What we said: It is a movie that declines to detonate the traditional climactic revelation or catharsis that pulls everything together, and some might find it frustrating.
Kelly Reichardt’s latest is a characteristically low-key look at the intersecting lives of four restless women, played by Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone and Kristen Stewart. What we said: A fascinating and unique meta-documentary or quasi-professional memoir it challenges the question of personality and authorship in the act of seeing, filming and editing. Veteran documentary-maker Kirsten Johnson taps into her vast library of footage to piece together a collage memoir on her career in cinematography and the nature of authorship. a summer romance saturated with poetic languor and a deeply sophisticated sensuality. What we said: The debt to pleasure is deferred in exquisite style for this ravishingly beautiful movie set in Northern Italy in the early 80s. Luca Guadagnino’s follow-up to A Bigger Splash stars Armie Hammer as a grad student who enjoys a summer romance with a younger man in sun-dappled northern Italy. There is a sudden stab of anxiety at the point where most romcoms begin their semi-intentional slide away from irony. What we said: A stranger-than-fiction date movie of enormous charm and sweetness, which plunges you into a deliberate seriousness after the setup. a tremendously watchable movie, with its teasing flecks of noir and black comedy.Įmily V Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani wrote this much lauded and socially groundbreaking cross-cultural romcom from their own experience – with Nanjiani starring in the resulting film opposite Zoe Kazan. What we said: Coppola won the director’s prize at Cannes for this hugely enjoyable melodrama that more or less allows bodices to remain unripped until an uproarious third act, when passions are declared, animals killed and acts of mutilation carried out.
It’s attracted approving reviews, as well as awkward questions over whitewashing. Cullinan’s civil-war-era novel about a Union soldier who sets hearts a-flutter in a Confederate ladies seminary. Sofia Coppola provides her own deadpan take on Southern Gothic, with an adaptation of Thomas P. This film delivers pure hallucinatory craziness that leaves you hyperventilating. What we said: The 2017 follow-up simply couldn’t be any more of a triumph: a stunning enlargement and improvement. What we said: It is a terrifically stylish and exciting piece of work, a summer movie cool enough to induce brain freeze, like an episode of James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke directed by Walter Hill.Ī belated follow-up to Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking sci-fi saga, Denis Villeneuve’s blockbuster stars Ryan Gosling as a replicant seeking some sense of humanity in a dystopian, neon-flecked Los Angeles. John Hamm, Jamie Foxx and Kevin Spacey are the surly crims taking advantage of his gifts.
Baby Driver Photograph: Webb/Sony/Kobal/REX/ShutterstockĮdgar Wright’s inventive wheel-spin on the car-chase movie stars Ansel Elgort as a getaway driver whose tinnitus causes him to pump out banging tunes at high volume while performing some miraculous escapes from the law. What we said: Aquarius is a rich and complex character study from the Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho: densely observed, scrupulously realised, and with a wonderful lead performance. Sônia Braga stars as an intellectual who refuses to vacate her apartment when the developers come calling, in a film that has been perceived as a comment on the cronyism and corruption plaguing Brazil. What we said: The unquiet spirit of Terrence Malick roams through this film’s rooms, and finally the ectoplasmid hands of M Night Shyamalan shimmer into view, grabbing the loose ends of the story’s beginning and end and tying them together. Part of a loose movement of films some are calling post-horror, David Lowery’s haunting meditation on love, loss and letting go stars Casey Affleck as a deceased musician whose sheet-wearing spirit form proves poignant, not preposterous.
There is such intelligence and delicacy in Kore-eda’s film-making, such wit and understated humanity. What we said: In the hands of another film-maker, this situation might be the focus of a queasy black comedy.