Beatrice Loayza

Coming-of-age works are about discovery, but Dreams reminds us that this process can be fluid and fanciful. Our fantasies shape who we are because they invite us to clear out the mist — and find firmer ground on the other side.

[A] disarmingly sensitive documentary.

Grémillon supplements the bleak fatalism and noirish intrigue with bursts of quivering melodrama that enrich and expand the story beyond its ostensible fatal-attraction framework.

The film’s structure may be conventional, and yet its story is unusually rich, and uninterested in easy answers as to why people hurt the ones they love.

McKenzie doesn’t rely on the usual uplifting messaging and strained empowerment arc to humanize An and Star . . . Their friendship remains mysterious, yet the film, as if by witchcraft, makes their connection feel palpable and true.

Smile 2, directed by Parker Finn, is more thematically ambitious than the original, which also allows Finn to stage more satisfyingly ridiculous kills and ramp up its air of delirium

In the end, Familiar Touch reveals itself to be less about the agonies of change than in the concessions we make to feel closer to our loved ones and ourselves.

Pimenta and Queirós invent a world in which Brazilian women at the very bottom of the social totem pole take matters into their own hands. They do so without an ounce of fear or self-pity — and in killer style to boot.

Court — whose languorous pacing heightens the film’s brief, bewildering moments of action — summons an unsettling experience from relatively restrained gestures.

Amanda is absurd and abrasive, but also sympathetic thanks to Porcaroli’s performance. She’s a flaming narcissist with a gooey core of vulnerability, a being forged by the fear of making herself known.

In the assured hands of the writer-director Ellie Foumbi, Marie’s unraveling yields not only an absorbing psychological thriller, but a profound meditation on the ethics of immigration.

Lentzou, with her first feature no less, gets at something much knottier about what it feels like to get older and perceive your parents as full people, in all their flaws and vulnerabilities; the pains and pleasures of adulthood, contrary to expectation, yield just as much, if not more, unpredictability than in youth.

Brimming with postmodern flourishes, Fauna calls attention to the slippery nature of performance and identity, lodging a complex, yet highly engrossing critique of narco culture’s influence on Mexican storytelling — and it does so without a drop of that pesky didacticism.

Cregger sets up dozens of clichés and pulls them in genuinely surprising directions, brandishing his touchstones: American horror films of the 80s and 90s in the vein of Wes Craven.

[Emma Dante] imagines the ripple effects of a sister’s death across generations with metaphysical grace and hints of fantasy, straying from the plot-reliant mold of most human dramas toward something more haunting and powerful.

The film’s tension rides on the unknown, a paranoid vibe accented by Kelly-Anne’s shady online presence and Gariépy’s stark, sphinx-like performance.

This startlingly evocative, complex and confrontational new film is not interested in justice or didacticism.

With a kind of dissociative, jet lag-induced delirium, the film transitions — somehow fluidly — from the lush woodlands and desolate churches of southern Germany to the flickering lights and modernist textures of Hong Kong in the throes of mass demonstrations.

“Three Minutes” is more than a documentary about the Holocaust — it is an investigative drama, a meditation on the ethics of moving images and a ghost story about people who might be forgotten should we take those images for granted.

The Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas’s The Box weaves some of the greatest horrors of modern Mexican life into an unsettlingly cryptic thriller.

Mbakam hits a remarkable balance. The sociopolitical truths that make up Pierrette’s losing streak are evident, without the miserable patronizing so common in films about struggle in Africa.

Abounding with nasty women, The Origin of Evil could have easily been flattened by the weight of a feminist objective. Untethered from such neat messaging, this decadent murder-movie takes the online credo, “be gay, do crimes,” and runs with it — to delicious results.

That passion could bloom in such spontaneous and unexpected forms is part of this enigmatic film’s potency.

The Crime is Mine is the epitome of a comfort film, decked out in old-Hollywood nostalgia and unfolding at an auctioneer’s clip. Its fun and games are deceptively smart — all the more because the women know their angles so triumphantly well.

Lacôte’s got a lot on his mind, and despite a few missteps, his ambition pays off.

Foregoing the knotty male-female relationships (and soju bottles) of recent work, Hong examines instead the textures of female relationships and what independence might look and feel like for women entering a new, more mature stage of life—and how a short trip out of one’s comfort zone might generate bounties of food for thought.

