While Holy Hell only offers answers about this particular group and the experiences of these individuals, it’s a riveting piece of work, a look into a tightly-controlled and private world of brainwashing, abuse and exploitation in the name of spiritual fulfillment.

Although “Olli Mäki” ostensibly belongs to the boxing film genre as much as it is functions as a romantic drama, it never seems truly invested in the underdog narrative of its title character.

For all its safe choices and standard narrative, The Idol succeeds in communicating its message that the Palestinian people deserve a voice and representation. Its most powerful images somehow aren’t shots of Muhammad’s wonderful singing; instead, it’s the reactions of the Palestinians to those performances and cheering on one of their own.

It’s just as predictably mind-numbing and tedious as any other comedy Sandler has attached his name to post-“Funny People.”

Although the film is rooted in arthouse film territory, and is particularly inspired by the films of David Cronenberg and David Lynch, Raw turns out to be its own wild animal.

Herzog’s latest proves a masterful inquiry into technological evolution.

According to Len, rock ‘n roll is "blood, bourbon, and napalm," and it’s exactly those elements that the film needs, but doesn’t provide.

After the Storm is a film that invites you in, and clears a space for you at the dinner table while you shuck off your shoes in the hallway.

The off-putting aesthetics of ‘Looking Glass’ are complemented by an equally putrid tale that’s determined to make its protagonist loathsome.

While The Ones Below doesn’t make it over the finish line, Farr shows good instincts, and has an ease for creating tension without overt manipulation, while keeping everything engaging enough that you’re willing to overlook questions that nag after the credits roll.

Warcraft may provide grand, thunderous spectacle as it transforms human actors into hulking Orcs, but when trying to perform the alchemy of transmuting genre archetypes into characters with soul, the magic fizzles out.

What The Wait really needs is more: more story, more character, and more reason to grieve with these women. Because what these women have to grieve is worthy of time and attention, yet these qualities are frustratingly absent from this film.

The film is a bullet train of laughs, gore, frights and folklore, making the two-and-a-half hour runtime feel like a couple of minutes. Blink and you might miss the whole thing.

His new film Zero Days may ostensibly be an investigation of the 2010 malware worm known as Stuxnet, but over its swift-moving 116-minute runtime, Gibney does a much broader and more important job: relating the rather airless, abstract concepts of cyber-terrorism and internet espionage to their real-world consequences.

Braga is simply riveting in this gift of a role.

Even within Schrader’s own back catalogue, Dog Eat Dog feels like a lukewarm retread of elements he has achieved, as a writer and director, much better before. It’s just that here they’re mashed together gracelessly, with a kind of bullying undercurrent, as though designed to get a rise out of you, just so it can deliver two for flinching.

An excoriating, gripping, intricately plotted morality play, Mungiu’s film is less linear, more circular or spiral-shaped than his previous Cannes titles...but it is no less rigorous and possibly even more eviscerating and critical of Romanian society, because it offers its critique across such a broad canvas.

Once it ends, you may be panting from exhaustion while still appreciating that Endless Poetry is greater than the sum of its parts as it feels naturally necessary and appropriately organic to the series.

The list of the film’s transgressions against the culturally acceptable is almost gratuitously long. But the spine of self-aware intelligence that runs through even its most grotesque, exploitative, and offensive twists, and the basically incredible, irreplaceable central performance from Isabelle Huppert, make this queasily hilarious mass of contradictions just about cohere.

Fumbling between broad comedic strokes you’d find in a Disney film and the kind of darkness that usually creeps out of heavy Danish dramas, “Two Lovers And A Bear” is tonally off-kilter on top of failing to engage on any deeper level.

It’s less a convincing, involving narrative than an episodic picaresque that rambles loose-jointedly from absurdist encounter to vaguely fable-like incident.

From the performances to the repetitive jokes and bizarre actions that have little bearing on anything, Slack Bay exhausts you with its intense spirit.

Puiu scoops up storylines and arguments and revelations armful by messy armful and the inexplicably titled “Sieranevada” becomes by turns pit-of-stomach-sad, flight-of-fancy funny and pin-in-heart moving. And never less than wincingly true in its deadpan acknowledgement of the beautiful absurdity of family life.

Though it is dense in allusion and rich in texture, there are choices he makes that ultimately pull The Salesman back from the greatness, and the engulfing universality of his best work. It is as compelling as anything Farhadi has ever made, but it’s also somehow smaller.

Laura Poitras has done it again. Much like the celebrated Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour, “Risk” is instilled with a sense of immediate urgency as an apprehensive cloud hovers over every action, every word, every wayward glance.

An unfeasibly charming film full of little wisdoms and quiet comforts where we might expect to find provocations, its only deception is that it is so much richer than it seems at first glance.

A dexterous, mischievous, almost incomprehensibly intelligent film that has such invention packed into every frame that the only real danger is overload, Neruda works most thrillingly as an effusive love letter to the very concept of fiction and all the ways it can set you free, written in lyrical but staccato meter, perhaps with a rose between the teeth.

It’s, all told, a preposterous and pretentious mess of a film, and all the good intentions in the world don’t mean anything when the execution is as ham-fisted as it is here.