Rafaela Sales Ross

It feels natural to expect blood-dripping gore and reckless violence from a film titled Victorian Psycho, but, with his latest, Zachary Wigon chooses instead to lure the audience with the fresh smell of ripped flesh, only to trap them under a heavy blanket of frustration.

Despite not being top-shelf Almodóvar, it remains the work of a director long settled into form and, as such, offers its fair share of delights.

In disregarding the much more interesting machinations of the Resistance in favor of shrouding his protagonist in a thin cloak of importance, Nemes’ pompous drama ultimately loses sight of both the audience and its thesis, all while patting itself on its self-aggrandizing back.

Orphan feels like an exercise more concerned with the precision of its technical execution than the more ungovernable reins of its emotional axis.

It is a great disappointment that we had to wait a decade for the Danish director to return to filmmaking, only to wind up with something that much more resembles the drivel of Copenhagen Cowboy than the fresh panache of Drive.

Despite the mid-runtime ebb and an overlong runtime that works against the film’s firm grasp on the slippery tautness of good action, Hope still proves one hell of a time.

The Iranian filmmaker guides his lukewarm homage to the seminal work of the renowned Polish director with an A-list French cast, crafting an examination of the traps of creativity that lacks the driving force of the spark it sets out to dissect.

It is a film that feels movingly personal while speaking to the ubiquitous tussle between duty and desire, and that does so through the gnarling of fresh and guts and bones to find what is buried deep within one’s being: a throbbing vein of wanting, undeniably alive, and that, once freed, will not stop until its thirst is quenched.

Romería is loyal to its sense of withholding almost until the very end. It is then, finally, that Simon reaches the grand apex of her journey of self-reflection, one that holds in the stunning clarity of carefully chosen words a moving encompassing of how one can only build a sturdy foundation for the future after lovingly repairing the unrectified cracks of the past.

It is an experience as moving as it is unnerving, and as the piercing screeching of iron rods announces the Rose of Nevada is to leave port once more, it is we the audience there to wave a pained goodbye, quietly stunned by the ethereal aura of Jenkin’s striking creation.