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]

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.

Although the film manages some disarming insights into the man’s complex makeup and difficult behavior, a service enhanced by Louis Garrel’s very good lead performance, serious cinephiles will likely reject it as glib and disrespectful, while more mainstream viewers could be amused but not that interested.

A film with some real stunning visual highlights but a narrative throughline that feels patchy and unbalanced.

Even admitting that films like Cache (Hidden), The White Ribbon and Amour have raised the bar higher and higher, Happy End feels like it’s pulling its punches and not in their league. For one thing, it’s hard to pin down the theme of the piece.

With his devastating, finely layered new drama Loveless (Nelyubov), Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev once again demonstrates his remarkable gift for creating perfectly formed dramatic microcosms that illustrate the bred-in-the-bone pathologies of Russian society.

The film slowly but surely works its charms, painting a rich, emotionally complex portrait of a woman who, like Denis herself, will not let herself be boxed in.

The Rider is a rare gem, a small, acutely observed portrait of a few lives on what used to be the frontier but is now a desolate backwater, the windswept badlands around Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

A minor addition to the Korean action cinema canon, The Merciless offers thin pleasures in a glossy package.

For a film meant to champion the powers of three-dimensional art, Rodin winds up being awfully flat.

Following the fizzle of his coming-of-ager Goodbye Berlin (Tschick) last year, Fatih Akin bounces back and bounces high with an edge-of-seat thriller inspired by xenophobic murders in Germany by a Neo-Nazi group.

Its tale of doubles, deception and desire allows Ozon to fool around with some of his favorite themes — the turbulent inner lives of complex women, the distance between appearance and reality, the essential unknowability of even our most intimate loved ones, the necessity of imagination in enduring everyday life.

Creature is exceptional in its depiction of the Byzantine bureaucracy that encases gulags, and how the towns adjacent to Russian prisons tend to be seedy snake pits of crime and venality.

His new film acquires considerable urgency and raw emotional power in the closing stretch. But at just under two-and-a-half talky hours it's almost maddeningly protracted, maintaining a somewhat cold intellectual approach that might have been improved by greater emphasis on the beautiful scenes of intimacy, tenderness, naked fear and helplessness that punctuate the action.