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Guy Lodge Film Critic With the possible exception of “Tora! Tora! Tora!,” any film with an exclamation point in the title should by rights be a spangly, full-scale musical. A frothy tale of warring classical music sensibilities in a Venetian girls’ refuge, “Gloria!” stops short of complete commitment to that rule — but it’s when it fully suspends reality for all-singing, all-stamping choral ecstasy that Margherita Vicario‘s uneven debut is most exciting.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Macho sports-movie tropes meet with bright chick-flick framing to curious effect in “YOLO,” either an ostensible boxing drama that doesn’t pick up the gloves until the third act, or a misfit romcom that takes a late and unusual turn toward transformational self-help territory. Chinese audiences have been delighted by either formulation, as Jia Ling‘s second feature as director-star — following 2021’s popular time-travel comedy “Hi, Mom” — has racked up the year’s second-highest global gross so far, mostly on the strength of its domestic receipts.

Guy Lodge Film Critic It’s no great slight to “Scoop” to say that it’s no more compelling than the real-life news broadcast on which it pivots. It’s also no less compelling than said broadcast, which was, after all, a doozy: the 2019 episode of “BBC Newsnight” in which anchor Emily Maitlis interviewed Prince Andrew about his friendship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Guy Lodge Film Critic As a general movie rule, when a group of happy weekenders head to a woodland cottage for a bit of rest and relaxation, the great outdoors has some grisly surprises in store for them. In “Who By Fire,” however, the horrors all come from inside the house — or more specifically from the people themselves, many of whose worst impulses and insecurities are unleashed by their tranquil surroundings.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Close to You” marks a reintroduction for Elliot Page, a screen presence at once warmly familiar and sharply redefined, finally established on his own terms. In his first film role since coming out as a trans man, the actor has evidently brought much of his own identity and experience to this sensitively observed story of a trans man cagily reunited with his family after a five-year period of estrangement.

Guy Lodge Film Critic An assortment of familiar life-as-sport metaphors get a healthy workout in “The Beautiful Game,” a story of underdog athletes for whom winning may not be everything, though it’s a welcome distraction from greater obstacles. For many viewers, Thea Sharrock‘s cheery Netflix entertainment may serve as an introduction to the real-life event on which it’s based: the Homeless World Cup, an annual soccer tournament bringing together displaced or dispossessed players from nearly 50 countries, playing not merely for a trophy but for a second shot at life.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Following the bracing sexual and political candor of “BPM,” writer-director Robin Campillo‘s much-laureled film about HIV/AIDS activism in 1990s Paris, “Red Island” initially appears to be a retreat into cozier nostalgia — a child’s-eye view of life on a French military base in 1970s Madagascar, flooded with sunlight, awash with the thrill of youthful exploration. That might seem an obtuse way to portray a time and place rife with fractious post-colonial tensions, only a couple of years before the African territory freed itself from the French Community to become a fully-fledged republic.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The international scope and grueling human cost of the global refugee crisis lends itself to contemporary epic filmmaking of a particularly sober stripe, as seen mostly recently in Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” and Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated “Io Capitano.” Shorn of their ripped-from-the-headlines urgency, such stories of humans crossing vast distances and facing hostile odds in pursuit of a better life are as old as time itself. A muscular, assured debut feature from U.S.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The Berlin Film Festival drew to a close with tonight’s awards ceremony, with French-Senegalese director Mati Diop taking the Golden Bear for her documentary “Dahomey.” Full report to come; full list of winners below.

Guy Lodge Film Critic It is any parent’s hope that their children won’t inherit their battles, or at the very least, that they can pass the generational baton with some ground gained. For young Palestinian lawyer and activist Basel Adra, a West Bank native who grew up watching his activist parents fight to protect their land from Israeli occupiers, there has been no such progress: Time has stood dispiritingly still as he has aged into his elders’ shoes.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Jane Campion is championing Matteo Garrone‘s “Io Capitano,” which is Italy’s Oscar-nominated contender for best international feature film. The movie narrates the Homeric journey of two two Senegalese teenagers, Seydou and Moussa, who decide to leave Dakar to reach Europe in pursuit of a better life. It realistically depicts their plight through the pitfalls of the desert, the horrors of detention centers in Libya and the dangers of the sea.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Tea can be an energizer or a sedative. “Black Tea,” the first film in a decade from veteran Mauritanian auteur Abderrahmane Sissako, sips exclusively from the latter end of the shelf, passing through chamomile-type calm into outright soporific territory.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Iris, the petite enigma at the center of “A Traveler’s Needs,” dresses at once to be noticed, and to disappear. Over a bright sundress, spattered all over with red and violet blossoms, she wears a cardigan of a most assertive, eye-searing green.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “We need a new idea of beauty,” says Michele De Lucchi, the Italian architect who talks us through certain stretches of “Architecton,” a singularly imposing and sonorous new documentary from Russian non-fiction auteur Victor Kossakovsky. His argument is that the earth can no longer sustain the kind of hefty architectural grandeur, built from the fabric of the Earth itself, that we’ve asthetically prized for centuries, and nor can the cycle of more disposable concrete construction continue without devastating environmental impact.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Three years ago, in an awards season narrowed and clouded by the global pandemic, the BAFTA awards acted as an unprecedentedly accurate Oscar bellwether, matching the U.S. Academy’s eventual selections in all but one of 19 feature-film categories — from “Nomadland’s” best film victory to acting wins for Anthony Hopkins and Frances McDormand.

