Devika Girish

The pleasure lies in the telling — the invention of fictions, the performance of emotions — rather than in the details of plot. Once you lose yourself in the thickets of “Trenque Lauquen,” you won’t want to be found.

Widespread racism, discriminatory laws and the Maori people’s centuries-long struggle for autonomy bracket the characters’ lives in Cousins. The film trembles with sound, color and feeling, deriving much of its power from an excellent ensemble cast (particularly Te Raukura Gray and Ana Scotney as the child and adult Mata).

The portrait of life that emerges organically from this understated, observant approach makes Eyimofe the rare social realist drama that conveys critique without didacticism and empathy without pity.

By the time we get to the film’s closing scenes . . . this modest documentary becomes something epic — a microcosm of the eternal cycles of life.

Kiran and her family are heroes, but this isn’t a simple tale of heroism. The film lays bare the uneasy and inadequate avenues available to survivors seeking justice.

Broad in scope and rapidly paced, the film can feel as if it’s bursting at the seams. But it acutely conveys the radical joy that “Soul!” inspired, barely contained in the movie’s running time.

Mahmud and Ziyad, volunteers at the Yazidi Home Center in Syria, will make several more such trips over the course of the film, and hundreds more after the cameras stop rolling. Their task is enormous, and it demands a stoicism that Hirori’s intrepid, immersive filmmaking mirrors.

The film’s striking images — a girl’s made-up face, sullen amid a crowd of colorful revelers; solar panels gleaming sinisterly below a full moon — leave an indelible trail.

Sarvnik Kaur’s breathtaking documentary about Indigenous fishermen in Mumbai, India, dispels the myth that cinematic beauty has to do with the power of the camera or the glossiness of the image. Shot by Ashok Meena, the film finds beauty, simply, in perspective.

At a time when the profession faces increasing dangers in India, the film’s faith in the powers of grassroots journalism is nothing short of galvanizing.

Most of the accusations have been reported on extensively in the last two years in various publications. What the film does is bring these accounts to living, breathing and moving life, taking us beyond the media cycles of allegation and denial to a survivor’s intimate confrontations with cultural pressures and trauma.

The power of the collective, more so than any individuals, is the focus here. The film is anchored with the arresting faces of Lowndes locals and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers, who recall a range of stirring details — from setting up camp in a house with no running water to internal debates over the term “Black power.”

Nicole Newnham’s film recoups Hite’s story from the margins of feminist history with both style and substance, taking its cue from its subject.

Touzani’s film becomes an ode to the many kinds of love that persist, even in an unforgiving world.

Rarely has a film made me so painfully, viscerally aware of the impotence of spectatorship — of the dubious remove from which we watch suffering.

Test Pattern achieves a lot with very little: The film’s nonlinear editing and cannily scored silences invite our interpretations, locating in them the entanglements of race and gender. Ford pushes us, if not to definitive answers, then to the right questions.

The film, a rousing, form-bending new feature by the Romanian auteur Radu Jude, rails at the tyrannical potential of language — particularly when backed by government power — to suffocate people’s freedoms.

By showing us the world through Justino’s searching gaze, Da-Rin gives us an elusive but powerful sense of the limits of our own vision.

It’s a sweet, strangely modest tragicomedy about the pleasures of (mostly banal) excess.

With a fly-on-the-wall approach, the movie allows the center’s cruel contradictions to accumulate with a slow burn.

An acute awareness of the relationship between memory, whether personal or collective, and identity emerges as the engine of We.

The Social Dilemma is remarkably effective in sounding the alarm about the incursion of data mining and manipulative technology into our social lives and beyond.

Employing minimal background music and a bleak, blue-gray color palette, Rasoulof evokes a sense of nihilism that is as suffocating as it is affecting.

Avoiding didactic conclusions or pat answers, Alala’s film questions blind belief but finds boundless enchantment in every frame.

Zinshtein’s patient, observant approach catches her subjects in moments of damning irony.

Araya is remarkably tender as she sinks her fingers into the earth or gingerly lifts bugs off the ground, while Sophie Winqvist Loggins’s hushed, soft-focus camerawork imbues these moments with an almost spiritual grace.

If The Stroll is an indictment and elegy, it is also a remarkable document of the self-determination of the women and workers who learned, in the face of the worst odds, to fend for themselves and each other.

Even as Farewell Amor treads familiar paths, its tripartite structure allows for uncommon nuance.

The relationship between mother and daughter is rather thinly etched — there’s a little too much going on in this ambitious, intergenerational film — but Hadjithomas and Joreige deftly use Maia’s archive to weave together past and present.

The documentary The Hidden Life of Trees uses the sensorial capacities of cinema to thrillingly visualize Wohlleben’s observations.

The most cleareyed of several recent documentaries about the perils of Big Tech (“The Great Hack,” “The Social Dilemma”), Coded Bias tackles its sprawling subject by zeroing in empathetically on the human costs.

7 Days takes a warm, witty look at the kinds of companionship that can emerge even — or especially — in the most unromantic, pragmatic of circumstances.

Drawn from Syms’s own experiences as a visual artist, The African Desperate is less an art-school parody as it is a portrait of existential incongruity, where contempt mingles with deep affection.

The director Sasie Sealy’s feature debut has style and keenly observed visual humor. Each scene is paced as perfectly as a punchline.

The documentary is less an inspiring tale than a sobering wake-up call.

The twists come rapidly in the movie’s first half; in the second, the narrative dissolves into a zigzag of flying bodies and explosions that bend the laws of space-time. But the implausibility of it all is a perk: There’s never a moment in this rollicking film when you can tell what’s coming next.

Winter Boy shines when it allows its actors to quietly play out family dynamics, with Lacoste, Binoche and especially Kircher wearing the many shades of grief with effortless, endearing naturalism.

Although each chapter is built around an event — a tryst or a revelation — the film comes to life in quiet, conversational details that capture the textures of people’s lives across different generations and classes.

A South African thriller haunted by the ghosts of many Hollywood blockbusters past, Indemnity trades plausibility and originality for a worthy substitute: a great deal of fun.

Deftly, the film shifts focus from Raducan’s disqualification to the entrenched injustices of Olympic sports, with their outsized pressures and brittle illusions of meritocracy.

Not much happens in Bird Island, but the center’s cycles of regeneration and care leave their mark, invigorating both the characters and us.

The film sometimes flags in energy as it cuts between these different strands, but its pace feels faithful to just how halting the fight for justice can be when democracy becomes impenetrable to those it serves.

Ghani’s mode is less interrogative than associative. Her montage of film fragments illustrates and sometimes poetically belies the interviewees’ recollections, evoking the ambiguous and unresolved contours of collective memory.

A film bristling with the kind of familial rancor that usually only emerges behind closed doors.

The most stirring parts of “Beijing Spring” showcase the power of the cinematic arts. The film weaves in long-unseen footage of the artists’ demonstrations that thrums with both history and stunning aesthetic beauty.

The film’s still, square images feel so much like paintings that any stray movement — the smoke rising in spirals from a mosquito coil, or a palm tree swaying in the breeze — can seem like magic, a picture come to life.

If Gerson’s brisk supercut style can feel frustratingly cursory at times, he chooses wisely to concede the stage to the artists — rousing scenes from concerts and recitals are the film’s highlights — rather than turn them into data points for an exhaustive account of the refugee crisis.

El Agua succeeds as a portrait of the village’s traditions, both manual and cultural, brought to life by a largely nonprofessional cast (including Pamies, a striking discovery).

Guzmán’s documentary is a people’s microhistory of a nation in transition.