Set in a rural village and cast with nonactors, led by a feral performance from dancer Wendy Chinchilla Araya, the drama occupies its own territory, tinged with magical realism and deeply immersed in the sensory world. It’s also a vivid reminder that even a matriarchy can be paternalistic.

You can feel Panahi drifting away from his director forefathers, including his own father, testing out new ideas and methods to see if they suit him, trying to find a different way to express himself. Like the older son in Hit the Road, he’s bravely venturing off into unknown territory for his first movie — although he also keeps one foot firmly planted in the past, creating the kind of quiet miracles Iranian cinema is known for.

Like a beltway surrounding its hero’s bloviating ego trips and massive libido, the film keeps turning in circles around a subject that’s only truly interesting if you’re Philip himself.

Its bow in Cannes in the Special Screenings sidebar is amply justified by two whimsical exercises in art house cinema directed by Jafar Panahi and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The other tales are quirky but mixed in impact.

Vacation Friends is a droll and mildly salacious flick that revels in subverting the expectations of its central characters and, eventually, its viewers.

He’s All That may be a flattened reflection of its predecessor, but both films are charming enough to get away with about one anal sex innuendo joke apiece.

There’s abundant joy, spirited resilience and sweet humor on tap that should be especially infectious for young LGBTQ audiences, or anyone with experience of outsider stigmatization.

In the end, Demonic is all simulation, no real scares.

Rebecca Hall’s admirable refusal to soften the brittle edges of her recently widowed protagonist in The Night House makes her a compelling variation on the usual woman in ghostly peril.

As adept as Together is at capturing the challenges of the pandemic — the uncertainty, the anger, the bone-deep exhaustion — it’s rather less convincing as a love story.

My Childhood, My Country, which inevitably recalls Michael Apted’s Up series, suffers from pacing issues and feels choppy at times. But its decades-long portrait of a young man struggling to survive amidst difficult circumstances proves deeply moving, especially in light of recent events.

Both touching and universally understandable, the theme is how an untimely death destroys the fragile fabric that binds a family together.

It’s a deliciously rug-pulling affair which, like the “catfishing” protagonist — i.e. a person hiding behind a fake online persona for deceitful purposes — comes across as one thing and gradually reveals itself to be quite another.

Even though Whishaw is mesmeric, by the end of the 105-minute running time the whole experience starts to feel like being trapped in a broken-down subway car with a violent mental patient.

Director Nia DaCosta, working from a script she wrote with Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld, uses Bernard Rose’s 1992 film as a jumping-off point for bone-chilling horror that expands provocatively on the urban legend of the first film within the context of Black folklore and history, as well as the distorting white narrative that turns Black victims into monsters.

It’s much closer to the work of its main subject: a bit hurried, inoffensive and ultimately unsubstantial. It’s loosely informative, rarely revelatory and, despite what the title might lead you to expect, never provocative.

The best that can be said about When I’m a Moth is that it is not lurid, although it does seem pointless.

While its disparate elements don’t meld together as smoothly as they should, they do, in the end, add up to a superhero movie fresh and fun enough to feel worth a spin.

While its mystical subject defies logic, Sara Dosa’s verite film is cogent and appealing thanks to a savvy strategy. Dosa respects Ragga’s beliefs without endorsing them, and positions her activism as a metaphor for saving the environment.

While the film is unlikely to hold much appeal for Netflix subscribers who never cared about The Witcher to begin with, it’s a worthy side quest for anyone with a passing interest in seeing more of the Continent.

The film’s true stars are the stunt and fight coordinators who render these clashes in visceral, mostly realistic fashion, although they eventually lose impact through their sheer repetitiveness.

An intellectual inquiry with burning present-day resonance, The Meaning of Hitler is also a road trip through some of the darkest chapters of European history.

Sans a compelling marriage of danger and eroticism, much of the third-act suspense fails to captivate

The scrambled narrative, listless pace, clumsy stabs at profundity and severe lack of humor will limit the film’s appeal to existing converts and cult movie connoisseurs.

In a movie this overloaded with plot, the revelations are like a leaky faucet, just like that purple voiceover. In fact, there’s so much going on, much of it behind the literal curtain of memory, that Joy leaves little room for the characters to establish themselves in the here and now.

Where the first film offered genuine scares, this one is suspenseful at best, snicker-worthy at worst, and will beg viewers to recall the time Fonzie got on water skis and tried not to get eaten by a shark.

The film does something unexpectedly audacious with its last few moments, making me wonder if there’s at least a little nutrition in cloying fluff.

A powerful account of self-actualization spanning 20 formative years, Liesl Tommy’s biopic is also an intimate gift of love, rich in complexity, spirituality, Black pride and feminist grit rooted not in didactic speeches but in authentic experience. The ageless music, of course, is the galvanizing force, but it’s the personal struggle behind it that makes the story so affecting.