It builds, in the process, to a stunning and genuinely moving crescendo.

Like a Brueghel or a Bosch, Youth (Spring) is less an individual portrait than a bustling portrayal of types — lovesick fools and weary old souls, agitators and wallflowers, peacocks and young parents-to-be, all united and made equal by the same shared and endless labor and the same cramped living quarters. And all of them — but for two outliers — united by age.

It’s one of the most chilling art-Westerns to come along in some time, as provocative for its ideas, dialogue, and characterizations, as for the beauty of its empty landscapes.

Tran Anh Hung’s core skill is that of a top saucier, he knows how to add a glut of ingredients and reduce them to a rich flavor that moves the palate in ways that defy what seems like a simple dish.

The film’s eye-popping, blood-soaked vistas are a marvelous sight, as are a number of its era-specific details, and its handful of striking moments of queer samurai imagery. However, for the most part, Kitano’s tale of ambition and beheadings — many, many beheadings — loses nearly all momentum in its second half, before settling into a rote, repetitive rhythm.

An 81-minute film that’s as crisp and bittersweet as a late autumn breeze, Kaurismäki’s latest might amount to little more than a bauble in the end, but it offers a stirring reminder — both with its story, and through the experience of watching it — that life can only be so bleak so long as you can still go to the movies and escape it for a little while.

For every engaging character-driven moment or bit of warm humor (Giovanni angrily shouting “I’m going to call Martin Scorsese” certainly got the audience in Cannes laughing), there’s unearned, even irritating quirkiness.

The result is a movie that registers as slight by its end, despite the talent found within its confines. What is nonetheless evident, however, is that Bemba and Gohourou are worth watching as they go forward in their careers.

There’s nothing scarier than things that go bump in the night, but the terror is easily dispelled once we turn on the light and see what’s really there. That’s the lesson of King’s story, but Savage’s adaptation fails to understand that there’s nothing more frightening than the unknown.

Secure in his standing as a marquis comedian, Maniscalco makes movies like a guy with nothing to prove, and his confidence buoys and brightens About My Father.

It’s always been hard not to admire Hausner’s audacity, but this time around the boldness of her storytelling finally spills into trollish provocation.

With its use of body horror taking a backseat just when it might have worked best, Nell Eu is seemingly reluctant to make a B-movie, having written a script that could make for a fantastic one. That makes “Tiger Stripes” good, rather than great.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed lacks for drama in its portrayal of the quotidian realities of sexual kink, but Arnow’s voice is distinctive, shrewd, and spiky enough to keep it afloat.

If all of Anderson’s movies are sustained by the tension between order and chaos, uncertainty and doubt, “Asteroid City” is the first that takes that tension as its subject, often expressing it through the friction created by rubbing together its various levels of non-reality.

This is a fun — and sometimes very funny — movie that is virtually impossible to make fun of in return, and at the end of the day, that might be the only metric of success that matters to it.

With its soulful tin heart, Robot Dreams moves us to appreciate the fortune of having a precious pal. Whether for a season or a lifetime.

It’s the kind of culturally specific filmmaking that somehow immediately gains universality in that ambition to connect, to understand the empathy and sensitivity to listen in to these conflicts and this bright spark of a boy who speaks to struggles of faith however you were raised.

While The Delinquents was pointedly made to provoke active viewing and push back against the algorithmic storytelling that has choked the life out of modern cinema, its airiness and emergent sense of romance make it a delightful place to get lost for a while.

This raw and lingeringly sensitive film resonates more strongly when it’s lost in the ice maze than when it’s tracing its steps back to the entrance. The Breaking Ice sticks with you because it doesn’t lead its characters out of the maze, it just melts down the walls between them.

Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex folds a nuanced look at the pressures and permissiveness of teenage friendships inside a frustratingly didactic story about the vagaries of consent.

Kahn uses the simplicity of his movie’s structure — the action rarely leaves the courtroom — to underline the complexity of the circumstances and the prickly figure at its center, Goldman himself, played excellently by Belgian actor Arieh Worthalter, who gives his character the fervor that apparently made him a figurehead in his day.

It’s a veritable snakepit of uneasy decisions that grips you with its novel approach to so-called truth-telling before lapsing into something a little more conventional.

Firebrand pays frequent lip service to the courage it surely required for Katherine to do her royal duties with a straight face at the same time as she cultivated such radical ideas in secret, but little about the film itself reflects the courage of her convictions.

That problem: Does it feel real? Not yet, and not even movie star turns and rapping birds and the very best of intentions can bridge that divide. For now, “The Little Mermaid” exists outside of the very world it so wants to be a part of, one already so lovingly rendered in its predecessor, “real” or not.

Black Flies is too enraptured by the violence it finds in the margins of New York City to meaningfully interrogate the mental stress of healing it; too focused on the constant buzz of sirens and death to rescue anything more nuanced from those layers of white noise.

Banel & Adama is a striking debut that puts Sy on the map as a purveyor of deceptively gorgeous visions that show flimsy desires at the mercy of the social, and literal, weather.

As it calls the institution of marriage to the stand, Triet’s piercing film holds the ambient tensions and illogical loose ends of domestic life against the harsh and rational light of a legal system that searches for order in chaos.

About Dry Grasses is among the most brilliantly off-putting works to be featured at Cannes in recent years, with so rotten a core that every hint of virtue or even normalcy in the camera’s peripheral vision becomes a tragedy unto itself, simply by way of being ignored.