This icy film indulges in banal images and obvious metaphor. Conflict and imprisonment appear everywhere. Dinner tables offer impromptu inquisitions; car backseats provide erotic solace. All stare at one another. The brooding is bleak and ridiculous. We’re supposed to feel the frictions of civility and barbarism, of ancient and new. Instead, we’re denied the comic absurdity of tragedy, the fine movements of despair. Beastly, bad, cold: these states weave together to enforce a virile, inhibiting status quo.

Carme (María Vázquez)…

Ethan Hawke offers the conventional tale of decline and fall through a freeform directorial approach: the story of country singer Blaze Foley is segmented, scattered, intercut. Clipped sequences, tangential folklore and aphoristic patter shape the portrait of a marginal artist. Talent and vice are asserted, musicianship and depravity assumed. Snippet and suggestion constitute a shivered mosaic, one of innate potential chipped at through burnout, destruction and decay.

Ben Dickey impressively captures Blaze’s mumbling Texan diction, his expressive if limited songwriting,…

This is a stunning diptych of adolescent love, often unrequited. Philippe Lesage has rendered a timeworn tale in extraordinary fashion. What should be twee, stale and predictable is wrought new, as an exhilarating shift inverts the interwoven trauma of the central romances. We finish with longing that’s innocent yet still pained, with testament to budding youth and its quieter heartbreak.

Noée Abita and Théodore Pellerin excel as Charlotte and Guillaume, ambiguously wealthy stepsiblings living in the French-speaking Canadian suburbs. Guillaume…

Lars von Trier is smart because he reads philosophy, art, and literature. Lars von Trier is reflective because he employs a disembodied voice to critique his failings as a man. Lars von Trier is thoughtful because he uses footage from the Holocaust in his fiction. Lars von Trier is daring because he depicts mutilated men, women, children, and animals. Spot the common denominator and we have the central subject. Lars von Trier has made a very boring film about himself.…