As drama the film mostly serves to illustrate the two sides of this crucial social debate in Africa.

The chosen style of animation leads to a distracting choppiness that renders the movements, gestures and facial expressions of the interviewees unconvincing. The other problem is that, memory naturally being something that returns in fits and starts, the film is rarely able to sustain any consistent narrative thrust.

Despite its successful attempts to show how oil has affected everyday citizens in nearby Nigeria, the film remains fairly dry.

For much of its running time, Zama is merely remote and enervating, too accurately reflecting its protagonist’s predicament.

The movie goes downhill into predictable territory, finally landing in a soggy quagmire of talkiness and would-be profundity expressed in voiceover at the end. But at least the visuals are nice, with Ceylan’s signature use of snow-capped landscape and wide-angled lensing to the fore.

A long, leisurely drama directed with self-assurance.

The film clearly wishes to explore the topic of children having children, but it only inspires a great desire to smack them both.

It’s unlikely to be remembered with any great fondness by all but Almodovar diehards, its self-regarding inwardness suggesting that he’s struggling, as his hero is here, to find something new to say.

The use of music and sound design is very thoughtful throughout, capturing the way music by street performers makes life in the city feel like a musical all the time while the murmur of traffic and general hubbub creates its own atonal backing track.

The main problem of Happy as Lazzaro is that it's unclear what Rohrwacher finally wants to say in part two, which combines the near-documentary realism of her first feature with the occasional flights of fancy of her second.

There are eight individual decisions to be made here, yet Beauvois never humanizes any of his monks. The film instead consumes itself with songs, communal prayers and nightly meals.

That nobody becomes a realized character with an emotional arc is just a place American Factory falls a little flat.

Hard luck conspires with bad sex in this unspectacular Austrian tale of crime and punishment.

Ironically, Sirat gets muddled near the end. Although the last act is in many ways the liveliest — viewers will be jolted by a series of bleak twists — it’s also where Laxe relinquishes narrative coherence in the service of making his metaphors more literal.

From a sensory point of view, the film is a pleasure, the images having been manipulated in various ways to evocative effect, Anderson’s voiceovers proving more amusing than not, and the music taking mostly lively turns.

This intoxicatingly stylish work is all over the place, a hot mess at times so ravishing it sends shivers down to the toes. Unfortunately, it’s also at times just plain crass and silly.

Boys State inevitably feels more and more like reality TV programming, which is both appropriate for our times and depressing.

Though it takes some time to sort out the large cast, the leads, all fine actors, eventually come into focus. As the good and bad samurai, Yakusho and Ichimura have the gravitas to take their roles seriously and perform a decisive one-on-one sword fight straight.

The film captures the energy, the stresses and the tension of people striking punching bags and each other but without narration, it all feels a bit random and uninteresting.

A penchant for suffocating close-ups and an overabundance of scenes that go on far too long mar Abdellatif Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain, an otherwise engaging drama about an immigrant Arab family in France.

Office is undermined by a simplistic screenplay lacking the nuances and frisson one expects of a cutting-edge satire of a capitalist world propelled by graft and greed.

It is good-natured, lowbrow, backlot, hit-or-miss humor, but with no cumulative effect beyond its succession of hard-worked jokes. More theatrical than cinematic in its conception, this group effort relies on the improvisation of its performers.

Impressive in parts, but wildly uneven as a whole.

Moonage Daydream is short on insight, and ends up feeling more enervating than enlightening.

More pictorially arresting than intellectually coherent.

Jewish and academically inclined audiences worldwide will respond to numerous aspects of this unusual drama, although it is paradoxically both too broad and too esoteric for the general art house public.

Turns Jane Austen's nimble satire into a lumbering gothic romance.

Especially in light of a short parable Cam tells early on about work and retirement, it's pretty obvious that Abbie's voluntary imprisonment is meant to reflect an American underclass that can't imagine any kind of life beyond our late-capitalist constraints.