Although the film’s overstuffed, overpopulated storyline proves only sporadically interesting, it’s notable for at least providing an alternative view of a city more commonly associated with wintry gloom, corruption and heavy drinking.

Chadha has distilled a fascinating and epic true story into a starchy, stuffy, sanitized period piece that never fully engages on an emotional or educational level.

It’s hard not to leave the film shaken.

While visually dynamic, Lightning McQueen’s newest challenge still feels out of alignment with a languid end result that lacks sufficient forward momentum.

For all its potential, the movie ultimately feels like a frustrating miscalculation; the ingredients are there — it's the recipe that's off.

Ascent sometimes lives up to its title by proving a slog, not fully earning its feature-length running time. But the film nonetheless exerts fascination with its haunting imagery.

The execution is weak, and Crowley does himself no favors by repeatedly invoking the memory of more psychologically persuasive films like Five Easy Pieces and Deliverance.

Weirdly out of place here, Cruise brings little daring and less charm to the film, though to be fair to the actor, his character's a stiff.

There's enough dark sizzle between leads Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin to keep the audience involved through the underpowered middle stretches before the film regains its footing, delivering a disquieting shiver of a conclusion.

In the absence of a sturdier storyline and more dimensional characters, the manic, rapid-fire delivery, while yielding some well-deserved laughs, proves more exhausting than inspired.

Dorfman declares that she was never a media or critics’ darling. “I was at the bottom of the list,” she says when talking about her position in the ranks of modern photography. This film will convince you that she definitely deserves a higher position in the pantheon.

With his fine cast and his gracefully restrained screenplay, Shults makes horror recognizable.

Bringing their real-life story to the screen, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite has made a movie about soldiers that's not, strictly speaking, a war film. She's made a love story, one that's all the more heartstring-tugging for its cogent restraint.

Australian director Jonathan Teplitzky has fashioned a small-scale chamber drama from huge historical events, with a functional script and modest budget that fails to match the grand sweep of its story.

As with all comics-based extravaganzas, brevity is anathema to the Patty Jenkins-directed Wonder Woman, and it doesn’t quite transcend the traits of franchise product as it checks off the list of action-fantasy requisites.

It is clear that Serraille has made a portrait of a very specific individual but that she’s also saying something more general about her own generation.

Even if one agrees with Jarecki's progressive political position, making Elvis into a metonym for the nation's spiritual corruption starts to feel too much like a contrived rhetorical sleight of hand.

The two creators hit it off famously and collaborate with great ease on a journey driven by mutual curiosity and creative application.

There is ample material in Fortunata for a heart-rending tale of blue-collar female empowerment, but Castellitto’s noble intentions get swamped along the way in incontinent floods of histrionic excess, broad caricatures, clumsy allusions to Greek tragedy and psychodrama subplots that feel like half-baked afterthoughts.

Overall, Pio's accelerated passage from adolescence to adulthood is depicted with moving honesty and sensitivity.

There’s something admirably honest about the meta-method Amalric and co-writer Philippe Di Folco have chosen.

The film was shot chronologically and this is clear in the increasing fluidity of Gras’ camerawork, which is less and less searching the closer they get to the city.

Perpetually shifting gears between playful sci-fi pastiche, quirky rom-com and apocalyptic thriller, Before We Vanish might have worked better as a single dedicated genre, but it becomes a little scrambled trying to cover several at once.

Barbosa doesn’t seem very interested in questioning Buchmann’s intentions — the idea of cultural appropriation never comes up, for starters — with the young man depicted as sincere if clearly naive.

Ultimately, this psychedelic culture-clash comedy-romance takes what was at heart a relatively simple story by Gaiman, which channeled bold sci-fi imagination into relatable adolescent experience, and overcomplicates it beyond repair.

There are multiple levels on which to enjoy Roman Polanski’s Based on a True Story (D’Apres une histoire vraie), none of them very deep or complicated. But together they raise the resonance of a masterfully made psychological thriller in the traditional mode.

The sheer purity of the imagery is entrancing and puts it among his finest, most uplifting works.

The use of both dialogue and film language is sophisticated; sometimes Ismael’s Ghosts borders on overripe melodrama, while at other times it relies on genre tropes but then gives them an unexpected twist. [Cannes Version]