Neil Young

A pleasant and sometimes stimulating viewing experience.

Rising like Olympus above the general run of low-budget debut features, Israeli writer-director Oren Gerner’s Africa is a touchingly well-observed study of long-time marrieds starring the filmmaker’s own parents as lightly fictionalized versions of themselves.

Herrero Garvin and company have evidently earned the trust of Dona Olga and her customers, their film winningly emerging as warm, humanistic evocation of sisterhood against a fascinating demi-monde backdrop.

If nothing else, the period picture represents an impressive change of pace from Ostrochovsky’s hard-knock feature directorial debut.

The enigmatic proceedings soon find an oneiric, hypnotic rhythm that some viewers may indeed find entrancing.

The film is most effective in simply conveying the agonising practical realities of Galvez’s quest, an operation involving endless telephone calls and long down-time periods of waiting punctuated by brief flurries of frenzied activity.

Swab’s strong suit, conversely, lies in the selection and handling of his performers.

It’s a deliciously rug-pulling affair which, like the “catfishing” protagonist — i.e. a person hiding behind a fake online persona for deceitful purposes — comes across as one thing and gradually reveals itself to be quite another.

A challenging work which punctuates taxing stretches of austere stasis with interludes of sublime beauty — including a ravishingly spectacular underwater finale — it uses a slight fable of a story as framework for some extravagant sensory stimulations.

The most sympathetic, illuminating study of domestic labor since Roma.

Of obvious interest to arthouse audiences in Cullen, Wright and Jensen's native Australia, this ambitious and stimulating glimpse into the dark abyss of creativity deserves widespread international exposure at festivals and via receptive theatrical settings.

It's an unassuming and delicate work which demands but ultimately repays close attention.

Properly analyzing what made "Boro" tick, and explaining how one of most acclaimed directors of his generation ended up fizzling out so messily in the 1980s, ultimately proves beyond Mikurda and collaborators.

The sour-tinged comedy of excruciatingly English embarrassment deploys some talented performers on both sides of the camera but its promising parts never quite cohere into a properly satisfying whole.

Rocky roads to romance, self-realization and adulthood are quirkily mapped in Take Me Somewhere Nice, a distinctive and ultimately quite promising debut by Bosnian-born Dutch writer-director Ena Sendijarevic.

A shaggy-seeming but carefully modulated affair, To the Ends of the Earth gradually emerges as an offbeat but persuasive investigation of culture-clashes and the potential for trans-global bridge-building.

Punctuated with moments of illumination, humor and even occasional visual flair —the opening shot executes a stately 360-degree cityscape pan from a high crane — Present. Perfect manages to retain interest despite a certain repetitiveness and some patience-taxing longueurs.

An undeniably demanding but cumulatively rewarding mood piece.

A pleasant, if in the end slightly inconsequential picture, perhaps primarily of interest to those currently experiencing Mullins-style sibling frictions and joys, those who have fresh memories of the same and ethnographers/anthropologists keen to see how some of the world's most economically fortunate minors currently make the ever-rocky transition from youth to adulthood.

A range of camera positions, from wide landscape shots to ultra-intimate close-ups, instead allows us to appreciate the two hounds in their adopted setting of the Parque de los Reyes.

An easygoing, unashamedly old-fashioned picture executed with a light touch that conceals a serious and sharply topical subtext.

This is a demanding and fitfully rewarding film which focuses minutely on the shifting relationships between its three protagonists.

An infectiously enjoyable slice of knockabout nostalgia that wears its Trainspotting heritage proudly on its rough-edged tartan sleeve.

Mayfair's picture feels like the work of a seasoned veteran rather than a newcomer, but this isn't necessarily a compliment. It's sensitively poetic and tremulously delicate to a fault, with every beat seemingly accompanied and underlined by an intrusive score from Ton That An which is heavily freighted with plangent strings and mournful piano notes.

Observing how six service dogs provide crucial daily help and companionship for their grateful owners, the ruminative, accessible affair proves as soothing to the viewer as the faithful pets are to their humans.

A fundamentally serious film leavened by a streak of deadpan, droll humor, its quality will ensure even greater interest in Ailhaud's memoir in the run-up to its impending centenary.

Bustamante's screenplay is a philosophically and theologically nuanced affair, intermittently elliptical, concentrating on the bigger picture without bothering to sketch in the smaller details. This becomes something of an issue, given that these are often the pivots upon which the somewhat telenovela-like plot hinges.

It's an uncompromising, sophisticated, multi-layered work of art which demands to be met at least halfway.