Cannes etc.

“The latest from Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda (Nobody Knows) begins with the mischief and intrigue of a heist movie, but Shoplifters is much more. Osamu (Lily Franky), a middle-aged man, and Shota (Kairi Jyo), a young boy, walk into a grocery store. They play it cool, not speaking but, rather, signalling to each other with [...]

“Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is a stark, mysterious and terrifying story of spiritual catastrophe: a drama with the ostensible form of a procedural crime thriller. It has a hypnotic intensity and unbearable ambiguity which is maintained until the very end. This is a story of modern Russia whose people are at the mercy of implacable forces, [...]

“Following his much lauded iPhone-shot Tangerine, director Sean Baker has lost none of his fire and exuberance working with a larger budget and some well-known cast members. Indeed, Willem Dafoe, as the reluctant father-figure manager at the Orlando motel where this movie is set, gives one of the best film performances of his entire career. [...]

“On one level, the film can be classified as a journey of discovery, but what deepens interest is the way Barbosa constantly asks the viewer to question what it means to travel. Gabriel (João Pedro Zappa) bristles at the idea that he’s a tourist, insisting on the more egalitarian word “traveler.” He believes he can [...]

“A fable-like story about a young African girl banished from her village for alleged witchcraft, it blends deadpan humor with light surrealism, vivid visuals and left-field musical choices. (…) With smart marketing, Nyoni's bold fusion of folklore, social comment, magical realism and her own family heritage could even translate into breakout word-of-mouth success akin to [...]

“One of the memorable characters lifted from reality in Jonas Carpignano's humanistic and timely plunge into the European refugee crisis, Mediterranea, was Pio Amato, a crafty preteen operator from a Romani family on the edges of a Calabrian town called Gioia Tauro. Already the subject of an identically titled short film, this magnetic Dickensian hustler [...]

“Widening the lens to take in the ills of an entire economic system, Pedro Pinho’s The Nothing Factory is the latest cinematic response to Portugal’s financial crisis. Less flamboyant than Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights but filled with rewarding eccentricities of its own, the film revolves around the crew of an elevator plant. Roused into action [...]

“A captivating, hallucinatory plunge into Russia’s atrophied civil society, in which a woman’s search for answers is rewarded with humiliation and abuse. Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries are conceived as silent commentary: His rigorously edited, coolly composed shots contain all the information needed for viewers to feel the weight of his argument. By contrast, his fiction films [...]

“In his sixth feature, clandestinely shot in the north of the country, Iranian helmer-writer Mohammad Rasoulof returns to the theme that underlies all of his work: the means by which an authoritarian regime succeeds in silencing independent voices. A tense, enraging drama about corruption and injustice, set in a small village. The essence of the [...]

“In many ways, The Day After is a quintessential Hong joint. Copious amounts of local spirits are consumed — you just know the eventual box set of his work will be called Fifty Shades of Soju — and people sit around tables and talk, mainly about love, from early morning until well into the night. The [...]