San Sebastian Film Festival — A–Z of films

Despite all of its shortcomings, 107 Mothers nonetheless, makes for quite a completing piece of filmmaking.

In one of the most complex and intriguing performances of 2021, Gong keeps us guessing about what Jin-na is really thinking and feeling.

Many doors are not very open, they give us merely a little glimpse into a strange world.

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

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

Running alongside the film's more elegiac sweep is a cut-glass wit.

Binoche gives her all, stripping away any vestiges of actressy pretence to assimilate herself in the community while at the same time investing her performance with an authentic conviction.

Bigger Than Us uses individuals to show how young people across the globe are stepping in - often against powerful opposition - where authorities aren’t.

Chitu gives a quietly dignified performance, gradually letting us see Irina’s strength through her resilience.

The actors make grieving palpable, as sure and solid as the colours caught by Ivan Gierasinchuk.

For all its intricacy and cleverness, this is a film that never loses its central focus.

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.

A film that is big on mood in general even if its structure and overall storytelling are weak by comparison.

Earwig invites you to listen, to put out feelers, to scurry.

François Ozon makes what could have been an impossibly painful subject more palatable but nonetheless affecting.

The real and the performed run so close together that, by the end of the film, it's not entirely clear if even Tammy knows where one ends and the other starts.

Schweblin’s work is rich in sub-plots and allegories and really could have done with being slimmed down a bit for the screen.

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

The balance of Javier Bardem's central performance as the CEO of the title is what elevates this from being another run-of-the-mill satire.

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.

This is a serious subject, expertly handled.

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

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

Kranz, best known for his acting career, certainly didn’t pick an easy project for his debut behind the camera, but his work proves exceptional.

Dreams and reality are porous in Alexandre's world - characters and situations so heightened they could also be imagined - although Alexandre's existential crisis about where he 'fits' in the world feels sharply real.

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.

This is the playground as a warzone, where the sandpit might, indeed, be as deep as the sea and hold dead bodies and where adult authority might only make things worse.

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.

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

Lafosse makes excellent choices with his editor Marie-Hélène Dozo (long-time collaborator of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne) in what is shown on screen and what is left out for us to fill in.

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.

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 film's combination of comedy (Berlanga) and melodrama (Bardem) is rooted in a realistic, cash-strapped milieu that was unusual in Spanish cinema at the time.

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.

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

Today it's interesting in large part because of the way it highlights the conceptual gaps in early feminist challenges to Confucian ideas about gender.