Yet without dumbing down its message, Marcello’s sweeping Künstlerroman has all the pleasurable characteristics of a simmering romance and a poignant tragedy, too.

This is not a happy story. The lucidity with which these subjects speak to their own mistakes and sorrows will leave you haunted.

A noirish psychodrama simmering with ambiguities, the film cleverly toys with our perception by loosening our heroine’s grip on reality.

The film is a portrait of modern labor that moves with the breathless tension of a Safdie brothers’ joint. But instead of gangsters and cocaine, it finds a flurried momentum in one ordinary woman’s everyday obligations.

There’s not much more a “Final Destination” fan could ask for, but “Bloodlines” — which at times feel more like a dark satire than a straightforward horror movie — reminds us we’re powerless against the world’s morbid whims. Best we can do is laugh about it.

An undeniable melancholy — a sense of loss — pervades the film. Yet it is never resigned. The ghosts of history live among us. To ignore their presence, “Małni” seems to say, is to forget who we really are.

This straightforward romp focuses its attention on its cunning and no-nonsense scream queen. And what Fox lacks in dramatic prowess, she makes up for in pure, wicked magnetism.

Moreno is given full rein of her story, which doubles as a case study in the highs and lows of showbiz for a woman of color.

Unfolding like a David Fincheresque procedural and doused in gloomy grays and blues, the film, by the writer and director Fernando Guzzoni, may seem provocative to some in the context of #MeToo and its popular mantra to “believe women.”

Il Dono manages to strike a balance between damnation and idolatry of its medieval setting. We’re sucked in, enraptured, even as we feel its lives fading away.

Coma pushes the boundaries of the so-called lockdown movie with its thrilling, chaotic form.

Urchin doesn’t break the mold, but it’s a confident, quietly affecting drama that strikes above the standard character study.

It’s like “Peeping Tom” meets one of Dario Argento’s giallo joints, but slathered in a coat of melancholic malaise.

Cryptozoo stands out as an aesthetically ambitious undertaking, seducing viewers with its hypnotizing hand-drawn animation and John Carroll Kirby’s pulsing electronic score.

Though the dialogue is often hit-or-miss, this young adult drama doesn’t simply put a fresh spin on old tropes: It takes seriously the messiness of growing up, the hardest parts of which involve accepting life’s ambiguities.

Hope was never something that I associated with Schanelec’s typically dour films, yet here, from the darkness of a timeless tragedy emerges light.

There’s Still Tomorrow is set in Rome after World War I, but it unfolds with timeless verve and romanticism.

Smell is perhaps the most opaque of the five human senses; the one that’s hardest to put into words. No wonder it’s key to the uncanny intrigues of the film, part queer love story, part supernatural psychodrama, by the French director Léa Mysius.

[Somai’s] exquisite visual compositions (of lonely bedrooms, concrete piers, and nocturnal courtyards) infuse even the film’s racy images with a somber sense of longing and introspection, finding beauty and humanity in the midst of the macabre.

The payoff feels somewhat slight, but the foreplay — the will-they-or-won’t-they and the will-he-find-out — builds up with energy and flare. Maybe climaxes are overrated, anyway.

Hints, whose grandmother introduced her to the smoke-sauna ritual, uses the documentary to speak volumes about what it means to be a woman, even as the focus remains fixed on a single location: a cramped sauna-cabin located in a forest.

The documentary combines interviews with original company members and archival footage with vérité-style training scenes from a college dance troupe’s reinterpretation of the piece. The result is a kaleidoscopic portrait of an artist that simultaneously taps into the personal and political dimensions that inform the creation of art.

It’s a blatantly didactic film, yet its focus on advocacy feels justified given the misconceptions that continue to dominate society’s understanding of the autism community.

Minari is that rare slice-of-life drama that contains multitudes without needing to look beyond the borders of its highly specific story.

Stewing in the film’s carefully crafted atmosphere of hypocrisy is, however, essential; values and attitudes deconstruct when they’re oversoaked. But make no mistake, the ride will be demanding.

It ultimately stumbles in this balancing act and loses sight of its emotional core, but its efforts remain compelling and delightfully bizarre.

