‘Summer of ’85’ Film Review: François Ozon Explores His Favorite Things – Sex, Death, Dark Humor

Todd McCarthy Red, White and Blue, the third and final installment of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe quintet of films about racial issues specific to Great Britain being world premiered at the New York Film Festival, zeroes in on the ordeal of a young black Londoner set on helping to definitively break the color barrier at London’s Metropolitan Police Force in the early 1980s.

Not since Jeff Goldblum stocked his penis in a jar or Bryan Cranston tore apart his meth lab has a fly played such a pivotal role on screen as in Mandibles (Mandibules), the latest comic whatchamacallit from French one-man-band Quentin Dupieux.

Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci play a middle-aged couple facing an existential crisis in Supernova, a poignant portrait of love in autumn from young British writer-director Harry Macqueen. Firth and the London-based Tucci have been friends for years, notching up several shared screen credits already.

When his girlfriend can’t get pregnant, a trans man decides to carry the child in her stead in the French drama A Good Man. This is the latest feature from writer-director Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar.

Jem Aswad Senior Music EditorSomehow, the mysterious British R&B/electronic-ish combo Sault has managed to drop four richly diverse, socially confrontational albums, all of them good and two of them absolutely great, in just 18 months.

Are all relationships between older men and younger women abusive ones? Do the young women who take part in such relationships hold any level of responsibility? Is it "OK" to be attracted to somebody more than twice your age, and, if so, can you act on that desire? Is it too French to be asking such questions, especially in a movie? These are some of the many thoughts evoked by Spring Blossom (Seize Printemps), a provocative first feature from writer-director-actress Suzanne Lindon that depicts

Danielle Turchiano Senior Features Editor, TVSPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched the second season of “Criminal: U.K.,” streaming on Netflix.George Kay and Jim Field Smith created and premiered the “Criminal” franchise (four unique series across four different territories: the U.K., France, Germany and Spain) with a storytelling focus on a “did the guy do it or not?” traditional dramatic police premise, notes Kay.

Also Read: 'Nomadland' Film Review: Frances McDormand Hits the Road in Quiet, Lyrical DramaThe film begins with three sentences, and they’re all the context you’ll get and all the context you’ll need: “After the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the First World War, the colonial powers sketched new borders for the Middle East. Over the following decades, greed and ambition for power gave rise to military coups, corrupt regimes, authoritarian leaders and foreign interference.

A modest French cousin to Erin Brockovich and Todd Haynes’ recent Dark Waters, Red Soil (Rouge) once again pits a tireless underdog against the forces of corporate greed and looming environmental catastrophe. The hook this time is that the underdog, played by the talented Zita Hanrot (Fatima), is fighting too close to home, with her own father a longtime worker at the factory that’s been dangerously polluting their region.

For her sixth feature film, French writer-director-actress Maïwenn (Polisse, Mon Roi) has definitely made one of her most introspective works yet.

LONDON -- The sea voyage that changed Peter Padfield’s life more than six decades ago started with an act of chance. In 1956, Padfield was third officer aboard a British cruise liner in Sri Lanka when he stumbled across a magazine in a ship wardrobe.A story inside introduced Padfield to a new sailing ship dubbed the Mayflower II, a replica of the square-rigged English merchant vessel that carried a group of dissatisfied Protestants across the Atlantic Ocean in 1620.

In his profoundly affecting 2017 feature debut God's Own Country, Francis Lee crafted a queer love story for the ages, carved out of rigorous emotional candor, uninhibited sexuality and an evocative connection between the two men at its center and the land that draws them together. Three years later, the British writer-director returns with Ammonite, an exquisite female companion piece whose transfixing quietness never conceals the roiling undercurrents of feeling beneath its surface.

Francis Lee’s “Ammonite” might be the biggest study in contrasts that you’ll find at the Toronto International Film Festival this year.

Todd McCarthy The temptation will be too great for some critics to resist proclaiming, “Ammonite is dynamite!,” as in some respects it is, specifically in the way it resembles a hand grenade thrown into the midst of an otherwise decorous, serious-minded 19th century British period piece.James Ivory might be proud and even jealous of the way writer-director Francis Lee takes the Anglo art house tradition of quality to an uncustomary level of sexual frankness, an aspect that will remind many

Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland” is a tiny indie film on a huge scale, an intimate drama set against the vast spaces of the American West.

Todd McCarthy Go-her-own-way director Chloé Zhao closes out her exceptional trilogy about the dispossessed and left-behind in the modern American West with Nomadland, a cool, contemplative look at contemporary American outcasts whose foothold in society grows more precarious with every passing year.

The green-eyed monster is but one of the problems of the protagonist of My Best Part (Garçon chiffon), the directorial debut from French actor Nicolas Maury (from Netflix’ Call My Agent!). Constructed entirely around the layered central performance of Maury himself as the mercurial man-child protagonist, this is a bittersweet comedy-drama that manages to be hilarious in one scene and extremely touching in the next.