Hafsah Abbasi

It’s Reichardt’s willingness to let a collective filmmaking process guide her, perhaps, that allows her meditative cinema to thrive.

On Bless This Mess, Remy explores ’80s synths, Talking Heads-esque art funk and Prince’s rhythm and blues to attain hi-fi heights — this cocktail of popular yesteryear genres ushering in Remy’s sometimes synthetic-feeling optimism.

The film is chock-full of a litany of ideas that never quite parlays into a cogent mosaic, with a campy, cloying satire of motherhood in suburbia and the mommy blogging industrial complex making way for a tedious, implausible rendering of postpartum psychosis.

It may be called the Mostly British Film Festival, but the cinematic event features pieces from English speaking countries around the globe, including Ireland, Australia, India, South Africa and New Zealand.

“One Fine Morning” is distinct for its attunement to a dual, elliptical narrative — and as such, for its commitment to finding poetry and complexity within understated realism.

Polley has not only left the scattered wreckage and lost autonomy of her past to author her own intricate narrative, but she endeavors to fold in the obscured narratives of women en masse into a finely woven tapestry of possibility.

Amid the film’s scattered use of a myriad of locked-in, puerile symbols, any empathy is squeezed out in favor of an overly wordy, writerly script.

It's a season marred by glacial pacing and emotional incongruity — a result of an overstuffed, ill-defined final stretch of episodes.

For a film premised upon skewering the rich, “The Menu” only succeeds in crisping the surfaces of its elite subjects when one takes a closer look.

Viewers, like Paul, are left negotiating with their own passivity, constraints and freedoms. Most strikingly, Gray doesn’t spare the audience — or himself — from this reckoning.