Carlos Aguilar

As with Rohrwacher’s previous movies, there is an exquisite blurring between the tangible and the ethereal, the urban and the pastoral, life and death, past and present — all of it overlapping with the same ease as the hues of a twilight sky.

As with plenty of memorable comedies, what makes “Dad & Step-Dad” a special treat is that beneath its well-mannered raunchiness and stoic silliness there’s an undercurrent of something truthful about the human condition.

Like a comedy sketch that overstays its welcome, “Society” undermines both its caustic intent and its romantic-comedy subplot.

Little insight is gained from what’s on screen.

You can get the facts about these migrants anywhere, but Garrone knows the tool of cinema is more effective. By presenting these adolescents in all their fragility and strength, he comes as close as is possible to getting us to feel how they felt. Io Capitano is as unflinching as it is robust with empathy.

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan spends his latest engrossingly verbose, three-hour opus, “About Dry Grasses,” warning us that every truth is partial as it’s tinged with the teller’s perspective.

No doubt comparisons to “Saltburn,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” or “The Talented Mr. Ripley” will abound, but what Lin conceived is far more subcutaneous, with a sobering tone and disinterested in building up to a grand plot twist — though the resolution is unexpected.

A work of tremendous lyrical potency, even more intricate in meaning and scope than the pair’s earlier stunner, Sujo thunderously demonstrates why Valdez and Rondero stand among those soon to be regarded as the new masters of Mexican cinema.

Bursting with unruly energy that practically escapes the confines of the screen, Kneecap is a riotous, drug-laced triumph in the name of freedom that bridges political substance and crowd-pleasing entertainment.

In the Summers is the type of personal, confidently executed first outing that should hopefully put the filmmaker on an auspicious track to produce other keenly humanist work.

Though Sehiri’s third feature offers a seemingly minor concept, it’s certainly bountiful in its power to unearth the unspoken codes that reign over this community, where some men demand reverence from women solely for their gender-based status in the social hierarchy, where the notion of absolute loyalty to one’s extended family guides every decision, and where romantic companionship remains mostly transactional.

Even those already familiar with the trajectory of Kahlo’s existence may find the delivery here raw, vulnerable, and refreshing.

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

Ilker Çatak, a German writer-director of Turkish descent, has shrewdly crafted a taut and tight examination of the concept of justice folded into an absorbing character study.

Though the humor and acting in “Concrete Utopia” can occasionally feel broad, Lee’s viscerally monstrous performance grounds a high-stakes drama.

The year’s most succinctly perfect film, Fallen Leaves aims to do for us what companionship does for its couple: make this treacherous life a bit more bearable.

While Wish is enjoyable, this new Disney fairytale doesn’t measure up to those that came before.

Even at her character’s most vulnerable, the Oscar-winning actor presents Lee with an edge of defensiveness, her guard never fully down, likely tied to a traumatic event in childhood.

For some, Nikou’s deliberate intent to portray a subtly warped reality may read as forced. But there’s an endearing bizarreness to “Fingernails,” his first film in English, that allows him to grasp at some of the intricacies of the human condition, steeped in silences as much as heartfelt analysis.

A movie destined for a cult following and subsequent midnight showings, “Divinity” does commit the sin of placing style over substance, but there’s enough of the latter to keep one’s mind spinning along with it, even if it’s all a jumble

This wickedly funny, blood-soaked portrait of a decaying tyrant hits streaming on the week of the 50th anniversary of Pinochet’s coup against President Allende. Larraín offers no false hopes about eradicating the ideologies that allowed it to happen and last. Instead, he warns that evil never truly perishes—it just transforms to poison new minds.

Although Rotting in the Sun isn’t revelatory about how little those in the higher echelons of society think about the tribulations of average people, the movie’s forceful way of expressing it achieves its presumed goal: to punch up and mock the fools.

The Boy and the Heron is Miyazaki’s strong-willed encouragement for us to persevere. If this is, in fact, a swan song, then it’s a ravishing one because no one has the ability to distill elemental truths into vividly rendered moving paintings like Miyazaki.

DuVernay transcends the academic nature of the material via imaginative swings of fancy that immerse us in Wilkerson mournful mindset.

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.

Despite its plot contrivances, the dramatic arc of Mutt delivers a changed individual on the other side of its many tribulations.

While the stirring visual fluidity of “The Unknown Country,” her first fiction feature and a kindhearted triumph, provides further arguments pointing to Malick likely being an influence, what distinguishes Maltz’s approximation to that style of evocatively loose filmmaking is that it’s grounded on the personal victories of real individuals. Based on that, she forges eclectic narrative devices for a tone poem with substantial dramatic meat on its bones.

As much as Amanda may seem like an irredeemable antihero, you come to appreciate her unspoken dream of finding fulfillment in the company of at least one other person on her crooked wavelength.