JONATHAN ROMNEY
1 Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan) A tender, painful, scabrously witty account of separation, especially discomforting as it stars the director and his wife. High-definition photography provides a pitiless scrutiny of faces and landscapes alike.
2 Les Signes (Eugène Green) At thirty minutes, this vignette about a missing fisherman is a marvel of suggestive concision: a parable of perception that’s as close as cinema comes to a Mallarmé sonnet.
3 The Family Friend (Paolo Sorrentino) Part farce, part Jacobean drama, this tale of provincial Italian lowlife is a fireworks display of formal invention: After the Zen-like chic of The Consequences of Love (2004), Sorrentino recasts himself as a punk Fellini.
4 Sehnsucht (Valeska Grisebach) Minor-key cinema par excellence, this sensitive treatment of a mundane theme—a small-town love triangle—achieves a Flaubertian complexity.
5
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