It’s hard to watch Notturno at times, but to the director’s credit it’s also impossible to look away.

No matter where Ferguson goes, he finds a way to sit someone in a chair and point a camera at them, resulting in a movie whose stultifying dullness works against the urgency of its message.

A sadistic delight, just like its predecessor.

The result is hugely impressive and awfully scattershot, a wry piece of art that is always entertaining but also so excruciatingly detailed that you wonder if it will connect the way the more emotional, more fully drawn stories of “Grand Budapest,” “Moonrise Kingdom” or “The Royal Tenenbaums” did.

Conroy wrote the book upon which the film is based and serves as the film’s central mouthpiece; full of twitchy, animated energy, he makes a terrific storyteller who’s boosted by Martin’s selection of found footage along with a minimum of jangly re-creations.

Fever Dream delivers its jolts with a whisper and not a scream, and its enigmatic final shot vibrates with a deep sense of dread, one that won’t leave after the lights come up.

You can’t call a film as lurid and alive as Benedetta a closing statement, but there is something valedictory about the erotic religious drama, which finds time to explore questions of voyeurism, sadism, masochism, systems of power, perversion, repression, rebellion, storytelling, divinity, irony and belief. Oh, and sex — plenty and plenty of nun-on-nun sex.

The film is deliberately and at times deliriously scattershot, jumping from one subject to another and rarely slowing down to draw connections or make larger points.

The performances are strong across the board — all the scenes between Theron and Davis, in particular, overflow with empathy and understanding — and Cody’s writing has never been better.

The subject matter is already horrifying; we hardly need to see its fictional illustration staged for maximum impact and set to insistent and foreboding music.

It’s not an exposé on what pornography does to women as much as a harrowing examination of what the workplace expects and allows from women and men.

Oldman treats Churchill’s words the way a Broadway virtuoso would: as the showstopper. And who can blame him? It works.

The recent proliferation of gray-haired cinema is a welcome development, but it hasn’t yielded very many notable pictures. “Dreams” doesn’t just buck that trend; it points a new way forward by being frank about living one’s final years and confronting that fact every day.

The film’s two-plus-hour running time is a patience-tester.

It’s Dyrholm’s performance that anchors everything.

It’s incredibly effective and culminates in one of the best closing shots of any film to show at this year’s festival. Without ever once overplaying its hand, it ensures the smallest act of resistance and compassion hits like a train.

Spy would be a standout if only for its ability to keep me laughing while also keeping me from figuring out who was really double-crossing whom. Add to that this extraordinary ensemble of actors (who knew Jason Statham could be this funny?), and you’ve got another memorable offering from McCarthy and Feig.

Carpignano once again uses a tight, intimate character focus to take a wider look at larger political and cultural issues in this region. In the poetically, humanistically crafted A Chiara, he also manages to flip the Mafia movie on its head, and in doing so, challenges the mythology that keeps these shadowy systems in power.

John Wick’s world is elegant and vicious, full of slaughter and courtesies and, if “Chapter 2” can’t quite replicate the original’s sense of discovery, its ending still made me wish “Chapter 3” could start right away.

No matter where you think Send Help is going, you’re probably wrong. Thankfully, that’s a huge part of its appeal. It’s not a mystery, by any means. But it is a story rooted in the exploration of human nature and exactly who we become if it means survival both in the literal and figurative sense.

The film feels true in the way it must be exploring Branagh’s memories of a tumultuous and confusing time, and the way it pays tribute to a vibrant community as that community is irrevocably changed.

It is a film about journalistic ethics and, in its own way, the interpretation of images is grounded in [Dunst’s] outstanding performance. It isn’t an easy role to inhabit, but she does so perfectly.

Co-stars and co-writers Daveed Diggs (“Wonder”) and Rafael Casal have a lot to say, much of it funny and/or provocative, but neither they nor first-time feature director Carlos López Estrada can figure out a way to shape all this material into a cohesive film.

Pike, giving the kind of transformative performance that puts her squarely in the awards-season conversation, manifests Colvin’s brazen outspokenness with candor, and her irreparable brokenness via a cocktail of rage and subdued anxiety.

“Until the Wheels Fall Off” works better as a humanistic exploration than it does as a biography, making its Hawk focus occasionally feel like a weakness.

Morris From America shines a deserved spotlight on Markees Christmas, who will hopefully be given more opportunities to command the screen, and it allows Craig Robinson a framework in which to deliver a career-best performance.

Thankfully, even when sudden exposition about past trauma lands clunkily, the rest of the film remains light on its feet and properly fun as we observe the couple being tormented by whatever is drawing their corporeal forms together.

Ozon manages to instill a measured touch into every argument, outburst, and testimony, matching the naturalistic cinematography (by Manuel Dacosse, “Let the Corpses Tan”) and bestowing on us the most important and assured movie on this treacherous topic made this decade.