Devika Girish

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.

The camera stays close to Jaakko, always at his eye level, blurring everything around him. But the script struggles to channel the character’s wonderfully playful, acerbic spirit.

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.

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

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

The fight scenes are plastic and glossy. Hargrave mistakes gore for cool and technical prowess for choreography, deploying overlong one-take shots that look like “Call of Duty” outtakes. He does commit to the location, though, creating a properly global thriller with a fine ensemble cast.

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.

Majid Majidi’s latest feature doesn’t lack in style or charm, using a child’s perspective — a staple in Iranian cinema — to locate beauty and hope in a cynical world. As is often the case with the director’s work, however, precious visuals come at the cost of narrative complexity.

It’s a tonal wild ride with eccentric characters, neon-lit settings and elaborately absurd detours. Unfortunately, the ripped-from-the-headlines meat of Dead Pigs gets lost in these affectations.

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.

Alice (rightfully) regards the choices of its heroine with respect and empathy. But its picture of sex work as an easy out, devoid of any real danger, feels like a simplistic fantasy.

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 setting is rife with metaphoric potential, and it is here that Chen falters as a director.

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

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.

These are familiar, even hackneyed themes, which make the film’s relentless theatrics feel gratuitous and somewhat exhausting. Style overpowers substance, though Poe’s fantastic eye for composition and Clemons’s vivacious screen presence are undeniable.

It’s a pity for both Salma and Basuki, whose expressive faces convey depths of feeling that the script and direction cannot quite match.

Too sentimental in its final act, “The Donut King” doesn’t quite manage to connect the dots between Ngoy’s financial troubles and the voracious capitalism that enabled his rise. The result is a cheery portrait of immigrant entrepreneurship that lacks political punch.

The film needs more facts and fewer flourishes, but its closing turn to documentary footage, comprising brief snippets of interviews with Hasna’s family, is too little, too late.

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.

The elaborate ruses of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm left me neither entertained nor enraged, but simply resigned.

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.

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

If the unremarkableness of the moments captured in Moon Frye’s footage is refreshing, it also makes for a somewhat insipid film.

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.