Jessica Hausner takes concepts such as workaholism or dieting and makes them into extremes. In her 2019 film “Little Joe” a scientist became so engrossed in cultivating her indoor plants that she would choose them over her children. “Club zero” takes place in a high-school in a non-descript city. Ms. Novak (Mia Wasikowska), a nutrition teacher just joined the school, she comes with her own branded weight-loss tea, it has her face on the package.

In 2015 two of Olfa Hamrouni’s four daughters left home to join the Islamic State in Libya. Tunisia was becoming known as the leading exporter of jihadists then. “They were eaten by the wolf,” the mother ominously says in the beginning in an attempt to rationalize their absence, her remaining two daughters by her side. Part-confessional, part-memorial “Four daughters,” ("Les Filles D'Olfa" in the original French) which is documentary

English filmmaker Jonathan Glazer (“Sexy Beast”; “Under the Skin”) was in Cannes this year for the first time with “The Zone of Interest,” a stunning new film about the Auschwitz concentration camp, more specifically about the camp’s top commander, a German officer named Rudolf Höss, who lives in the house with his wife and their children and a recent newborn, their staff and a black dog. A river flows nearby, the house

In “Black Flies” the full-frontal reality of two nighttime paramedics grabs you at the throat and doesn’t let go. The new Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire film is an infernal ride of double-shifts and bullying and death into the belly of the beast, the film pops, hits hard, the image is jumpy, the screams are loud, it’s a pressure-cooker, I came out of there traumatized and a little shaken. This is not the New York City I know. Had an inkling.

In Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Monster,” competing for Palme D’Or, a small boy and his mother, the father dead and buried, the boy’s in school and the mother works in a dry-cleaners. At the start of the film a building in their neighborhood catches fire and they watch from the balcony, mother and son looking more like two friends. She’s carefree, unaffected by the pressures of raising a son but vigilant nevertheless. They place a small cake with candles in front

Director Jesse V. Johnson makes the type of action thrillers that would’ve allowed him to be a force in the action cinema flicks that flooded theaters in the eighties. Johnson’s latest, “One Ranger,” is a mildly-entertaining thriller that would make the ghost of the Cannon Film Group proud.

Thomas Jane is Alex Tyree, an rugged Texas Ranger tough who is recruited by

Moody and always intriguing, Cristian Mungiu’s “R.M.N.” is a tense parable focusing on social unrest and racist intolerance in Romania. 

Written by Mungiu, this a film that focuses on those who set out to hate almost any identity that is different from theirs. These are communities in racial crisis.

Matthias (Marin Grigore), a German