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.

At a point in time, a film like Two Prosecutors would seem like an old fashioned recapitulation of a dark, disastrous period we’d safely moved away from. However, it’s difficult not to see crystal clear parallels, on an operational level at the least, with NKVD, an agency operating with complete autonomy, and something like the newly minted monstrosity DOGE in the US.

Guilt certainly becomes her, and the narrative, which consists mainly of a handful of one-on-one interactions, yields often funny, sometimes surprising results.

Destined for instant controversy and an eventual time capsule documenting Israel’s normalizing of barbarism, Lapid’s latest is an admonition of almost shocking import, an increasingly rare example of modern art speaking truth to power.

Quickly shot on single location, and brought to life collectively and collaboratively by an ensemble cast, Wheatley’s latest could have been a minor curiosity to keep the creative juices flowing in-between bigger projects, but there’s definitely more under the surface of this relentless barrage of recriminations and reckonings.

Despite its flaws, the film’s affirmation of immigration and shared humanity feels rare, timely, and quietly powerful in a divided Britain.

Marczak is clearly a talented filmmaker, but his instincts seem better suited to narrative than documentary; his eagerness to flourish prevents a true marriage between form and direction.

With a unique perspective that both uplifts and devastates, Birds of War is a stirring portrait with its head on its shoulders and its heart firmly in the right place.

In the world of Franco, humankind always resorts to base brutality, and this is a hemorrhaging revenge film suggesting the cruelest crimes are those of the heart.

Rosi approaches obscured angles of Naples, going above and below, inside and out.

One’s familiarity with similar agonized portraits of motherhood may dictate how novel Nightborn might seem, though it’s lonely, traumatized Sara who makes one want to stay until the end credits.

If there’s any need to make another film about despicable, beautiful, filthy rich monsters, at least decide what, if anything, might be of interest to say. If families are rose bushes needing pruning, then so are scripts.

Hüller is quite exceptional as the disfigured human grimly determined to succeed, sacrificing pleasure and comfort for control.

What’s shocking is how rough hewn the characters and sentiments are in Yellow Letters considering Çatak’s laser sharp focus in The Teachers’ Lounge.

The choreography feels restrained and intimate and when Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! swerves into fantasy its catchy and feels vibrant — and is methodically threaded with the notion of letting go, and that even finality can be cheerfully addressed.

Nuisance Bear is many things at once – a critical look at the traces the erosion of long-held practices and vanishing ways of life added to technological encroachment and human interference making for another tangle of unintended consequences.

Perhaps a bit more mainstream than might be expected from the distinctive human miseries usually employed by du Welz, Maldoror is an enjoyably meaty recuperation of an infamous scandal.

Arguably, there’s nothing innately wrong with Young Mothers, other than it feeling like a return to safer socio-cultural predicaments which characterized the directors’ earlier output, which often involved children.