A fundamentally serious film leavened by a streak of deadpan, droll humor, its quality will ensure even greater interest in Ailhaud's memoir in the run-up to its impending centenary.

Initial hints of a "Mean Girls"-meets-"Lord of the Flies" complication don't come to much in this straightforward pic, which will be zeitgeisty enough for some viewers while leaving most wanting something a bit more imaginative.

Vogler creates an intoxicating mood at times, especially through slick visuals and a trippy score by French electro maven Laurent Garnier, but her movie is like something you distractedly watch out of the corner of your eye in a café or train station or on someone else’s iPhone on the subway. In other words, it belongs on the small screen.

Hart has fashioned a tale of matriarchal inheritance, but one whose fierce message is undercut rather than deepened by its child's-book clarity. The intriguing setup receives underpowered execution, the intended jolts landing all too softly.

In the end, it’s hard to tell whether Simon is actually critical of her establishment’s methods or whether she fully embraces them, although she is clearly compassionate toward the applicants and offers a reasonable payoff when we finally learn who made the cut.

Pang’s cast of regulars is a well-oiled machine, and he and co-writer Sunny Lam are as fond of their characters as the characters are of each other.

A fascinating if ultimately failed exercise in histrionics and social commentary.

The deeper the script gets into how its version of witchcraft works, the less convincing it becomes. Uniformly solid performances and artful camera/sound work make the movie hard to dismiss out of hand, but the script doesn't sell its hokum as effectively as more mainstream supernatural soap operas.

Wickedly funny, fascinating and niftily made.

The story gets engrossing enough that we don't much miss what Avrich doesn't offer.

Admittedly, Elephant is a heavy affair, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Hu's characters remain very real, and they are never shown as indulgent to the point of being above the banalities of everyday life. Barbed humor abounds, too, in matter-of-fact dialogue.

The first feature-length doc by Suzannah Herbert, it is smartly focused, offering nothing to distract from the stories it is able to fit within its running time.

Where it might have been an old-fashioned melodrama with credible historical appeal, instead it suggests an old-school celluloid epic whose print has lost a reel or two.

A long, leisurely drama directed with self-assurance.

While Woods' brash vitality is the movie's motor, it's in the moments when Goldie drops her bravado and reveals her vulnerability that the story becomes more than a reckless adventure.

Bustamante's screenplay is a philosophically and theologically nuanced affair, intermittently elliptical, concentrating on the bigger picture without bothering to sketch in the smaller details. This becomes something of an issue, given that these are often the pivots upon which the somewhat telenovela-like plot hinges.

The director is such an engaging presence onscreen — wry and humane, balancing sly social commentary with a playfully child-like attitude — that even a minor autumnal work like this is still a heart-warming mood-lifter.

Lapid continues to exhibit a singular blend of intensity and absurdity, as well as a distinct attention to cinematic craft.

The film improves upon reflection, raising, as it does, some knotty questions about originality in art and in life, as well as provocatively positing that even a copy of a copy of a copy has the potential to move hearts and minds.

The screenplay struggles to rise above the level of a sociological study into the realm of exciting cinema.

An extraordinary feeling for nature and the seasons of life pervades Out Stealing Horses (Ut Og Stjaele Hester), an ambitious reflection on our responsibility to others from Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland.

Writer-director Yuval Adler connects the dots of the convoluted plot with reasonable clarity, but The Operative only intermittently builds suspense.

Nothing on either side comes close to the trenchancy or grim poetry of Jones' harrowing odyssey, which is as it should be. But there's also no reason for all the political obstructionism and journalistic frustration to be so windy.

What holds the film back is the familiarity of its elements.

As a supposed snapshot of life in the unaccommodating big city, and of the humane gestures that can soften that harshness, it feels utterly synthetic, not to mention a romantically "European" view of New York that's sheer nonsense.

It's an uncompromising, sophisticated, multi-layered work of art which demands to be met at least halfway.

Zoya Akhtar (Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara) directs with flair and passion and, aided by explosive performances from a right-on cast, triumphs over the familiarity of the star-is-born storyline.

On some level, Fritz’s story is compulsive viewing, only you wish you weren’t there.