Vilnius Film Festival — A–Z of films

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

Where narrative fails, look for symbolism; and there are symbols aplenty. It’s just not clear that they mean anything coherent.

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.

Simón takes a loose approach to the narrative, letting the small dramas of family play out alongside larger ones, giving as much value to the transient pleasures of fresh peach juice and cooked snails as the tensions between siblings.

Aleph shows how big our world is, how manifold, how beautiful, and how the really important riddles are the same for everybody.

I could not have wished for a more perfect first film to wean me back into the in-cinema press screening world I left behind in March 2020.

Like the people in front of his balcony, the meaning of the film meets Lozinski in each subsequent interaction.

This is a triumph of design.

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

Given the state of the things, it's fair to say that some of the situations that will arise are telegraphed ahead of time, but that adds rather than detracts from the tension - after all, aren't all satisfying meals in some ways connected to anticipation?

It'll make you fall in love with Chaplin, and with cinema, all over again.

Haguel inverts viewers' habits, breaking conventions like a trickster.

The madness and the badness is everywhere - the dangerous and the foolish

Generational tensions and expectations are also explored and you can feel Sarutyte's love for all of her characters, each lovingly crafted, no matter how small.

The simplest of pleasures bring the greatest moments of joy in Reichardt’s latest film.

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.

Maurice Ronet gives a towering performance.

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.

Diwan lets the cold hard facts trickle in as weeks are marked off at the bottom of the screen.

Beautifully photographed as always, with a colour palette whose soft, shifting hues reflect its moral and narrative ambiguity, A Hero is one of Farhadi’s finest works.

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

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

As ingeniously simple as it is unnerving

At the genre level, Medusa is failing. Simply put: it's not scary.

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

The arc of the film isn't particularly defined, but this is a positive in some ways as the filmmakers aren't trying to 'force' any sort of triumph in adversity narrative.

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.

Harari and his co-writers Bernard Cendron and Vincent Poymiro, show how the war propaganda becomes internalised in these men, so that even when they are given signs that the conflict may be over, they rationalise that it must be some sort of 'fake news' designed to trick them.

Bliadze observes the proceedings with a cool and non-judgemental detachment and an eye for the absurd.

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.

Bareisa successfully contrasts the slow long takes and great blocking, making it a well-balanced watch that will engage you on multiple fronts despite its withholding of many common cinematic devices to facilitates its ambivalence.

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.

What sustains Possession is the excess with which the actors throw themselves into the parts.

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.

The young director not only manages to create a convincing critique of the bourgeoisie in general, but also points out more local, Polish problems.

Vildziunas' film never slackens in its imagination but it becomes increasingly self-indulgent as things progress.

Wright doesn't try to reinvent the documentary form, but draws on the Maels' energy, matching their playfulness and incorporating both stop-motion and a decoupage styles of animation into their back story.

Tafdrup chooses to follow the more familiar route, carrying events to a natural extreme, but in a way this lets the Danish couple off the hook.

Grisi has a background in photography and though the images are moving here, there's often a stillness to them and they are no less perfectly composed.

This film is well aware of its own limitations: knows it can only pose the questions here, while answers will take time and belong, perhaps, to later generations.

Bakalova, who will be familiar to many English-speaking viewers from her multi-award winning turn in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, shows great depth here in a performance which is equally deserving of notice.

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