The Peasants is a histrionic and often-ludicrous bummer, one that wastes the deeply committed performance of star-in-the-making Kamila Urzedowska. The Welchmans deserve credit for developing a unique style. Now it is time to write words that match these images.

Jacobs’ understanding of these emotional truths––family ties finding ways to continually adapt, evolve, and mend in the most difficult circumstances––gives Daughters its power.

Bill and Turner Ross approach the narrative with a deep understanding of vagrancy as soul-searching and the camaraderie it entails.

By letting the horrors to come unfold in all their uncensored brutality, Dear Jassi forces those who would rather dismiss such situations as not being their problem to experience the violence being done in God’s name firsthand.

It’s a very funny romp with a fantastic comedic performance by Pednekar.

The film is playing with familiar tropes along a formulaic path, but it’s simply too endearing to dismiss outright.

Yes, admirably “bonkers” by the end, but one wishes the rest of the film could cut a little deeper.

One hopes Wildcat can disappear into thin air so that it doesn’t have to weigh on Hawke’s legacy.

Chastain and Sarsgaard––ably supported by Josh Charles, Jessica Harper, and Elsie Fisher across the ensemble––are just fantastic, and find an ideal emotional register for Franco’s dramatic somersaults.

Maybe there’s not much space for beauty, yet there’s still a thrill from the trademark jerky camera movements that follow Wang Bing’s subjects. His often muddy-but-striking images always figure out a way to compose bodies somewhere between ultra-realism and painterly precision.

There may be a subtle melancholy to the three overlapping character studies in Kiyohara’s film, but watching it was one of the more soothing cinematic experiences I’ve had this year precisely from its sense of place, examining how this location proves surprisingly fruitful in providing life’s simplest pleasures to those who live there.

Rustin still has its Oscar-bait moments and doesn’t necessarily take any big swings that might risk mainstream appeal, but it’s a solid drama and above-average profile, nonetheless. And if you get nothing else out of it but a cursory education on Bayard Rustin the man as well as an acting clinic from Domingo and Glynn Turman, even that should be enough.

The director of Astrakan is David Depesseville (frankly just a touch too close to Depressville for comfort). Astrakhan is his first film and suggests something of a stylistic calling card, not least at film’s close: a late flurry of exposition and offcuts that are less in service of plot or character or even mood and more an artist showing what else they can do. It’s not entirely a turn-off.

The animation on offer is also strictly low-fi, something we might charitably call relatable––it seems indistinct from what members of the audience might be able to produce should they put some effort into it.

Ly is, for the most part, much more somber and reined in here: he doesn’t focus too much on the direct, violent action conflicts as a trigger mechanism, instead showing the process-oriented political policy that inches towards the greater destruction of a vulnerable and underprivileged community.

With a little more Keaton charm, a sharper script, and a bit more filmmaking verve, Knox may have succeeded.

Ultimately, The End We Start From is a success because its focus is not on the tropes of post-apocalyptic cinema. Instead it zeroes in on the love between a mother and her child, and that makes all the difference.

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial succeeds as many adroit legal thrillers have, probing the limits of the law (and its inability) for all its protocol and safeguards, to provide a full accounting of “justice”: it is always so much more complicated.

This is the kind of comedy one imagines will only earn a few chuckles when it eventually arrives on a streaming platform.

Grant Singer’s best directorial decision in a film filled with clumsy ones is giving Del Toro as much real estate as possible, in many occasions having the entire screen filled by his visage––sad, squinted, glaring eyes look right at you through the dead-center of the frame.

In many ways Lee is a perfect festival crowd-pleaser––handsomely made, well-acted, based on a true story, filled with recognizable stars. While it is not a great film, it is undoubtedly a good one, and that’s enough to warrant a recommendation.

For all its anger at the ways Black experience has been flattened, reduced, and commodified, American Fiction has a fleet-footed touch, distilling complicated systemic issues of race to a comedy that invites both a laugh and conversation.

Despite there being zero surprises from start to finish as it fulfills its mass-marketed, for-profit formula, Next Goal Wins never talks down to us. It ensures its characters learn from their mistakes and that any mean-spiritedness is exposed as being about the giver rather than the receiver.

If far from revelatory, it nonetheless contains a good deal of likability and honesty.

Woman of the Hour likely won’t be the last re-telling of this shocking tale, but it’s hard to imagine a more perceptive take than the one Anna Kendrick provides.

The whole gets somewhat tiring, considering few (if any) scripts could sustain the level of insanity met when it’s at its best. Anything not dialed to eleven becomes noticeably dull by comparison.

Coup de Chance is an amiable, sometimes-profound amuse-bouche.

What defines The Boy and the Heron is its wistful feeling of looking back.