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

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.

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.

Strange yet familiar, ending on a wistful note to the crooning of Anika, a favored artist of the director, the strange pain associated with not living up to the conditioned expectations of our prescribed roles is exactly what makes Father Mother Sister Brother feel poignant.

The set-up is familiarly threadbare, with numerous lackadaisical interactions between some sort of creative type confronted by new people whose orbits slowly circle one another as they engage in an eat/drink/be merry scenario. But it builds to a surprisingly weighty climax in a third act which is more confrontational about duplicitous human behaviors than most of his past works.

Essentially, Linklater is applying his own hangout tableaux to the New Wave alumni. But it fails to capture the energy of what exactly made them such trailblazers.

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.

Bizarre, but not without its own unique brand of narrative and visual rewards, The Hyperboreans is an eclectic, disturbing, and formidable foray into the creative possibilities of what cinema can be.

While this is vastly better than the B-grade action franchise generated by Olympus Has Fallen (2012), the fatal error of the film exists in its structural foundation.

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.

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

Arguably less sensational and surprisingly straightforward, it’s another expertly crafted bit of bizarre theatrics from an auteur who remains fascinated with exploring characters struggling to comprehend situations from obscured vantage points, puzzling skewed realities together often too late to avoid disaster.

Lawrence is exceptional, and as committedly bleak as the film is, her empathetic portrayal allows this to feel less like miserabilism and more like an honest depiction of a woman who feels indefinitely trapped.

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.

An audience’s mileage for Hedda will depend on how much they enjoy watching what is little more than a parlour game between the pampered upper classes.

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

Certainly, Sorrentino does ask questions worth pondering. But the corresponding answers are often monosyllabic.

Between tidbits of enjoyable banter, Baumbach stages some of the most comically tone-deaf moments of his career.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

While examining the broader implications of political polarization and on a lesser frequency the fragility of democracy, journo-director Michael Premo’s debut often captures crucial moments of civil unrest with a well-placed camera.

The emotional payoff of the film isn’t so much about triumph, but resilience. And the reality of never knowing how being yourself inspires others, even long after it might seem the opportunity to do so has passed.

Martin sets himself up with an ambitious endeavor for a first time feature, but unfortunately, it’s just out of his reach. Utilizing abstraction to achieve universal sensations is almost like pulling off a magic trick — it looks easy when done well, but the seams split and show when it doesn’t come off just right.

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.