Zlotowski has turned in a beguiling film that impresses as much for its oddly specific and well-researched setting (the ragtag community of lower-grade workers at a nuclear power plant), as for the romance, and maintains impressive narrative and tonal control right up until an ending that falters just at the final hurdle.

Rather than use his trademark raw style to expose and eviscerate social injustice, here Escalante puts it in service of a kind of cautionary fable about both the healing power of sex and the harming power of sexual hypocrisy, and he uses a tentacled alien to do it.

The charming, rousing WWII romance Their Finest is a film that openly stumps for two causes: the value of women in the workplace, and the power of cinema to tell stories that people need to hear.

The Secret Scripture is a film with a lot to say, which struggles with the best way to say it.

The picture is genuinely entertaining and moving, but the fact it even exists in the first place is something you simply cannot dismiss.

Didactic yet generic, The Promise endeavors to educate about a period of recent history that is still unacknowledged by the Turkish government, but curiously manages to be anonymous in form nonetheless.

To her credit, Zlotowski’s film does capture the lulling feeling of a séance, but there’s a gossamer-thin thread between the mysterious and the mystifying and perhaps her delicately ephemeral film just doesn’t know how to recognize the difference.

Wildly bizarre and imaginatively alluring, if not occasionally slight, the animated movie, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, is an engaging surrealist take on the disaster movie.

Guest isn’t fixing what isn’t broke, but after so long between movies, and with many more people tackling the style, it does leave Mascots at times feeling a bit overfamiliar.

Underneath the dark humor and holistic mise en scène, there remains the nagging suspicion that what is onscreen is — in spite of the film’s best intentions — another patriarchal interpretation of Lady Macbeth.

As aesthetically dazzling as this picture is, with hypnotic compositions carved through meticulous mise-en-scene, there are certain conventional lines which — when crossed — must warrant good reason. In this case, the activity on the screen must be immersive and interesting enough to balance out the physical endurance asked of the viewer by the creator.

What’s most disturbing is Jackson’s pedestrian direction has resulted in a film that barely recognizes how powerful this is in contemporary society.

In substance, it might be Vigalondo’s most ambitious film to date. And while there’s a sense at times of his uncertainty in fully committing to the ideas on the page, in the moments when the conceptual component of “Colossal” is fully embraced, the results are truly chilling.

This “emotionally immature braniac” character is funny and heartbreaking in equal measure. Carrie Pilby is special. “Carrie Pilby” is less so.

There seems to be a tiny gem of a character study hidden inside Walsh’s film, unfortunately, Maudie and its at-odds tones just don’t work. It’s a film that one can actively admire, but its difficult to fully embrace.

While Lion isn’t the kind of drama that demands risky storytelling, it is one that has within it a whole world of emotional topography that is disappointingly scrolled over instead of mapped out.

Jackie is what happens when two distinct sensibilities — the Goliath of the Hollywood prestige pic and the David of Pablo Larraín’s playful, idiosyncratic intelligence — throw down.

Cedar’s smart dialogue and direction lift Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (hereby just referred to as ‘Norman’) above expectations.

It’s an admirably well-crafted misfire, created by two of the finest filmmaking duos working together today. But perhaps that demonstrates just how singular the original remains, even to this day.

Bridget Jones’s Baby is not a game-changer, but that’s not what it sets out to be. It’s a goodnatured, accessible, persistently endearing matinee, and sometimes it’s nice to be won over by simple sincerity and commercial likeability.

Very well-made, very sweet-natured and very, very familiar: how strange that Philippe Falardeau‘s The Bleeder, a based-in-truth film about pretty much the definition of a confrontational sport —boxing— should feel cosy as a down comforter from beginning to end.

Outside of the Berg’s incredible depiction of the Deepwater’s destruction and the escape of a majority of its crew, the picture also benefits from two fantastic performances by Wahlberg and Rodriguez.

There’s something widely relatable about the way Barry tries to find somewhere to fit in, and preferably in a place where he can be himself and not somebody else’s symbol.

All of “Pastoral’s” problems could have been slightly forgiven if McGregor showed a hint of inspiration behind the camera.

The Age of Shadows has no pretensions to being a particularly deep or politically resonant piece of filmmaking. Its more that Kim Jee-woon has found in this era and this milieu the perfect inspiration for a blisteringly entertaining and exquisite genre exercise, one that may not be recognised as such only because we we have never expected genre films to be this good.

Take away Forster’s hard-working visual style, and what All I See Is You essentially presents is a standard relationship drama, with two generic, privileged people at its heart who don’t become any more striking even as the tensions between the two gradually reach a breaking point.

Walter Hill’s legacy of pushing the edges of genre conventions made the prospect of (Re)Assignment, at least on paper, potentially dangerous. But the filmmaker’s touch is completely lost here, and the only danger the film winds up posing is to the time spent by those who choose to watch it.

When the big show finally happens at the end of the picture? You can’t help but smile.