The film is grounded in a harrowing historical reality, about the terrifying lengths to which women will go to liberate themselves from destructive domestic conditions. Franz and Fiala bring out this reality’s latent horrors through a series of suspense-building strategies.

The film’s palpably-rendered environment, with stiflingly dense foliage and vivid natural soundscapes, heightens the dizzying nature of the war without resorting to titillation or idealized images that might glorify pain and suffering.

The cat-and-mouse game, which involves Hamid tracking his suspect throughout campus, plays out in a relatively low-key manner, with the film relying on Bessa (and eventually, an eerie Barhom) to deepen the survivor’s dilemma.

The traps are disgusting; the plot, so self-serious its absurd (and knowingly so). And unlike the sundry sequels before it (by the third “Saw,” any pretense of ingenuity had been hacked off), this one manages to make you feel something beyond gross-out adrenaline — assuming you have affection for the franchise’s mainstays.

Symbolism overshadows characterization, or any sense of motive for that matter, nevertheless Roh succeeds as a spine-tingling baffler, hitting at nerves we can’t quite articulate but feel all the same.

The film avoids a cut-and-dried triumphalism for something more slippery and, perhaps, more meaningful, too.

Muritiba understands that any portrait of masculinity that fixates too intensely on the cruelties and self-denials of machista culture are futile. Instead, he finds grace in stolen moments of tenderness.

Nelson may be throwing too much at the wall, but he does manage to make you feel something beyond just gross-out thrills.

It’s more of a fever dream than an actual story, offering a queer counternarrative to the macho vision of the legendary warrior that is as hypnotic as it is gnarly.

Plenty of things happen, but Silent Friend isn’t traditionally plot-driven. It’s a film of sprawling ideas that float around like pollen, with some particles creating marvelous blooms. Others drift off aimlessly.

Mandibles is sweet, simple, and oh-so-very stupid — a stupidity that’s oddly liberating, like making up ridiculous scenarios with a pal over bong hits.

So many things can and do go wrong, but this production diary’s most intriguing element is the way it considers the value of art at a time when the country seems to be on fire.

A portrait of modern girlhood, this documentary ultimately becomes a bleak look at the normalization of sexual abuse among the very victimized young women.

Bao’s lighthearted, refreshing approach neither succumbs to whitewashing nor the model-minority myth. The film sticks to the action-comedy basics, which is just fine.

We tend to look at the sex lives of sex workers as endlessly fascinating, but in Bliss the line of work is instead part of a larger take on the hurdles of modern romance.

So committed to maintaining an enigmatically sinister atmosphere, the film fails to build out the many compelling issues it raises about toxic masculinity and familial gaslighting. Nevertheless, some inspired confrontations, and a commanding performance by Sidse Babett Knudsen, who plays the hot-and-cold matriarch, Bodil, makes “Wildland” an absorbing and highly watchable psychodrama.

Like a cross between a Studio Ghibli joint and “Interstellar,” Arco, by the French comic-book artist turned filmmaker Ugo Bienvenu, strikes a lovely balance between fantastical kid-friendly wholesomeness and real-world bleakness.

Reeve’s bond with his fellow actor Robin Williams also makes up one of the documentary’s meatiest threads, adding depth to the character study.

In dreams, he imagines himself and his mother as glamorous figures in a monochrome variety-show spectacle, poignant bouts of movie-magic that underscore both Andrew’s innocence and his sharpening intuition: Freedom, for the both of them, will mean upending reality itself.

Unlike so many new movies that seem to be algorithmically manufactured to appeal to diverse audiences and tick the boxes of representation, Four Samosas feels organic and true as a slice of Indian American life — even if it’s all fun and games and movie magic.

Each time we think Signe has hit her breaking point, she perseveres. It’s deadpan funny at first, but then gets disturbing. Her refusal to give up the act proves to be more sickening than her physical symptoms.

The film may be sticking to a familiar template, in which a regular Joe gets sucked into an underworld, but Blanchard’s snappy direction and the great mileage he gets out of the city’s nooks and crannies bumps it up the crime-action totem pole.

Thornton, who briefly attended a Christian boarding school when he was a child, brings a textured perspective to this story of cultural violence and white guilt.

Jalali maintains a mysterious ambiguity, but Wali Zada conveys what matters.

