In The Broken Hearts Gallery—Krinsky’s first feature—Viswanathan’s performance lends the movie its sole impression of vitality and spontaneity, to go with its one bright light of conceptual inspiration.

What’s unusual about Kajillionaire, and what makes it July’s most absorbing film to date, is that you can feel her testing and challenging her own aptitude for whimsy.

If only the style of The Artist’s Wife could scald with equal intent. Alas, it opts for plangency, with a musical score applied like a gentle balm, and a plot that hungers for healing—absurdly so, given the incurable nature of Richard’s plight.

Doucouré pays keen attention to Amy’s quest for a self-made identity—and to a sexualized, commercialized mainstream culture that deludes children, especially those raised in cultural isolation. The film’s ultimate subject is the ghetto itself; a remarkable symbolic ending redefines French identity.

Gerima films Jay’s intimate confrontations with an impressionistic flair that focusses attention on characters’ listening, thinking, and remembering; flashbacks and dream sequences infuse Jay’s tightening conflicts with the pressure of history—both social and intimate.

Kaufman seeks admiration for his warmhearted and gentle humanism and also for his extravagant creativity, even when the latter gets in the way of the former—when his cleverness stands like a child’s antics in front of the screen where the movie is playing, defying viewers to pay attention to what’s going on behind him while amiably indulging or ignoring his trickery.

To a remarkable extent, the new movie is full of cheer. It feels boisterous, bustling, and, at times, perilously close to a romp.

Zlotowski crafts a distinctive style to distill and heighten the drama’s psychological complexities and societal analyses. No less than its young protagonists, the film dangerously brushes against the edge of modernity’s enticingly destructive glitz.

Red Penguins, is here to serve your bedlam-loving needs. Communism, capitalism, corruption: the gang’s all here.

Boys State will leave you alternately cheered and alarmed at the shape of things to come.

The movie dramatizes the constraints of the era, the imposition of a narrow and religion-based morality, the stern discipline that’s internalized as a result, the elision of women and their world from public life, and the firm expectations of family and society that Héloïse will endure in her unwanted marriage. Yet it does more than merely depict them—it embodies them, in the characters’ poised stillness, which makes the airy surroundings feel as rigid as stone.

Seimetz films this coldly ghoulish and derisive fable with quiet intensity and rage at the way of the world.

It’s a hell of a performance by Robyn Nevin, who’s had a long and commanding career on the Australian stage.

What does make this movie stand out is the presence of Cristin Milioti, a paragon of goofiness and grace.

Despite the merely functional reticence of Glowicki’s direction, along with the narrow scope of the drama, Tito is an instant classic of acting.

The teeming profusion of events that Lee dramatizes is inseparable from the historiography that he foregrounds throughout. Both are brought to life with an intricately varied texture of dialogue and gesture, purpose and spirit—a crucial aspect of Lee’s career-long artistry that, here, reaches new heights, thanks to an extraordinary cast of actors who blend fervor and nuance, and whom Lee directs with manifest inspiration.

What’s concrete in the film are its bluff and energetic performances. Tomei is, as ever, a wonder of passion and imagination. Burr is a dynamo of roaring invention. And, above all, Davidson himself, with his blend of blank comedic aggression and bare-nerve vulnerability, provides the film with an emotional complexity that surpasses the bare storytelling.

The extraordinarily imaginative new feature by Christopher Munch, The 11th Green, stakes out a genre unto itself: poli-sci-fi, a fusion of science fiction and the history-rooted political thriller.

Perhaps a filmmaker whose powers were less orderly, less morally driven to soothe and pacify, could have pushed Fabienne—and Deneuve—to tragic and stylistic extremes that would have rendered the film’s reconciliations as mighty as its conflicts. Instead, he offers half a film of magnificent fragments.

An existential thriller--the most original and shocking French melodrama of the 50s.

As for Ferrell, a noted Eurovision nut, there’s no mistaking his affection for the brave hogwash of the genre, but even he is felled by the movie’s swerve into P.R.: a sing-along, say, in which genuine victors from Eurovisions past team up in a rolling medley.

To be fair, Irresistible picks up in the final quarter, with the aid of a clever twist that whistles in from nowhere. We get an assortment of different endings, each undercutting the last. It’s as if this dozy film has woken up, belatedly, to its comic responsibilities and opportunities.