Carlos Aguilar

With sci-fi touches and sanctimonious eroticism, the incisive satire intently takes on the influence of evangelical Christianity on the state — namely the far-right movement that elected populist Jair Bolsonaro.

Facile explanations are absent from Josephine, as they should be, but what lingers is a sense that every gesture of empathy and bravery, no matter how small or imperfect, tips the scales towards good, even if trying feels like a losing fight.

A master class in endless narrative inventiveness and an ode to the resourceful and collaborative spirit of hands-on filmmaking, One Cut of the Dead amounts to an explosively hilarious rarity.

Where others could have made a less sophisticated pastiche, Schoenbrun has filtered the familiar through their nonconforming lens to beget a bona fide original.

With its image folding onto itself like a wave in unstoppable motion, “The Human Surge 3” envelops the senses until the very end.

An eternal nurturer, the black mother whom Allah dissects and praises in this transfixing hymn of a movie about the place where the woman that gave him life was born is far more than just a homeland but a direct link to the answers about existence.

My Imaginary Country is as much about the causes, participants and outcomes of a collective awakening in search of a more promising future as it is about an artist allowing himself to feel hope for a homeland that has forever been the focus of his artistic preoccupations.

Even as emotions may overcome the viewer, Hamaguchi never pushes All of a Sudden into saccharine terrain for empty positivity or cheap inspirational aims. It all feels earned.

As a journalistic depiction of the rescue operations as they happen, Sabaya brims with heart-pounding tension and immediacy. But given the access obtained and Hirori’s connection to the people and the land where this grim chapter in modern history is unfolding, the superficial handling of pivotal aspects of the story is disappointing.

As Sandra, Seydoux puts forward a delicately incandescent performance portraying someone in an unstable state, whose conflicting emotions about what she can’t change overwhelm her.

It’s through the alchemy of cinema that the Davies brothers have carried out a resurrection of a soul now frozen intact on the screen.

Told in sumptuously gritty imagery, this epic feat of bold imagination, unconcerned with mitigating its creative force for the sake of unadventurous audiences, has an unconventional film grammar and irregular structure that peers into the different possible outcomes of the would-be paladin’s trek.

Dahomey is at its most blazingly confrontational when Diop includes footage of a panel session in which students discuss the issues at hand.

Writer-director Rodrigo Moreno methodically unfurls a genius tragicomedy on the elusive nature of freedom: an idealized state in which, in theory, one does as one pleases at all times.

Using a style of elegant lyricism, which enshrines tiny moments into glisteningly miraculous turning points, Erice lets the exchanges between the people he’s conceived play out without the need to advance the plot.

Amid tableaus of sundrenched landscapes, Simón’s instinct for eliciting naturalistic performances—displayed in her feature debut “Summer 1993"—marries a remarkably stealth narrative structure that lets us into the lives of these people, collectively and individually.

For all the technique that she demonstrates in Passing, it’s the way Hall mines praiseworthy turns from her cast that will earn her the most acclaim. Mannered in varying degrees, the actresses’ performances strike a delicate balance of emotional nuance and period-specific affectations.

Once Wang gets into the murky waters of the hoaxers here, one wishes she could dig deeper and examine the evolution of those fringe factions at length. That unfortunately doesn’t happen — likely given how much ground there is to cover with this story — yet her hard-hitting doc, both explores complex ideological battles and maps how a humanitarian calamity morphed into a political one in both countries.

As with all great moral dilemmas, Sorogoyen makes it impossible to entirely side with either party without considering that each of them has been victimized by larger social ills.

Taut yet thoroughly laced with levity, Black Bag plays like the filmic equivalent of a skillfully executed espionage mission in how tight and exact it feels.

Some movies wound us so profoundly that once darkness has consumed their final frame we are incapable of shaking off the heartache. That’s the power of Identifying Features, which is as painfully intimate as it is unsparing in its indictment of a country ravaged by a corrosive, entrenched evil.

I’m Still Here brilliantly distills an agonizing chapter of a nation’s recent past into a sophisticated portrait of communal endurance.

In White on White, what permeates is a merited sense of dread, by design too starkly impenetrable on emotional grounds, but direct in its fierce thematic intent.

As engrossing as it’s alarming, the documentary flows with a stream of consciousness about the illusion of the “Chinese Dream.”

This tale of parents and poultry more than earns the exclamation point in its title. It sweeps you into a whirlwind of ingenuity, bite after animated bite.

The Krafft’s globetrotting love story exists at its most ardent in proximity of their mutual passion.

The Tale of Silyan functions as a dialect between old-world wisdom and modern socioeconomic realities, between the natural realm and the worries of mankind; it’s both spiritual and humanist, about forgiveness and adaptability, and makes a case for holding on to what you’ve always known to fend off the illusion of progress.

An exquisitely tender tribute to love in its purest expression, The Blue Caftan doesn’t romanticize the complications and conflicts facing its two soulmates, and precisely because of that it feels like an utterly honest tale of romance.