The distressing Ford penchant for symbols of religiosity which had marred The Fugitive does the same disservice here.

Though Stranger by the Lake leans a bit too heavily on its long-take, slow-cinema bona fides, there’s a clear purpose to Guiraudie’s rigorous perspective. He’s out to unearth the very potent (and often terrifying) emotions underlying every explicit act, sexual or otherwise.

Saavedra, in an incredibly vanity-free performance, never shies away from Raquel’s darkest edges and still forces us to empathize with the frustrations and stunted loneliness of a life lived in servants’ quarters.

This documentary, shocking and enlightening, succeeds in contextualising, and thus humanising, misunderstood sexual deviancy.

By the end, you feel curiously closer to the performer and her process without having any clue how you got there. It's exhilarating.

In style, the film’s ambition sometimes oversteps its ability, but it’s a rare London gangster film that has something to say about the city and says it with wit and little resort to bloodletting

It’s hard to understand the emotions coursing through Marvin’s body, as it’s wrapped in gaffer tape or barbed wire in a series of improvised exercises in fashion-as-armour. She admits to fear, but never to doubt as she embarks on her single-minded mission to subvert Russia's remorselessly anti-LGBTQ+ agenda.

Maybe the film loses its head a bit at this point too, with its deeper message lost in the epic bloodshed, but the chances are you’ll be having too much fun to mind.

Despite winning several Oscars, Olivier's (condensed) version of Shakespeare's masterpiece makes for frustrating viewing: for all its 'cinematic' ambitions (the camera prowling pointlessly along the gloomy corridors of Elsinore), it's basically a stagy showcase for the mannered performance of the director in the lead role (though he's ably supported by a number of British theatrical stalwarts).

An eerie, neglected classic of its kind.

These characters are more than what we see on the surface, and it's thanks to Leigh's rigorous yet generous eye that we never just gawk at the drama.

For all the clammy grip it exerts, this thrillingly original film is more interested in trapping you in its psychosexual maze and immersing you in the relatable pains of self-discovery.

At Berkeley works beautifully as a picture of compromised activism; viewers who summon the patience to commit to its indulgences won’t feel shortchanged, even if next year’s freshmen are.

Arrival director Denis Villeneuve pulls off the dare of the decade, hatching a thoughtful, expansive sequel to a sci-fi classic.

At one point, Paul describes his music as “somewhere between euphoria and melancholy,” which is also an apt description of Eden itself.

Hardly the heady stuff of "Frost/Nixon"--or then again, maybe exactly the same thing. This one’s more rude and fun.

Simply a rivetingly murderous game of cat and mouse that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

The slowest of slow burns, requiring adjusting to its careful pacing. There’s no instant gratification on offer, but the second half will draw you into its bristling power games.

An Arabic-German coproduction, it is a rare movie shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, which has no cinema industry to speak of, and the first feature by a female filmmaker from that country. Forbidden from mixing with the men in her crew, Al-Mansour often directed via walkie-talkie from the back of a van.

What comes across loud and clear is that 13TH is a serious, timely, important work with highways and byways of thought that are worth traveling for anyone who cares to understand why, as DuVernay argues, slavery didn’t end with slavery.

Yakin never settles for the easy, last-minute moralising and macho posturing that has afflicted much of the otherwise intriguing new black cinema; here, story and character take priority, helped no end by Nelson's quiet, riveting central performance.

Toward the end of the film, a few hard-hitting cuts between young and old brings the title's meaning home: These children have an inescapable life of drudgery before them, and there's little likelihood it will change anytime soon.

There’ll be moans from horrorheads that it’s not scary throughout, but in deepening his exploration of family life in the ‘burbs, Cregger sharpens his twisted scares to a dagger point. And the frights, when they come, really land.

The concept is a doozy, ripe with comedic juice and packed with visual thrills.

Blue Valentine has a quiet, resigned wisdom to it.

It’s a quiet tragedy that’s rendered close to uplifting by its gentle grace and compassion.

In her amazingly assured debut, Clare Denis draws out the implications of the action with great subtlety. She makes the most of the exotic location, and elicits strong performances from all her cast.

Masterson's images of small-town America are imbued with a luminous and melancholy nostalgia, but otherwise the film is not mounted with any special imagination, and its fusty, old-fashioned (not to say reactionary) lauding of homespun values sticks in the craw.