Deborah Young

Ava’s rebellion is against more than her parents’ mistrust; it’s about the cage of societal norms in Iran that stifles female creativity and self-expression.

An uncompromising drama from one of Iran’s most outspoken directors.

Singh shows a confident hand as he works with the material on multiple levels of narrative and symbolism, keeping it interesting and in focus throughout. His greatest strength, however, is Randhawa’s powerful portrayal of the shepherdess, a role that could launch a career.

Tautly shot and edited by a top-flight technical crew and notably scored by Peyman Yazdanian, Just 6.5 is more than a thrilling watch. It is a sobering reflection on the inability of the law to stem the tide of drug addiction through round-ups, arrests and executions. Or perhaps it’s society that needs adjusting?

Without sensationalism, Wuhan Wuhan makes its quiet mark through its natural approach to a culture where people appear not to rebel against the strict government lockdown.

Among other things, the film is an extremely dense fusion of elements that make up our sense of time and memories, including collages of hundreds of old photos, grainy super 8 footage, notebooks, songs and music, sound bites and newspaper articles.

It’s a dreamy, unexpectedly rigorous debut that starts frustratingly slowly but ends with an emotional bang.

More uneven but ultimately more effective than filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi’s previous anti-war film.

Saad has an absolutely sure hand in directing Badhon and guiding her into higher octaves of the role as the drama grows and grows.

Surprising, disconcerting and droll, this Italo-Swiss co-prod packs the grotesquerie of an Ulrich Seidl film minus the sex, plus vivid acting. Its weakest link is on the narrative level.

Its bow in Cannes in the Special Screenings sidebar is amply justified by two whimsical exercises in art house cinema directed by Jafar Panahi and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The other tales are quirky but mixed in impact.

Both touching and universally understandable, the theme is how an untimely death destroys the fragile fabric that binds a family together.

Typical of Hong’s work, the laid-back anti-storytelling lets daily life flow slowly by without incident, until a revelatory twist in the last act gives the film its meaning. It will certainly appeal to his festival fan base but neophytes beware: It takes patience to get to hidden truths, and even so they are about as clear as a Zen koan.

One feels the lack of an underlying original idea that makes the director’s work so quirky and identifiable, and that also goes for the missing element of ironic-iconic humor that has been slowly disappearing from his films.

Ayouch’s most personal feature film, it infects the audience with its passion and the unshakable belief that a person who has self-confidence and self-expression can really change society.

Perhaps the most ambitious film to date by Japanese animator Mamoru Hosoda.

The film’s simple, lower-class setting is met with equally direct camerawork, lighting and editing. This feels like the farthest Farhadi has come from his stage work and the sometimes unconvincing dramatic elements that occasionally creep into his films.

The characters are irritating, the look is cheap and the plot is reheated from other movies, but it has to be admitted that Dachra delivers its unsavory thrills.

The intriguingly elliptical narrative and the use of highly aestheticized cinematography and music draw the viewer into a web of genocide and a series of shocking events

This cannily edited selection of rare archive footage reveals the peak of the people’s mind-born terror, and it is the beginning of the end.

A heavy-handed reimagining.

Night in Paradise contains a lot of good plotting, several amusing characters and a decent array of exciting action scenes and bloodshed. But it is indulgently long.

The finale is telegraphed far in advance, yet when it comes the drama is so down-played it doesn’t register in its full horror.

Graf has spent most of his long career as a director of TV series and movies, and much of the staging lacks great originality. But this is made up for, in part, by the striking way the story of Jakob and his friends is told mixing the narrative drama with now old-fashioned “modernist” tech devices borrowed from the past.

Three hours long yet anything but leisurely, the doc is charged with energy, anger and disappointment.

It’s hard to think of a less dramatic subject to fictionalize, yet in its own quiet way, Hive builds a strong storyline around the self-reliance and determination of an uneducated country woman, played with glammed-down but riveting cool by a granite-faced Yllka Gashi.

It is, at least in its closing hour, a moving dramatization of maternal feelings.

The subject is horrifying but the screen is hard to look away from, as the situation becomes a powder keg of tension.