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I n Master Gardener , Paul Schrader continues his late-career cycle of “man in a room” films, about men who carry the sins of a nation, and work towards an increasingly unlikely, even miraculous redemption. First Reformed ’s Toller (Ethan Hawke; priest complicit in ecological desecration) and Card Counter ’s Tell (Oscar Isaac; professional gambler complicit in Abu Ghraib torture), meet Master Gardener’s Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton), an expert horticulturalist whose torso, concealed under anonymous workwear, is covered with neo-Nazi tattoos, traces of his former life, under a different name, as a murderous member of a neo-Nazi militia. Roth has turned state’s evidence, disavowed his old ways, and turned over a new leaf as the head gardener at Gracewood, a plantation turned botanical garden run with an iron fist by Mrs. Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). But Narvel’s monkish existence is upended by the arrival at Gracewood of Maya (Quintessa Swindell), Haverhill’s troubled biracial grand-ni...

W hen you see guys with droopy jaws, immaculate greased side-partings, slightly ill-fitting leather jackets, and a flask of unidentified hooch in the breast pocket, there’s only one place you could be: the wonderful world of Aki Kaurismäki. The Finnish legend returns, his deadpan instincts enhanced more than undimmed, with a(nother) sweeping, Hollywood-inspired romance set among the disenchanted and the destitute, where the possibility of love becomes the only respite from an arduous day sweeping metal filings from the factory floor. Ansa (Alma Pöyst) is a diligent supermarket worker who is fired for daring to take home items of spoiled food – Kaurismäki’s first of many micro-critiques of a morally corrupt employer class who treat workers like dirt on their heel. Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) is an affable alcoholic who holds down a job in a scrap yard, and is let go not for the many bottles of liquor he has hidden around the workspace, but when he’s injured as the result of faulty tools....

I s there a specific word in film criticism for the kind of realistic drama in which people’s worst nightmares seem to be coming true, and if not, should there be? They’re a bit like horror movies, but more tonally plausible. Think Andy Dufresne getting sent to prison in The Shawshank Redemption, Humphrey Bogart’s murder suspect in In a Lonely Place, or the family running from an avalanche in Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure. The director Justine Triet’s latest is a particularly finely wrought addition to this mini-genre, as middle-class author Sandra (Sandra Hüller) finds herself standing trial for the murder of her husband, who has died after falling or being pushed from a balcony in their scenic chalet in the French Alps. There are no witnesses – their only son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) was out walking with his scene-stealing dog Snoop at the time. But where this film differs from films with similar premises is that there is no clear antagonist or obviously charming hero here. F...

T he names Banel and Adama echo throughout Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s debut feature like an incantation. Ghostly voices whisper them, a hand scrawls them in a notebook over and over; they are rarely separated as words or, in fact, as people. A young couple in a remote Senegalese village, they are both obsessed with and haunted by their togetherness. With its balletic choreography of performance and statuesque visual approach, Sy’s film is a work of remarkable composition. Through often static and poised imagery, closer to photographic work, the filmmaker and DoP Amine Berrada play with notions of structure to convey the restrictive traditions of Banel (Khady Mane) and Adama’s (Mamadou Diallo) home. Banel, reluctant to have children and eager to work in the fields with Adama, rebels against the norms of the village where the elders would rather she fulfil her supposed duties as a woman. Adama struggles too, refusing to inherit the title of village chief that his lineage grants and his moth...

A dding melodrama to the seemingly endless list of genres he can turn his hand to, Todd Haynes creates a thorny, completely compelling feature from Samy Burch’s acerbic script in May December, as an actress tries to get under the skin of the woman she’s scheduled to play in an upcoming biopic. Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) is best known for her work on Norah’s Arc – a television show in which she plays a veterinarian. Although she’s “so lucky to have the show”, she yearns for the legitimacy of a meaty film role, and thinks it might exist in the indie film she’s starring in which tells the story of Joe and Gracie Atherton-Yoo. The couple live in the suburbs of Savannah Georgia with their eighteen-year-old twins Mary and Charlie, who are about to fly the nest for college – by all rights they seem like a sweet couple, but the story of their relationship is revealed to be a contentious one, when Gracie (Julianne Moore) is unfazed by strangers leaving packages of dog poo on their doo...

M ichel Gondry’s protagonists are often dreamers, tinkerers, or otherwise stand-ins for the director; his films frequently reflect on his whirligig, handmade creativity, and reveal a hidden core of melancholy beneath all the papier-máché sets, cardboard props, and snarls of D.I.Y. electric wiring. Science of Sleep , for instance, is about an aspiring artist and illustrator of whimsical drawings, who struggles with loneliness and fails to connect with others; the teenaged title characters of Microbe and Gasoline , who build a house-on-wheels from scrap and drive it around France, use art and craft to overcome their youthful insecurities. With The Book of Solutions , Gondry offers his most explicit author surrogate yet, as well as his harshest self-critique. Both a cute, crowd-pleasing comedy and a confession, the film stars Pierre Niney as an antic director who struggles to buckle down and finish his next movie while engaging in monstrously selfish behavior, notably the verbal ab...

D ocumentaries are just as much about the careful withholding and staggering of information as they are about sharing said information itself. This dichotomy stands as a reason to make one reticent to share in a first paragraph the life-shattering circumstances that turned the women of the Hamrouni family into the subject of the newest documentary by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, Four Daughters. The inciting episode of Ben Hania’s follow-up to Oscar-nominated The Man Who Sold His Skin is at first blamed on a wolf. Olfa Haroumi, the mother of the titular daughters, describes the disappearance of her two eldest as a modern Red Riding Hood, her loving nest violently invaded and destroyed by a preying figure. As Four Daughters unravels, the wolf shapeshifts, guilt ping-ponged around those involved in a slyly crafted examination of perspective. Ben Hania places her latest in the murky patch between fact and fiction, with Olfa and her two youngest joined by actors to reenact key ...