New York Film Festival — A–Z of films

As a whole, it appears way too kinetically ostentatious for its own sake, sadly making it less than the sum of its parts, but there are things to appreciate here.

Brilliantly claustrophobic and eerily entertaining.

At times, the dialogue is well done, scores points. At other times, it felt like we had wandered into a Socratic symposium.

This is a triumph of design.

The interplay of the spiritual and the sensual is vital here.

The film unfolds at an easy pace, Hansen-Løve making everything matter of fact and yet beguiling, thereby softening viewers up to accept the fantastic or surreal aspects of the narrative as normal.

Full of unspoken pain and resentment, the treasured Chiara carries her father’s sins in his absence as she struggles to decide which course to follow in her own life.

Slow to build and with an assembly of characters who are all more complex than they seem on the surface, Drive My Car exemplifies Japan’s growing body of literary cinema.

It is pretty.

By animating the whole movie, Rasmussen makes the story feel more immersive and of a whole piece.

France is a supremely sad film, maybe the saddest Dumont has made in its interplay of the true and the fake.

It all has a very particular flavour. Even a new one.

The reflections and insights are many.

The Zürchers carefully construct their web of relationships, showing how a small vibration somewhere can lead to unexpected consequences elsewhere.

The multi-layered emotional consideration of themes, in particular the clash of cultural traditions and modernity - the building up of the city mirroring the destruction of the people within it and the natural landscape - are resonant and engaging.

Silver makes us feel that this is an authentic piece of social history.

Panahi and his actors shift through emotions so smoothly, you barely notice them until they have immersed you.

The group of speleologists in Il Buco are housed in the storage room of a church, a sublime decision by the filmmakers that gives Berta ample opportunity to visually connect the scientists of the early Sixties with the splendour of Renaissance paintings.

Swann Arlaud as Yann Andréa and Emmanuelle Devos as Michèle Manceaux give tremendous performances that circle around discoveries of deep personal truths.

When he walks the streets of Istanbul, people stare at him and at the camera filming him. What, we wonder, are they seeing?

The closer and more personal this documentary gets, the more it opens up to the largest of issues.

The film comes into its own because of Gyllenhaal's non-judgemental perspective, even sympathy, for the small suffocations of motherhood.

The family portrait is devastating.

For all the talk of hermetical storytelling, this might be his least hermetic and most approachable movie to date.

Set in a futuristic Rwanda, the themes are as old as the hills - with colonialism, identity and self-determination chief among them.

An oneiric, sensory and imaginative journey documenting being young in contemporary India.

This pleasant, thrilling watch shows Muntean is capable of making great cinema in some of the starkest places.

Milena Smit is a relative newcomer. This is only her second feature and she has real presence.

The role is a gift for Negga, who has always evinced considerable talent but has not previously had the chance to demonstrate her abilities to this extent.

The autumn setting fits it perfectly, because although this is the change of the year as things die back for winter, it is also blazing with colour and hopefulness.

Campion treats the material with such well-mannered reverence that you begin to wish that not just the characters, but she too, would loosen up a bit.

By delving into fiction, Huezo is able to focus on the impact of this crisis on individual human lives.

There is an artistic sensibility in Ramsay's approach to film.

The grooming of Strawberry may have some moments of levity but that, in many ways, makes it all the more uncomfortable.

Never directly asking the question, but leaving liberté, égalité and fraternité to hang in the air between scenes and lines, Périot’s latest gives a voice to the voiceless, the disenfranchised, the forgotten.

Shengze Zhu mixes the past, present and vision of the future in a new, strange, anti-social, empty world.

Côté has often played with artifice, particularly in his documentaries, and here he pushes things to experimental extremes.

The costumes in The Souvenir speak volumes about female and male desire and the search for identity that garments can encompass.

Hogg has always had an eye for architectural as well as emotional spaces and we see it here, as she floods the large rooms of Julie's parents' home with light, so that she almost seems to be paling out of them, which, coupled with her often silent reactions as others babble around her makes it seem as though she is the one who might be the ghost.

The use of traditional folk song and the fact that the language shifts from Italian to Spanish also highlights the way that stories are passed from mouth to ear down the generations and across borders.

The audience laughed at times that were not meant to be that kind of funny, a primate exhalation of surprise and relief.

The Velvet Underground will restore your belief in documentaries!

The most restrained and yet audacious, unadorned and still intelligent picture the Argentinian auteur has made.

Digression builds upon detour, which piles charmingly onto excursion, sometimes lifted, sometimes pushed and always shaped by a score that also roams freely in its influences.

The Japanese filmmaker guides his actors as if they were just learning emotions, creating an impression of awkwardness.

There is a lingering, half blossomed melancholy that lies underneath the often very funny, fast-paced moments of quotidian chaos.