Poulter and Ackie are so cute together with their acerbic flirtations.

Embracing Close will depend on how willing you are to forgive the filmmaker for overriding some nuances he’s established, compared to the insightful things he’s able to say when not aiming to emotionally provoke us.

Broker marks a thematic continuation of career-length fascination with alternative families and the legal, social, and philosophical values that paint such complicated ethical portraits of them. The director still has plenty to say, and does so quite eloquently.

It’s a hard picture to dislike. The Belchers are such a purposefully weird and inclusive group; even if you haven’t seen the show you’ll feel right at home after a few minutes.

Among many films that tackle class, race, and privilege at Cannes this year ... War Pony is more subtle in its pursuit. The stories aren’t plotless but the emphasis isn’t on any one narrative conflict. Keough and Gammell make it more about witnessing the culturally and spiritually rich world of Pine Ridge.

Making every moment grim is to risk over-saturation, but Davis and Holmer’s deft direction keeps things compelling here, skilfully leaving plenty of things unsaid and with the confidence to allow key events to happen offscreen or in the margins.

Thirty minutes in—with all interesting ledes sufficiently buried or ignored, the charm of his husky southern drawl faded—you realize you’ve been conned into letting Coen take you on a YouTube train of his favorite Lewis performances and interviews. If you like Lewis’s sound, that’s fun for a short while. Then you realize he’s just playing the same songs on repeat and it starts to get annoying, as getting cornered at a party usually does.

It’s a work as faithful to its peculiar milieu as it is universal in its themes—a coming-of-age that feels, in a wistful and cumulatively moving way, like going back in time.

Shot by Jenkin on 16mm color negative with a 1970s clockwork Bolex and scored with post-synch sound, the film looks and sounds as a relic unearthed from one of the island’s caves. A chest stashed with stories in turns seductive and chilling, woven into a tale that will keep on unfurling, in an endless and confounding maze.

It’s tough to watch a movie like Elvis and totally dismiss it, no matter how much of a trainwreck it might seem. Name a department that isn’t the Tom Hanks department and there’s plenty of creative work worth praising. It’s just utterly incoherent with the material—that’s even tougher to get past.

Pacifiction draws you in with its sense of mystery and surrealism and leaves you ultimately agog.

Her latest work is not one that feels fully achieved and realized, suggesting an absolutely confident mastery of her primary source material, but it’s still deeply watchable, laden with sex and intimacy in a way that doesn’t apologize for itself, and provides an alternate gloss on her key themes of power, bodies, and postcolonial afterlives.

A somewhat familiar story about obsession set adjacent to the unique world of the underground music scene in Columbus, Ohio, Poser is a charming and dark debut from directors Ori Segev and Noah Dixon.

So many scenes unfold with static frames to give actors our undivided attention, letting them evolve emotionally without unnecessary cuts undermining authenticity.

There is something admirable about the sheer hopelessness of this narrative. It’s not altogether surprising given Schrader’s imprint, but it lacks the nuances of something like First Reformed or The Card Counter.

Ratcheting up the conflict and confusion becomes counter-intuitive, the escalation of violence and brutality arriving without clear motive. I can’t even decide for myself what’s happening—there’s nothing but smoke to grab. Owen stripped away the film’s own agency.

Overall it seems Abbasi got caught between the social righteousness dictates of the “message movie” and pure amorality of what, disturbingly so, often makes for great genre cinema.

Shot in gorgeous natural light by Denis Lenoir (the cinematographer on all but one of her films since Eden), and backed by a soundtrack of typically esoteric needle-drops, the director delivers her finest in years by doing what she’s always done best: a humanistic story of when to love and when to let go.

It’s dazzling and uneven, seductive and flawed, and only [Cronenberg] could have made it. There’s no beating the genuine article.

Skolimowski uses cinema to create a non-headset-required virtual-reality experience of another creature’s life—an empathy machine, if you will.

There’s never a moment of grand revelation; rather a subtle, perpetual sense of understanding what’s going on, a fact that takes some pressure off the film and will likely make for a richer rewatch.

Though struggling with some pacing issues, it’s mostly an engaging, well-performed drama that offers a fascinating peek into an institution matched in significance only by the Vatican itself.

Its dizzying culmination of ideas proves more feature than bug.

Its content, humor, and heart all merge to deliver a piece with the potential for cult appeal that transcends the act itself. It’s a treatise on America, the blurred line between taboo and cruelty, and our collective fear of real individuality despite claims by both sides of the aisle to foster freedom. The outcasts get their day.

At a lengthy 140 minutes, the film flashes by. The deeper you go the more you want to know, and the more there is to know.

Ruben Östlund might like his fish in a barrel but he’s a ruthless shot.

As swings go, Three Thousand Years of Longing is a miss, but there is something infectious about Miller’s confidence here: you’re never too far from an idea to enjoy.

Brother and Sister holds the line of his recent strong, if under-distributed work, but still doesn’t get within inches of his dazzling 90s-00s run. Yet it also gains credence and relevance as an epilogue (or mature re-consideration) of his past themes, a reminder of how few filmmakers contain his sensitivity, originality, and literary gifts.