Guy Lodge Film Critic After several years working in German TV and locally-oriented film projects, Julia von Heinz had a significant breakthrough with “And Tomorrow the Entire World” — a taut, punchy political thriller with a youthful spirit of anti-fascist revolt, vigorous enough to land a Venice competition slot. Its success evidently raised the status of the director’s long-held passion project, an adaptation of Australian novelist Lily Brett’s semi-autobiographical 2001 title “Too Many Men,” which reckoned thoughtfully with her parents’ experience as Auschwitz survivors, and the hereditary nature of trauma.

Guy Lodge Film Critic If any part of you has been curious as to how French filmmaker Olivier Assayas spent the early days of the global pandemic, along comes “Suspended Time” to answer your question, with very much the answer you might expect: pretty comfortably, thanks for asking. Alternating a thinly fictionalised portrait of the artist isolating at his family’s country home with fully autobiographical narration by the director himself, this mildly amusing but vastly indulgent bagatelle feels a tardy entry in the first wave of lockdown cinema — too late to feel fresh, but still too soon to have accumulated much meaningful perspective on an experience we all remember too well.

Guy Lodge Film Critic From “28 Days Later” through to his recent, Oscar-nominated turn in “Oppenheimer,” Cillian Murphy has cultivated a reputation as a strong, silent type — all while resisting the inscrutability associated with that masculine cliché. His beautiful, sharp-boned face twitches and tightens and teems with feeling. Closeups always catch it thinking, wrestling with surges of vulnerability or violence, or watching other characters in turn.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In “Porcelain War,” a resilient Ukrainian couple divide their time between two seemingly antithetical pursuits: When enterprising Slava Leontyev isn’t training fellow civilian soldiers in the ongoing fight against Russia’s invasion, he and his partner Anya Stasenko are skilled ceramic artists, casting and painting dainty porcelain figurines inspired by local nature and folklore. If the title already suggests something pointed in that disparity, this emotive debut by Leontyev and American co-director Brendan Bellomo leaves nothing to chance in ensuring we get it: Porcelain, we are told, is “fragile but everlasting, and can be restored after hundreds of years.” Lest the point still be lost on us, the couple’s combined voiceover later offers a blunter paraphrase: “Ukraine is like porcelain — easy to break, but impossible to destroy.” The metaphor is clear enough, then; whether it’s quite complex enough to sustain a feature-length documentary is another question.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Amid the surfeit of films about women’s rights and men’s abuses of power that have emerged in the wake of the #MeToo reckoning, we haven’t yet seen one quite like “Black Box Diaries.” A tightly wound, heart-on-sleeve procedural documentary, Shiori Ito‘s directorial debut identifies a world of systemic iniquities through the prism of a single, long labored-over case of sexual assault — crucially, the director’s own. That raw first-person perspective, untempered by the interests of another filmmaker and given narrative rigor by Ito’s substantial journalistic skills, makes “Black Box Diaries” not just a damning analysis of patriarchal power structures in contemporary Japan, but a vivid evocation of the day-to-day psychological swings and breaks that come with living as a survivor.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Look Into My Eyes” opens with an unexpectedly sobering, even provocative encounter for a documentary about New York City psychics and their clientele: not a fanciful palm reading or a conjuring of a lost loved one, but an attempt to reckon with long-festering professional trauma. A middle-aged female doctor, sharply dressed, talks directly to camera — or rather, to the mystic sitting silently behind it — about the time, as a junior doctor on the emergency ward, she attended to a 10-year-old girl who was shot upon leaving church, and died of her wounds in hospital.