Guiraudie is after something much different here: creating a palpable sense of the connection between fear and desire, which, sure, aren’t the most rational of our human impulses — but neither are love, marriage or jihadist crusading.

Wei Lun comes off as one-dimensional in his brash, immature pursuit of Ling, yet their illicit relationship is portrayed in an anti-sensationalist light, blurring the lines between maternal and romantic love.

The film tracks about a year in Chuang’s life in a sober, sociological style of long takes and smooth pans. The story feels loose, intentionally directionless, at first, but as it winds toward the cooler months, its collection of small details builds up to big-picture revelations about the imminent rise of China as a global superpower.

The mounting tensions of these moving parts — and steely performances by Mandi and Amir — make for an engrossing thriller fueled by female rage.

Directed by Emily Atif, this middlebrow drama showcases Krieps’s captivating blend of melancholic fragility and spiky tenacity, riding on the strength of its performers, including the Gaspard Ulliel in his final live-action role before his accidental death in 2022.

Through the use of symbolic peepholes, eavesdropping and dark rooms that provide cover for whispered assurances of devotion, Two of Us succeeds as a stealthy depiction of lesbian erotics, one that mirrors the inhibitions of a generation.

My Donkey, My Lover & I is yet another story about a woman who ventures out into the wild and finds herself. But to the writer and director Caroline Vignal’s credit, this low-key romantic French comedy proves friskier and more idiosyncratic than its reliance on this trope of feminist empowerment would suggest.

This Is Not a War Story, which Lugacy also directed, is a naturalistic, chat-heavy narrative that captures the difficulties wrought by the unimaginable trauma individuals face as they attempt to forge connections and find peace after war.

Touch rekindles a treacly genre that I didn’t realize I missed. Its tender performances and gut-punch reveals are classic tear-jerker ingredients. Add to this a natural, inordinately sensitive approach to intercultural love — mercifully, without a sense of righteousness or obligation.

We somehow feel connected to these animals — not by their precious, humanlike relatability — but by the cyclically banal and thorough means with which they are exploited, milked and bred on aggressive schedules that break their bodies down prematurely.

Simon’s drag spectacles may be intentionally fierce and operatic, but there’s something refreshing about this drama’s intimate scale and lack of interest in sweeping tragedies, especially in the context of queer cinema.

That Philibert doesn’t stick to a “main character,” or impose a phony narrative arc, vibes well with the facility’s free-spirited methods, even if the documentary lacks the drama of a more structured production.

Should you be willing to overlook certain intrinsic difficulties, Held for Ransom is a surprisingly thoughtful hostage drama given the blunt meatheadedness of its title.

We know there’s great tragedy and ugliness behind the smoke and mirrors, but we watch in amusement nonetheless. Sinisterly, Seidl reminds us how easy it is to turn people into objects for the taking.

There’s something smarter between the lines about the way technology warps our (self-) perception, but maybe that’s giving too much credit to a film so giddy about its warping. That’s not totally bad: Some films are like dreams whose meanings never materialize.

True, its hero is a philandering middle-aged novelist; he has an affair with a divine younger woman; and there’s even an imaginary trial where said novelist stands before a jury of women accusing him of misogyny. But, if you can tolerate these passé indulgences, there’s also something slyly compelling about this ethereal, pillow-talk-heavy drama.

Cookie-cutter though it is, The Janes does have something going for it: its interview subjects, the former Janes, who all speak about their beliefs and shared past with striking clarity.

To Akin’s credit, the film isn’t tastelessly sentimental (see “Jojo Rabbit”), and it depicts Nanning’s awakening with the kind of subtlety and restraint that suggests his moral education will continue evolving after the end of the movie.

In the end, Jensen opts for feel-good fantasy over hardened truths, but his dizzyingly chaotic methods amount to a dynamic, unexpectedly touching ode to the difficulties of baring your vulnerabilities to genuinely overcome them.

Here, heroism is presented less as a feat of preternatural bravery than a series of choices made by someone who simply refused to give up his humanity.

Though far from the gold standard of “brief encounter” dramas like Andrew Haigh’s “Weekend,” Sublet nevertheless wins you over with its subtle charm and its mellow depiction of two men forging an unexpected connection.

A simple yet engaging melodrama.