Sophie Monks Kaufman

Tran Anh Hung’s core skill is that of a top saucier, he knows how to add a glut of ingredients and reduce them to a rich flavor that moves the palate in ways that defy what seems like a simple dish.

Banel & Adama is a striking debut that puts Sy on the map as a purveyor of deceptively gorgeous visions that show flimsy desires at the mercy of the social, and literal, weather.

The subtext behind the pilgrimage is that an act of kindness from decades ago can stay with a person and compel them to shake off the shackles of shame. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is about the lengths that even skeptical people will go to for each other, a length that defies all logic.

The puzzling thing about Italian director Gabriele Mainetti’s feature set in 1943 in German-occupied Rome is that, rather than embracing tastelessness a la John Waters, it guns for earnestness despite not having a thoughtful bone in its body.

It is tempting to want people to be one thing or the other: the murderer or the victim. This film reminds us: Highsmith was both.

This is a curious, slightly underwhelming offering. Even so, falling flat as a result of being understated to a fault is a promising event in a genre dominated by obvious signposting, and Wright is certainly one to watch for the future.

Panahi is a director who has always mingled fact and fiction, and here the distinction is more addled than ever, so that by the time the final credits roll it’s not exactly clear what was staged and what was real.

With her first fiction feature, Diop lets real material speak with an ancient sadness, with hope offered in the form of Rama who keeps moving, carrying a burden of knowledge into the birth of a brave new life.

Already a robust director, Laura Poitras has leveled up with a towering and devastating work of shocking intelligence and still greater emotional power... This is an overwhelming film.

It’s not that Andrew Dominik has made an implausible film about the experience of a poor young beauty haunted by fears of madness who was chewed up by the Hollywood machine, the issue is that he has made a film inspired by Marilyn Monroe where she is monotonously characterized as a victim.

Despite a hectic list of characters and their grievances, the plot is not tightly constructed and scans, for stretches, like a hang-out movie.

This may be an offbeat and textured snapshot of history, but it still holds at its core cold anger on behalf of the dictatorship’s victims and interest in how the people will receive updates about their future.

Wiseman has made a vocation out of filming what is right in front of him, and he applies that schematic to a dead woman whose words are all that remain. Her husband did not see her, but we will.

Nothing is phoned in here, everything is calibrated to a unique frequency so that even though you can trace the influence of Bette Gordon, Catherine Breillat, and Lucille Hadzhihalillovic, “Piaffe” is its own playful and majestic beast.

Human Flowers of Flesh becomes stranger and more liminal until one is literally lost at sea. This frustrating condition is not without its pleasures and consolations. The question of what the title is referencing provides a poetic source of intrigue.

Some viewers may be frustrated by the opaque way all threads are resolved. To the end, Mysius retains the sense of her film being a glistening and mysterious object, you can watch but can’t touch. Yet this intact mystery flows from themes too vast to ever be rendered fully transparent: young girls are prescient and love is fate.

Boy From Heaven wants to offer up a character study of a young Muslim man who ends up in hell and keeps going. Sadly, a deep and meaningful portrait of Adam is forgotten as the film — like the state officials it depicts — prioritizes functionality above all else.

Günther executes stray powerful moments, but his lack of a handle on the material leads to two hours so meandering that the story drifts away in a haze of boredom.

Deep Water contains some earnestly committed performances, a ridiculous car chase, a snail emporium, and a sparkling teaser for Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde.” The dynamic between her and Affleck is fascinating: not ridiculous enough to be camp, but not far off.

The marriage of abstract existential themes, immersive, tactile images and dual timelines is always impressive but only occasionally moving.

Inevitably, there is a tacked-on quality here, yet Cousins’ flair for providing visual pleasure means that, like that first champagne cocktail of the night, The Next Generation bubbles with sparkling uplift.

It may not all add up but this is an ambitious and taboo-tackling debut with an atmosphere that lingers thanks to gutsy performances from Colman and Buckley.

The dynamic of the central four is a pleasure incarnate. Equal parts funny and warm, each actor brings a specific dynamism that, when combined with the rest, crackles with life and love.

Hassan doesn’t need to provide a grand framing device. You sense their powerlessness, you are embedded within it. There is no omniscient camera to take the audience away because there is no freedom of movement for the Fazilis.

Faces Places is a subtly self-reflexive documentary that swims against this tide, inviting audiences to see that filmmaking is a process of having conversations with people, and enveloping each individual and their private creativity within the wider collaborative process. Art is a form of social work or, rather, it can be with the right people at the helm.

The lure of intense mystery that beguiles you into trying to solve it again and again; the transference of an intoxication that makes you feel physically different afterwards. It sounds hyperbolic to describe art as having such power, but surely the reason we care about art is a belief that such power exists. High Life is too layered, too ambiguous, too potent to be about any one thing.

A Hidden Life is, underneath it all, a love story. The Jägerstätters are a private microcosm imprinted by history. The Nazi regime is almost incidental, as these people could be anywhere opposing any evil regime. The substance of the film is buoyed by unselfish, enlightened love, shaped by a couple’s faith in each other’s morality.

This is a film trying to wriggle out of the straitjacket of its own story, the better to reveal the symbiotic passions within its two leading ladies.