Or at least, the best ones I got the chance to see, from an elliptical drama about sleeping sickness to a stunning lesbian love story.
8. Youth
Gianni Fiorito / Fox Searchlight Pictures
In the latest film from Italy's Paolo Sorrentino (who won an Oscar last year for The Great Beauty), Michael Caine plays an aging composer looking back on his life from the decadent haven of a Swiss mountain spa. If it sounds indulgent, well, it absolutely is, but it also reaches for transcendence in every stunning, poignant frame, from a starry-eyed mountaintop embrace to a whimsical sequence conducting cowbells in a meadow like the animals were an orchestra. Youth is opulent, but it has a sense of humor — what other movie would allow Jane Fonda to walk on in garish makeup and a blonde wig and steal her every scene away from co-star Harvey Keitel?
Youth will be released in the U.S. by Fox Searchlight.
7. Green Room
Broad Green
Patrick Stewart as a menacing white supremacist, Anton Yelchin as a punk rock bassist, Imogen Poots as a seen-it-all skinhead girl — and those are just some of the spiky pleasures to be found in writer-director Jeremy Saulnier's gleefully brutal survival movie about a touring band that ends up barricaded in the green room of a remote venue, trying to fend off the local neo-Nazi crew. Saulnier has found a marked way of reinvigorating his action sequences by having them be clumsier and seemingly less choreographed than the norm; their utter lack of poetry makes them all the more shocking and immediate. Green Room is terrific fun, but it's also joltingly visceral.
Green Room does not yet have a U.S. distributor.
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