Devika Girish

Abbasi seems enamored by the contradictions of Hanaei, who was at once an upstanding Muslim, a family man, a pervert and a ruthless killer. But anyone who reads the news, anywhere in the world, will respond to these rote hypocrisies of misogyny with little other than jadedness.

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.

Rather than offer insight into the difficult choices facing disabled people, Gigi & Nate opts for mawkish wish fulfillment, undercutting the film’s powerful emotional core.

It’s a film-school pastiche of the French director’s style, with none of the forward-thinking intellectual curiosity of his movies.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The topic is, of course, timely. (When is racism not?) Yet The Walk feels dated.

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.

The result is a bittersweet family portrait that, though relatable, lacks the specificity that makes for truly universal cinema.

Star power is a logic unto itself, and Lou has ensured a limitless supply by casting Gong as an actress-spy. She conveys depths of pain and longing even when the script offers none, seducing us as effortlessly as Jean seduces her enemies.

The message — that science cannot succeed without a politics of solidarity — is important, but the film ends on a note of uncertainty that feels defeatist rather than urgent.

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.

Where Abu-Assad falters is in turning Huda into a didactic mouthpiece for the very themes that Reem’s tribulations, filmed up-close with a jerky camera, convey effortlessly.

Mokri constructs his film like a control experiment, tweaking each of its variables — time, space, narrative — as if to see what he might catalyze.

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.

It’s a story that spans past and present, arts and politics, and kin and country — and the movie, with its haphazard editing, struggles to contain it all.

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.

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.

Goulet’s sleek, lo-fi world-building — decrepit gray cityscapes; fields covered with smoke-spewing factories — is more compelling than her storytelling, which grows increasingly predictable as Niska and the vigilantes plan a raid on Waseese’s academy. Yet the film’s use of clichés can also be thrillingly subversive at times.

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.

Sooryavanshi is both overstuffed and paper-thin.

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

The critical edge of the film feels blunted by platitudes (“Opportunities are born from crises,” says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization), not to mention the exhaustion viewers will likely feel in reliving early memories of the still-ongoing pandemic for nearly two hours.

Hot people pretending to be homely is par for the course in makeover movies; the real thrill lies in watching opposites attract. But the catfights, confessions, and dance-offs in He’s All That lack the sting of real romantic conflict, and there’s nary a spark between Rae and Buchanan.

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.