real power comes from each of the many shared, sad stories from women whose lives were affected by the law.

This sensitively structured psychological drama benefits from first-rate casting.

The meditative experience is heightened by Wenders’s innovative use of sound: indistinct whispers flutter like bats through the cavernous spaces.

Hit Man takes Powell’s amiable, supporting actor appeal (Top Gun: Maverick) and hones it to a star quality of such laser-beam intensity, you start to fear for your eyesight. It breathes fresh life into the played-out hitman genre – and contains what may be one of the top five winks in movie history.

There’s a despairing inevitability to the film’s incremental pacing – we feel every aching minute of the nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time. It’s not exactly fun, but it’s a relentlessly powerful piece of film-making.

There’s a languid kind of magic to Koberidze’s approach, which, with its enchanting score, digressive montages and sparse dialogue, has roots in silent cinema but also feels refreshingly and genuinely original.

Richly detailed and superbly acted across the board, the film cast a scathing eye over the rigid social constraints that ensnare anyone who fails to conform.

A celebration of scientific excellence and an account of a discovery which has ramifications for natural environments the world over, The Serengeti Rules makes for compelling viewing.

It’s a masterclass in using a stripped-back, minimal approach to gripping effect, evident throughout Ilker Çatak’s terrific, taut, Oscar-nominated drama.

It’s a tough watch – at the start, she suggests that we “close our eyes and take a deep breath if we need to” – but a brave and important one.

This terrific, unexpectedly moving documentary portrait captures the man at work.

The music they create together is emblematic of the central problem. It’s sterile, manufactured and utterly fake production-line pop masquerading as some kind of indie rock spotify sensation.

The slow-motion breakdown of a family is tracked by a lens that initially sought out intimacy and celebration, but finds itself, as the years pass, increasingly distanced from figures caught in its time capsule of a frame.

The use of animation is sometimes a little crude, but the homespun aesthetic works well with the quirky nature of the story which unfolds.

The sex is like tennis: fierce, combative bouts in which there will always be a winner and a loser. And the tennis, ultimately, is like sex: an ecstatic consummation between two perfectly matched people at their glistening physical peak.

What a joy is a documentary that neither talks down to its audience nor diminishes its subject.

There’s a bracingly astringent bleakness under its surface layer of melancholy humour; a biting, sharp edge that counters the occasional lurch towards sentimentality.

This remarkably assured debut ... uses the medium of cinema to its fullest extent, both visually and aurally.

It’s predictable but glossily watchable. The main redeeming feature is the crackling charisma of Emily Blunt, in the central role of a down-on-her-luck single mum turned pharma marketing genius.

It’s a bold, arresting debut from writer-director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, who balances muscular, crime-thriller tropes against moments of striking, unsettling beauty, tension and urgency against knottily complex character development. Highly recommended.

It’s an intense watch; at times infectiously hilarious, at others wrenchingly sad. For the film’s brief running time, there’s an emotional osmosis at play, in both sauna and cinema alike.

As the story progresses, Bell’s decision to share the focus and to examine her relationship with her mother makes more sense, bringing an intimacy and tenderness to the rock documentary format.

It’s a genuinely exciting piece of storytelling, a propulsive real-life quest for truth driven by ingenious tech-geeks and the disarming force of Navalny’s personality.

It’s striking how much can be conveyed with such economy: a few deft line depict diving terns, a gently turning water wheel. There’s a wild, unruly quality to the drawing at times of emotional trauma.

The narration, by LaKeith Stanfield, speaks on behalf of the photographer, who died in 1990. It’s through his remarkable pictures of South Africa and Black America, however, that we really hear his voice.

The Liam Gallagher of old, with his shrapnel wit and swaggering crusade against being “suckered in by the dickheads”, would have tossed a grenade into the editing suite rather than sanction a doc that is more extended corporate rebranding exercise than it is rock’n’roll.

Ultimately, as Agniia Galdanova’s remarkable observational documentary shows, Gena is her own extraordinary creation.

The film is a bracingly confrontational commentary on the direction the country is taking in the Bolsonaro era. Propulsive storytelling doesn’t come at the expense of the vividly sketched personality of the community.

Although perhaps on the enigmatic end of the Hong spectrum, The Woman Who Ran touches rewardingly on themes such as relationship dynamics and gender roles. The delicacy of the predominantly female-driven storytelling is unassuming but beguiling. And Hong goes so far as to skewer his own tendency to indulge monologuing windbag male characters in previous films.

The words are so piercing and acute that we hardly need the stirring score that swirls in the background.

It’s simply executed but undeniably powerful in its lean, stripped back elegance.

Buckley, as always, is terrific, bringing the picture more emotional potency than it perhaps warrants.

The combination of knock out performances, in particular from newcomer Eden Dambrine as Léo, and direction of uncommon sensitivity from Dhont makes for a picture which is intimate in scope but which packs a considerable emotional wallop.

It’s a testament to the quality of writing, and to the action direction, that this never feels as corny or as crass as you might expect.

It’s an accomplished, ambitious work which has a Herzogian fascination with vast, unforgiving landscapes, hubris and madness.

The overriding impression, once the adrenaline has drained away, is of futility, waste and pointless destruction.

The space that Mungiu leaves, both physically, with his immaculately composed wide shots, and temporally, in the unhurried plotting, allows for a satisfying complexity, and an eventual swerve into dreamlike symbolism.

What’s more unexpected is just how much Russian documentary filmmaker Vitaly Mansky is able to reveal despite, and often because of, the stringent restrictions imposed upon him.