Beatrice Loayza

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

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Though visually handsome, the film leaves the audience with the sense that, like a grad student, it is still working out its big ideas.

The stately Foïs carries the film as it devolves into a restrained drama about familial loyalty and womanly fortitude, its change of gears not entirely clicking into place.

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

This aestheticization of Chinese society doesn’t exactly sit well with this viewer: one wonders if this counts as a kind of tourism.

Ultimately, the film feels a bit misshapen.

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.

The film swings back and forth from scenes of pastoral bliss to brutality, generating a narrative that, while unfocused, is nevertheless anchored by the tender and wounded performances by its adolescent cast.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 brutal possibilities of the white supremacist mind-set are nothing to shy away from. Still, the film’s admittedly jarring cruelty does little beyond press down on old bruises, turning the realities of racialized violence into an immersive spectacle with the kind of real-world sadistic allure one might find in a serial-killer movie.

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.

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.

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.

“Speer” is an intriguing document, highlighting the ease with which the most reprehensible figures are able to whitewash their legacies. But once you settle into its wavelength, the documentary begins to feel simplistic, like a one-track excuse to roll out rare film clips and testimony.

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.

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.

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.

[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.