Utterly uneasy to watch but strikingly and confidently assembled, the film is a powerful aural and visual experience that doesn’t quite manage to sustain itself over the course of its running time, but is a remarkable — and remarkably intense — experience nonetheless.

While that awkward final section shows Jia's lack of assurance working in English, the misstep is instantly erased in a beautiful concluding sequence that reaffirms the film's aching depth of feeling and extraordinary sense of place.

An intensely compelling work.

Highlighted by an all-consuming lead performance from Lindon – surrounded here by an excellent cast of non-pros – this third collaboration strays further into Dardennes Bros. territory than previous efforts, although its depiction of an Average Joe scraping by in contemporary France features its own unique voice.

Ambitiously mounted but wildly uneven.

The director, her co-screenwriter Etienne Comar and the exceptional cast led by Emmanuelle Bercot and Vincent Cassel have an acute enough eye for the manners and mores of these archetypes to make the material feel consistently fresh and alive.

My Golden Days more often privileges emotional truths over historical veracity. This helps not only to make the past dilemmas of the protagonists feel more immediate and real, but also suggests how, looking back, we see our lives as a succession of emotional experiences, not dry historical facts.

It feels ineffably slight even if it’s a consistent pleasure to spend time in the company of these three likeable women.

Gus Van Sant’s sticky, gooey side — previously on display in the likes of Finding Forrester and especially in the 2011 Restless — oozes out once more in the woefully sentimental and maudlin The Sea of Trees.

The violence of the inter-American drug trade has served as the backdrop for any number of films for more than three decades, but few have been as powerful and superbly made as Sicario.

Youth is a voluptuary’s feast, a full-body immersion in the sensory pleasures of the cinema.

It shows Audiard once again drawn to resilient people in punishing situations, and its arc from the opening images of death to its final notes of hope and wholeness is quite moving.

A very fine if not exactly groundbreaking film about, as the title hints, perspective and distance.

While it's uneven, A Perfect Day builds to a nice melancholy conclusion. It underscores with gentle strokes the frustration and disillusionment of self-sacrificing workers confronted on a daily basis with feelings of futility in the face of corruption and compromise.

Writer and director Portman's film seems conflicted over whether it is about young Amos or his mother, whom she portrays as a beautiful, cultured woman with a head full of romantic fantasies.

Caissy and his editor, Mathieu Bouchard-Malo, manage to construct something that acquires a cumulative force that speaks compellingly and much more generally about the intersection of youth, education and personal morality than the specific cases of these often nameless, zit-sprinkled pieces of work.

Star-stuffed, well paced and very funny.

A bit of community spirit and camaraderie, it seems, can go a very long way, and sequences of spectacularly dystopian-apocalyptic, third-world bleakness are leavened by moments of incongruous beauty, even grace.

If the metrics by which you want to measure Love are its brute sexiness and technical panache, then the film is indeed rather extraordinary. Thanks to Noe's regular collaborator Benoit Debie (who also shot such recent visually bravura films as Spring Breakers and Lost River), Love contains some of the prettiest shagging scenes in cinematic history.

Such a deliberate setup is by design intended to create emotional conflict, so it’s perhaps fortuitous that the plot doesn't become even more contrived than it starts off.

The sensitive macho Schoenaerts is pretty much center-screen throughout this sleekly made suspense piece based on a script more loaded with holes than the numerous bad guys he either shoots or stabs to death.

While it's well acted and has strong moments on a scene-by-scene basis, the film lacks an emotional center, keeping the impact cool and diffuse where it should be affecting.

Initially somewhat wispy-feeling, this 72-minute feature transforms in its final reel from an ironic divertissement to a work of considerable feeling and intensity.

As action, it's niftily executed, the suspense neatly built, and the shocks expectedly surprising.

Past lives and ancient ancestors are evoked through conversations that are both cryptic and oddly matter-of-fact, in a work that has the realistic vibe of a documentary but the unearthly qualities of a sustained reverie.

While Hooper favored shock value and jump scares, Kenan and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe construct far more fluid sequences as the camera glides and hovers over its subjects, reserving the most impactful shots for the climactic scenes, particularly a concluding sequence that’s particularly thrilling.

Tale of Tales combines the wildly imaginative world of kings, queens and ogres with the kind of lush production values for which Italian cinema was once famous. The result is a dreamy, fresh take on the kind of dark and gory yarns that have come down to us from the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, only here they're pleasingly new and unfamiliar.

Blanchett makes an indelible impression as a woman who, through breeding, intense personal cultivation and social expectations, has brilliantly mastered the skill of navigating through life.