Most powerfully, Dhont stages a recuperation of queer representation as both resilient and hopeful. Happiness, or perhaps more importantly, contentment, is possible when you seek it and seize it.

The Birthday Party is perhaps familiar to a fault, playing with hoary genre conventions effectively (though arguably not transcendent enough to withstand the expectations associated with competing for a major film festival prize). Still, Mysius (co-writing with Laurent Mauvignier) knows how to write compelling characters, and her ability to squeeze new energies from routine ideas through shifting the perspective can be pleasurable to those willing to look past the conventional hook.

The Dreamed Adventure is, ultimately, not an easy or altogether conformable viewing experience. But Grisebach’s penchant for unfussy storytelling lulls us into such complacency with Veska that even the subtlest hints suggest the hard won comfort of the present is on the verge of crumbling at any minute. Perhaps the dreamed adventure is, rather troublingly, our ability to believe in stability or comfort because powers beyond our control can pull us into depths we pretend aren’t there.

Of the many significant issues severely hobbling The Wizard of the Kremlin, the latest film from French auteur Olivier Assayas, the most egregious is how incredibly stupid it believes its audience to be. Characters freely interpret for us the meaning behind every moment, like professors lecturing us through interpretive stage dialogue. Add to this a thick porridge of Europa flavored accents from the primarily English language performers, led by the shockingly miscast Paul Dano, and it completes a recipe for one of the esteemed director’s biggest failures.

Hayakawa’s narrative isn’t so much experimental as it is unfocused.

A silver lining is how Herzi brings a tangibility to her heroine’s experiences, brought to blazing life by compelling newcomer Nadia Melliti. But there remains a core absence in the film’s trajectory, which utilizes familiar beats (set to a Kim Ki-duk reminiscent season cycle, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring) and cliched elements softening the blows, criticisms, and self-reflection penned by Daas.

A Man of His Time never justifies its subject or its methods, even if one wishes to make an argument for it being another embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil.’

Despite displaying a reverence for queer personas and artifacts, this is the first time Sachs has directly recuperated elements of the AIDS crisis, and it serves like an homage for the countless gay men who lost their lives during their prime.

After disappearing into television for the past decade, Nicolas Winding Refn once again rears into the cinema with Her Private Hell, which unfortunately is an insufferable, nonsensical exercise suggesting his narrative coffers remain empty.

Minotaur is a familiar story, to say the least, but a fitting continuation of the director’s clear-eyed deliberations on how intimate relationships present a sordid microcosm of the world at large.

Despite the potential grueling running time for such a specific and intimate narrative thrust, Sorogoyen presents something nothing short of fascinating in how creation allows for its own powerful form of catharsis.

Paper Tiger is partially a film about ‘more money, more problems,’ but also, quite powerfully, a study on how the tantalizing facade of the American Dream is an express elevator to hell for anyone who desires to outstrip the fate of their economic realities.

Frustratingly limited and unfortunately banal, it’s one of the prolific filmmaker’s most disappointing efforts to date and feels desperately in need of an updated operating system as regards its narrative reach.

Gentle Monster is perhaps a bit two striated in its examination of these two women and their eventual choices.

Warmly empathetic, it’s also a graciously staged and subtle romance between two women played superbly by Virginie Efira and Tao Okamato, building a connection despite destined brevity.

Unfortunately, the end result feels as shockingly out of touch as a principal character’s devotion to a typewriter.

Fukada is perhaps at his most elegantly demure as he juxtaposes two developing relationships rapidly progressing during one week in the titular rural area located in Okayama Prefecture.

Patches of narrative banality and fussy details are thankfully overshadowed by an effervescent lead performance which manages to unite all the messy threads into a satisfying melancholic portrait of a rigid personality who (maybe) finally learns a painful lesson in the necessity of exploring passion on her own terms.

The inextricable union of victim, victimizer, and witness becomes a metatextual balancing act in Jane Schoenbrun’s formidable third film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a gonzo pop art slice of catharsis which works as both a recovery and discovery of the queer gaze in horror cinema.

There’s little by way of excitement, and Pawlikowski adeptly conjures a world reviving from paralysis. But the family at its center isn’t able to redefine themselves like a phoenix from the ashes, their pasts, despite the privilege of being ‘on the right side of history’ as ‘good Germans’ whose hands are clean, still nipping at their heels like a curse they will never exorcise.

Salvadori’s greatest crime is denying Antoine and Suzanne the space to develop the chemistry which makes their budding romance seem plausible.

With a vibrating audio palette and crisply edited finesse, Silent Friend becomes a sensuous immersive experience, flitting between observational instances of periods and characters, pollinating the audience with characteristics of its players with just enough information to keep desiring more.

The characters in Pete Ohs delightful Erupcja are similarly caught between past and present in this summery, loose-limbed look at relationships under scaffolding.

Saleh’s script seems to be beating around the veritable bush for nearly two hours before it slams into violent gear, which effectively snaps the audience into a whiplash, but would have felt more effective had it arrived sooner. A tighter edit would greatly reduce the aimless, meandering quality, especially since multiple scenes regarding the film’s shoot also, by the nature of their falseness, feel flat.

Lifting directly from Camus’ prose in the final throes, Ozon’s take on The Stranger effectively administers the source’s intentions—and clearly, there is a point, even if Meursault himself would reject it.

Simple, sweet, and perhaps a bit too disarming, familiar stakes and an ambiguous resolution make DJ Ahmet feel more mundane than it should.

In many ways, Living the Land plays like the fictionalized version of moments in Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy, particularly in communal moments of intersecting realities. It’s a familiar human story, yet one which carves out its own fierceness as seasons change, life goes on, and new generations must contend with being unable to inherit the fruits of their parents’ toils.

While The Blue Trail ends on a tenuous note, it envisions a troubling, slippery slope of a future which doesn’t seem inherently unimaginable.