Guy Lodge Film Critic As teenagers go — and let us allow for some hormonal leeway here — 17-year-old Sam is what most would call a good one: smart, thoughtful, grounded, self-sufficient but not averse to advice, the kind of kid that parents can’t help bragging about, as their friends wish their own nightmare offspring were a little more like her. But such a reputation has its downside, as elders take the teen’s compliance and good humor for granted, and expect undue allowances for their own irresponsibilities.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Adding to cinema’s long list of hellish bachelor parties to which nobody in their right mind should accept an invitation, “It’s What’s Inside” gathers a large crowd of mostly estranged friends in a remote mansion where either no one can hear you scream, or no one much cares if they do. It’s an age-old setup for a body-countdown horror movie, and it’s to the credit of Greg Jardin‘s highly strung, busily plotted debut feature that it doesn’t unfold exactly as you’d expect.

Guy Lodge Film Critic If zombies weren’t so fixated on eating our brains, perhaps they’d be poignant to have around: semi-living, semi-breathing semblances of people we’ve loved, there to be seen and held and talked to, not truly present but not absent either. Whether that’s preferable to the void of death is the question underpinning “Handling the Undead” for much of its running time, even as the threat of the undead reverting to their usual habits gives this soft, sorrowful bereavement drama a core of cold-blooded horror.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The opening minutes of “A New Kind of Wilderness” promise some kind of documentary advertorial for off-the-grid living. Over idyllic shots of her hippy-hunky husband Nik and their three cherubic children camping, foraging for food and literally hugging trees in verdant Norwegian woodland, photographer Maria Vatne’s voiceover soothingly espouses the liberating virtues of “getting out of the rat race” and “being free and full of love.” It all looks wonderful, like “Swiss Family Robinson” updated for the era of Instagram cottagecore, and a cynic might say that it hardly seems sustainable.

Guy Lodge Film Critic There’s a very young, very online contingent of Generation Z that propagates repeated cycles of so-called “age gap discourse”: heated, often condemnatory debate over the rights or wrongs of people dating, or merely socializing, outside their immediate age group. The discussion often takes quaintly prudish forms, permitting no adult age at which such differences cease to matter, but if it circulates most heatedly among the young, it’s been handed down to them via age-old social rules and biases — ones to which Nathan Silver‘s delightful “Between the Temples” gives a cheerfully flippant middle finger.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Pretty much anyone who grew up watching television has a vivid memory of that one show that, for a time at least, wouldn’t let go of their young imaginations — characters observed and fretted over like close friends, haunting images captured and embellished over time in the mind, cliffhanger endings that hit like harsh personal betrayals. A show doesn’t have to be especially good to resonate like this, provided it finds its viewers at the right place and time; eventually, most of us move on, that hard cultural grip giving away to the forgiving affection of nostalgia.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Sting, Isabella Rossellini, and U.S. director Roger Ross Williams (“The Apollo,” “Life Animated”) came out to support the recent New York launch of Matteo Garrone’s Venice prizewinning immigration epic “Io Capitano” at the Museum of Modern Art. The movie – which is Italy’s now shortlisted Oscar candidate for best international feature film – narrates the Homeric journey of two two Senegalese teenagers, Seydou and Moussa, who decide to leave Dakar to reach Europe in pursuit of a better life.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Android or artificial intelligence isn’t the enemy in “Robot Dreams,” Pablo Berger‘s gently whimsical fantasy of a loner finding manufactured friendship in a scuzzy vision of 1980s New York City. Indeed, one takeaway from this portrait of a shabby-happy Big Apple populated solely with anthropomorphic animals and surprisingly sensitive automatons is that the world might be a better place without humans in it.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Quick, silly and lent weight only by the costume department’s copious wigs and furs, “The Crime Is Mine” finds tireless French auteur François Ozon in the playful period pastiche mode of “Potiche” and “8 Women.” It’s a film less about any frenetic onscreen shenanigans as it is about its own mood board of sartorial and cinematic reference points — Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder, some vintage Chanel — and as such it slips down as fizzily and forgettably as a bottle of off-brand sparkling wine. This story of an aspiring stage star standing trial for a top impresario’s murder (and making the most of her moment in the tabloid flashbulbs) may be based on a nearly 90-year-old play, but for those versed more in Hollywood and Broadway than in French theater, Ozon’s adaptation resembles a kind of diva fanfic: What if Roxie Hart went up against Norma Desmond, except in rollicking 1930s Paris? As it happens, Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil’s 1934 comedy “Mon crime” has twice been adapted into Hollywood screwball romps: 1937’s Carole Lombard vehicle “True Confession” and the lesser 1946 remake “Cross My Heart,” starring Betty Hutton.