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Guy Lodge Film Critic For teenage tennis prodigy Julie, discipline isn’t merely a virtue but a survival strategy. Repressing adolescent urges and emotional swings has long been part of her routine at the high-level youth tennis academy where she’s currently the star student: Years of concentrating all her time and attention on her game — all work and all play, as it were — look likely to reward her with the pro career she dreams of.

wrote Variety critic Guy Lodge. Check out this emotionally devastating movie before Mescal further blows up in this fall’s “Gladiator II.” Comedian Tig Notaro directs this coming-out story starring Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a woman who realizes she’s a lesbian after all her dates with men fail miserably. “Emotionally, she’s as awkward as a freshman with her first pimple.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Like her fellow documentarian Frederick Wiseman, Claire Simon is drawn to institutions, and the human flow that keeps them running. Where many of Wiseman’s films favor a big picture, a systemic view, Simon often works in more intimate close-up, picking out faces and personalities from a larger institutional community.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Nobody really makes AIDS dramas anymore, which seems as good a reason as any to make one now. The disease that, forty-odd years ago, decimated a generation of queer people and prompted a prejudice-driven global panic hasn’t gone away — least of all in various developing countries, where it isn’t popularly defined by gender or sexuality, and death rates are still high.

Guy Lodge Film Critic No major film festival is complete without at least one Love Letter To Cinema™ from a filmmaker of some renown, to advocate the joys of the medium to an audience that doesn’t have to be told twice. French writer-director and Cannes regular Arnaud Desplechin brings that to the Croisette this year with “Filmlovers!,” a duly warm and nostalgia-washed cine-valentine, but one with a little more to say than just, “Movies, amirite?” Indeed, the film’s somewhat inelegant English-language title risks concealing the more specific focus of this unassuming but winning hybrid documentary: The French title, “Spectateurs!,” makes clear this is first and foremost a celebration of spectatorship rather than filmmaking, probing the dynamics of cinema audiences and their relationship to the screen.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Love, as everyone has long agreed, makes you do crazy things. Silly things, too, and vastly indulgent things, and occasionally even beautiful ones.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Welcome to the Motel Destino, which may be some distance from the Hotel California, but is very much programmed to receive — or give, if that’s your preference. With mirrors on the ceiling but definitely no pink champagne on ice, the run-down roadside sex den that houses most of Karim Aïnouz’s Olympically horny new film isn’t so much a palace of pleasure as a this-will-do hideaway for the illicitly amorous couples (or throuples, or more, no judgment here) checking into any of its hastily wiped-down rooms.

Guy Lodge Film Critic For crisp tension or thematic clarity, nothing in “The Balconettes” quite outdoes the nearly self-contained, minutes-long short that opens actor-director Noémie Merlant‘s frenzied, heatstruck genre mashup. On a 115-degree summer afternoon in a wilting, AC-challenged Marseilles apartment block, a put-upon middle-aged wife passes out on her balcony.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Depending on who you talk to, the world is either in crisis, on fire, at war and/or simply lurching toward a frankly deserved final judgment. So what can be done to save it? Why, a carefully worded provisional statement, of course, from the global leaders currently in possession of both the gas canister and the lit match, but not a surfeit of great ideas for the future.

Mubi has swooped on its third 2024 Cannes competition title, Variety has learned. Having acquired worldwide rights to Coralie Fargeat’s buzzy body horror “The Substance” and U.K.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The very title of “Everybody Loves Touda” poses a kind of challenge to viewers. If everybody loves Touda, dare you not? Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch‘s forthright musical drama certainly doesn’t permit much room for dissent.

Guy Lodge Film Critic A hot, strong summer wind is the overriding soundtrack to “Three Kilometers to the End of the World” — the kind of dry, whirring weather that swallows conversations held even a short distance away, and carries stray, light objects far from where they meant to land. For 17-year-old Adi, however, it’s not loud enough to keep his secrets safe, nor heavy enough to lift and float him away from the home in which he feels increasingly imprisoned.

Guy Lodge Film Critic It is polite, we are told, not to speak ill of the dead, though it’s just as often prudent not to speak ill of the living. For victims with grievances against those older and more powerful than them, it’s hard to know when to speak up at all.

Guy Lodge Film Critic What is poignant about “This Life of Mine” — the final film by French writer-director Sophie Fillières — is all but impossible to extract from the beleaguered circumstances of its creation. Aged just 58, Fillières died last summer, shortly after completing the shoot of this wistful, somewhat autofictional study of midlife feminine crisis.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The longest days in your life are those where a loved one dies. Exhausting waves of feeling lap each other over the hours, stretching and blurring them as disbelief gives way to panic, to fatigue, to deep and paralyzing sadness, all while practical tasks mount and accelerate.

Alex Ritman Paris-based sales house Charades has sold the Argentinian Western-inspired documentary “Gaucho Gaucho” across much of Europe. The film — which won a Sundance Jury Prize in January and recently played at CPH:DOX — has landed deals with Tandem (France), Filmin (Spain), Selmer Media (Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Denmark), M2 (Romania, Poland, Hungary. Ex-Yugoslavia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria), Praesens (Switzerland) and Bantam Films (Benelux).

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.

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.

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.