Devika Girish

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Much like its heroine, Twice Colonized is a storm of emotion and conviction.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

It’s all a bit uneventful, but it works as an endearing portrait of average life: sometimes up, sometimes down, but moving steadily along.

Understated almost to a fault, the film pitches its tone somewhere among the looming sorrow, gentle comedy and bureaucratic tedium that death, especially when planned, can entail. If the result is bracingly unsentimental, it’s also a touch inert — a little too poised to compel emotionally.

This negotiation between techno-pessimism and techno-fetishism is at the heart of Users, though Almada’s scattered movie struggles to keep them in balance; her broad, rhetorical voice-over is a poor match for the complexity of the film’s images.

A theme running through the interviews is that for the U.S. government, sending a Black astronaut to space was more a matter of propaganda than racial justice.

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.

The movie is funny and touching, with a star-making performance by Min and a script full of lovely, self-aware little touches . . . But it’s shot like a sitcom — flat, shiny, perfunctory — and structured like one, too, with quip-heavy vignettes that resolve in pat conclusions.

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.