Dave White

The approximately 270-minute running time becomes a hushed demand for the viewer to sit with historical cruelty and listen as its victims teach to the future, its effect a cumulative cry of warning for today.

Toni Erdmann is a thoroughly confident and impeccably executed comedy of oddball family functionality.

By centering the real-life experiences of his actors, Costa’s conscientious cinema lives in a fully humane space. Material deprivation and unrelenting night provide a blackened backdrop for quiet intimacy and dignity. Costa rejects voyeurism and condescension in favor of a form of storytelling solidarity with his actors, one where there’s no buffer of irony, no distancing effects.

It begins in a lush, green garden, but High Life, the quiet, bracing and ultimately moving first English-language film from acclaimed French director Claire Denis, is the antithesis of a creation story.

Boutefou’s performance in this delicate but wild environment is coiled and tense, but one that balances interior pain with a graceful delivery. She embodies rage, bitter amusement, longing and an emotional knowledge that comes only from decades spent with one very difficult person.

McQueen is formally traditional, and guided by a respectful approach to a complicated man. It’s lovingly told, even as it refuses to gloss over ugliness.

Diaz has made an epic-length small film about the powerless, one full of moral urgency that he chooses to elongate and slow down to a crawl. It’s a quiet consideration of grief and mercy, of control taken and freely given up.

“Civil War” strikes that admirable balance: serious-minded action that never forgets to indulge in serious fun.

The result is one of Hong’s most emotionally generous films. In a career full of small triumphs, it’s a beautiful gesture of family love, of non-specific spiritual awakening, and self-possession meant to create outward waves of goodness.

It is by turns scatological, hilarious, art-referential and, ultimately, moving.

What Ray & Liz offers is the opposite of exploitive or vengeful enumeration of parental failure. Billingham finds grace for his ruined family, even if he refuses to save them, and it feels like an act of forgiveness.

A thrilling, sprawling sensory overload that simultaneously enchants and overwhelms.

Panahi and cinematographer Amin Jafari take familiar tropes of contemporary Iranian cinema and rework them with refreshing twists.

Tea With the Dames, from director Roger Michell (“Notting Hill”), is as cozy and satisfying as its title suggests.

Formally, Tsai’s approach is as spare as possible while still maintaining a loose sense of narrative.

If Lanthimos’ gloom-vision is decidedly more blunt, it’s no less accurate an assessment of every heartless thing human beings already inflict on one another. His is a wild, sad, mordantly funny dystopia, but one that gives sexual desperation the bad name it deserves.

The filmmaker’s outsize, and sometimes unnerving, stylistic choices jump into the frame and vanish just as quickly.

This is filmmaking that demands to be noticed, if not always trusted.

An atheist’s inverse Balthazar, Wiener-Dog witnesses and experiences suffering but cannot transform that pain into anything substantive, nor can she redeem those around her.

It’s Dyrholm’s performance that anchors everything.

As a document of a special creation, Maria by Callas is very nearly enough, thanks in no small part to that generous helping of footage where she fulfills that very destiny. It’s a powerful reminder that private walls can stay put when she’s singing Bellini’s “Casta diva,” that the music is more than enough, that we can let the mystery be.

In Bruckner’s directorial hands and David Marks’ editing, more information is delivered than ever before, but no plot point is over-explained. Mysteries are allowed their ambiguity.

In spite of an excessive, metaphor-bash of an ending — forgivable when everything else on screen is this frenziedly fun — In Fabric seduces like its bias-cut main character, then taunts you for your desire.

Téchiné intuitively favors movement over chatter, and he directs his young actors toward intimate, yearning performances.

[A] brash, bruising comedy.

Layered images, un-erased pencil strokes, odd color blocking, jagged edges, heavy lines, painted frames with visible brush strokes, juxtapositions of marker, crayon, and charcoal, collage techniques, photographic effects, a set of psychedelic human lungs: this is is low-budget ambition firing on all cylinders.

A respectful, reserved, and charming documentary.

Undine allows for the magical while keeping its eyes firmly on the painfully real, making a valiant, full-hearted attempt to break the bonds of history.