New Directors/New Films — A–Z of films

Martelli carefully crafts an air of almost casual dread.

If there’s vacillation in general at work, the slippery nature of the film, greased with the sweat of physical and metaphorical dance, remains beguiling.

The mixing of fiction and reality, as well as a lot of aesthetic choices, make for an interesting echo of the Yugoslav Black Wave aesthetic.

It is not so much individual people who cause the problems but rather the constricting cultural circumstances that dictate everyone must play their allocated role.

For every shot when you wish Foy would learn melancholy doesn’t have to be meandering, there’s another of striking poignance.

Belcu doesn’t need to show us much violence in order to indicate how the mere threat of it can become an effective tool of oppression.

Confident enough in its characters to tell its story without sensationalism or stylistic overcompensation.

There’s an increasing sense of the unnatural impinging on the natural.

Memories connect and even if they are not ours, they can make us understand something urgently human.

The transcendental nature of the film feels like an existential and therapeutic need.

The idea of different things being in and out of focus for the various generations runs through a film that has sweetly comic moments and poignancy in equal measure.