Manuel Betancourt

Aiming to be a gripping survival thriller, 65 rarely surprises. With only two characters to speak of, the stakes feel decidedly low.

Your Place Or Mine isn’t that invested in crafting a world that looks anything like ours; it’s arguably more interested in giving its supporting cast’s ace one-liners (which, I’ll admit, is where the film sporadically got me chuckling).

The film’s rom-com template feels more like a structure to play with, a solid foundation on which to question the very tenets of romance and comedy.

Close is exquisite, tender, and bruising in equal measure, managing to feel both like an open wound and a balm.

Equal parts wistful and sensual, vivid and gentle, Stolevski has gifted us with a swoon-worthy romantic drama that looks at that first blushing crush not as an ephemera in need of being remembered but as a living memory that can pulsate and ache precisely because it’s never left you.

When the film lets its guard down—namely, whenever Aldridge gets to deploy his charm as Kit or manages to let Field echo a weathered kind of Steel Magnolias screen presence—the film sings. Yet its attempts to distance itself from the very genre of a film it so clearly is (there wasn’t a dry eye in the house by the time I left my screening) end up shortchanging its impact.

At once an intimate portrait of a makeshift family and a treatise on motherhood and motherlands, Bantú Mama is a quiet achievement.

Examining the bone-breaking work that being a mother can be, Garza Cervera’s tale is most thrilling for the ways it refuses any tidy answers about a woman’s place and wallows (and finds plenty of terror) in the ambiguities therein.

Kramer sketches out a feverish queer manifesto on gender that feels both novel and familiar.

Despite its thrilling central performances and its sleek production design, The Immaculate Room has more ideas than it can hold together, and emerges, quite ironically it must be said, as quite a muddled mess.

The film comes alive in its second half, which deepens and complicates the story we thought we were watching, about a disgraced cop trying to run away from the violence that’s set to cost him his job and his reputation. For some, the tender empathy that runs through the film’s latter half may not be enough to offset its choice of sympathetic leading man.

As a revenge spy thriller of sorts (the kind that seems tailor-made for a TV miniseries these days), “Rogue Agent” is an engaging affair. Much of it is due to Arterton, whose steely performance firmly anchors the film even during its most improbable twists and turns — especially as it careens toward its inevitable conclusion and its all too pat final image.

Telling a straightforward tale about this queer-skewing business, “All Man” opens up inquiries on how masculinity has been packaged for the American consumer, straight and gay alike.

Late-night stakeouts, dinner dates gone awry and greenscreen Cristiano blunders often make My Fake Boyfriend feel like a collection of skits and sketches strung together. Some are very funny and they are led by two very capable performers.

Memory House is, above all, a fable about identities lost and cultural artifacts in need of recovery that doubles as a thrilling and foreboding ride designed to rattle audiences at home and abroad with equal verve.

This is a gripping and heartbreaking film that goes out with a whimper that hits harder than any kind of bang it could’ve mustered.

With a breezy 70 minute runtime, Fauna is a delightful puzzle of a film. Even as it leans heavily into its metafictional conceits, laying bare just how much of its second half, for instance, is pure fantasy (or is it?), Pereda’s actors find ways of unearthing emotionally wrenching moments.

Painstakingly conceived and teeming with raw, unbridled energy, Eyimofe offers a sumptuous, keen-eyed look at modern Lagosian life.

Its final beat, like the entirety of its fabulous, tragic final act, is as masterful as it is heartbreaking. As a whole, though, it remains too stilted, like a painstakingly staged tableau vivant of late-19th-century Mexico and the patriarchal power structures that undergirded it.