Devika Girish

In Toofaan, the Bollywood director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra attempts — with some success — to deepen the standard-issue sports drama with sociopolitical strife ripped from Indian headlines.

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

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).

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.

Asia and Vika struggle to emerge as full-fleshed characters from the movie’s dull, blue-grey frames, while the script rushes through provocative plot turns in its bleak procession toward a wrenching conclusion.

Infinite muddles around with some wishy-washy Eastern philosophy, and has mostly charmless actors (with the exception of Ejiofor, magnetic against the odds) duel and drive while mouthing exposition that lacks even a wisp of subtext.

There’s much to unpack here, from the preponderance of Latino agents in ICE to the mental health effects of immigration, evident in Luis’s panic attacks. But the film, frustratingly, stays on the surface, settling for easy emotional moments.

White squanders the opportunity for true satire, speeding past the many topical issues kicked up by the script — police corruption, mental health, gun crime — into a feel-good conclusion that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Postema’s interlocutors respond with candid critiques, but the director’s self-flagellation feels increasingly empty — less a reckoning with neocolonialism than a toothless display of white guilt. His critical insights are thin, too.

The unfocused editing somewhat defangs the film’s urgency, but it does give a sense of the scale of the issue and the corporate greed that fuels overconsumption.

Those who disagree that abortion is akin to murder are unlikely to be persuaded, and even those on the fence might struggle to sit through the hammy acting and poor production values.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Racial injustice, economic inequities, police corruption, media ethics and foreign-policy scandals are all crammed — a bit too cursorily — into Stanley Nelson’s brisk primer on the 1980s crack epidemic.

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.

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

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.

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.

It’s fertile thematic ground, but as in most survival movies, showy feats of filmmaking take precedence over insight or revelation.

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