It’s a cool film and never less than interesting, even as it meanders a bit too sleepily toward its final denouement.

The ambivalence of it all is a compelling force. And even if everyone is made to look pathetic at one point, we can safely say this is Breillat’s version of the old saying: “Love conquers all”.

Erice and co-writer Michel Gaztambide satisfyingly resolve the primary mystery while letting possible accompanying details and circumstances swim teasingly in our minds.

Club Zero is less a cautionary tale about eating disorders than a satire on environmental anxieties, extreme activism, and the sometimes-competitive nature of those who get swept up in it. That’s a tasty premise, but Hausner’s take is frankly a cynical one and, much like the plate of vomit that dominated headlines after the film’s premiere last week in Cannes, it leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth.

Even as it routinely threatens to get lost in a head-spinningly knotty plot, the director’s kinetic approach and gallows humor makes Kubi a singular addition to Kitano’s oeuvre.

Despite the cool, screeching, horror-like score and some memorable moments, Kidnapped plays more like a heavy sigh than an absorbing adaptation of history.

As a film, Fallen Leaves could hardly be simpler––two people living separate, lonesome lives meet and maybe fall in love––but there is beauty in that simplicity and, as ever, Kaurismäki’s characters live far richer inner lives.

A Brighter Tomorrow may be soaked in nostalgia, but it’s a nostalgia with a reactionary twang. Its title, in retrospect, feels oddly ironic. This is a screed from a director unwilling to look at the future with more than just contempt, where the “tomorrow” is really just a rose-tinted fantasia of long gone past.

That Kandahar’s geopolitical ambiguity isn’t the richest is maybe to be expected, but paired with lame character dynamics, it sadly sells short the potential of Butler’s weary face under duress, something I’ll nonetheless keep returning to.

Asteroid City is an absolute delight, Anderson’s best since The Grand Budapest Hotel.

British teens on holiday at a Greek resort means booze, booze, and more booze, but Molly Manning Walker’s debut film has the power to take these prosaic cultural archetypes (teenhood, virginity, youth drinking culture) and use them as tools to tell a poignant story about the ambivalences of growing up, female friendships, and consent.

It’s an immensely enjoyable, idiosyncratic entertainment.

Railing against conventions has the potential to become conventional after a while, and the film eventually suffers from a case of diminishing returns, but there’s more than enough to warrant such lulls. And of course Williams ends it with a lot of swagger.

Blanchett gives a committed turn as the conflicted nun, but all her emphatic exertions cannot resurrect a story that forsakes its mysticism for a calculated parable, as well-intentioned as it is turgid.

It’s a wonderfully distinctive debut by Arnow, who lays it all out in both her script and performance.

It would be very fair to expect a movie about a woman who raped a child and her future family’s reckoning with that to be dark, heavy, even overbearing. But May December is more funny than it is fervent, a bona fide spring suburban anthem, an American malady in chrysalis.

Martin Scorsese triumphs yet again.

Steve McQueen’s first documentary feels more like an unedited podcast with dizzying visual accompaniment than a feature film, despite ruminating on its subject, Amsterdam under Nazi occupation, for more than four hours.

It’s a shocking piece of audio-visual art that only further cements Glazer as one of the 21st century’s most original and influential filmmakers.

It often fizzes as much as it lulls, but in Mikkelsen’s Dr. Schmidt the film can at least boast a worthy antagonist, and one with enough personality to cover some of those cracks.

All told, Fast X is an improvement on its recent predecessors and perfectly welcome as distracting summer fare, but whether or not it will stall before the end of the road remains to be seen.

What starts as a relatively clear story about sinister pyros, “pig-brained” kids, and abusive teachers transforms, through labyrinthine story mechanics, into a maze of limited perspectives crafted by loss, misinterpretation, and rejection.

With its whirlwind, surface-level observations of fascinatingly complex lives, The Thief Collector is the kind of scattershot true-crime documentary that grips in the moment but, with reflection, is more entertaining to discuss than revisit for additional clues.

It’s almost bold of director Dominik Moll and screenwriter Gilles Marchand to center their film so much around both the male perspective and flawed, albeit noble cop protagonists, and intriguing how Night of the 12th flips this on its head by having them get lost in the abyss of the case by simply feeling like bureaucrats.

Neang doesn’t widen his focus beyond the characters; they’re at risk of displacement from the city they’ve always known, but this critique of gentrification largely remains implicit, visible only allegorically through their daily struggles.

Even if the form could be a little more wild, Rodriguez keeps his film moving at a reasonable clip so you don’t spend too much time thinking about the various ridiculous plot twists.

While Employee of the Month might start slow as it sets this stylistically heightened (yet completely believable) premise, it doesn’t take long for chaos to reign supreme.

Sable becomes a nexus point of preservation and destruction. Lucas captures it all as data while Mills unleashes the artistry of those numbers courtesy of sight and sound. Beauty lives in death. Suffering is born from life. Everything is connected.