Glenn Kenny

The mostly low-key mode of Nowhere Special is the right one. Norton is spectacular, but little Lamont delivers one of those uncanny performances that doesn’t seem like acting, and makes you feel for the kid almost as much as his onscreen parent does.

Mr. Kore-eda, whose most noteworthy family dramas include “Still Walking” (2009) and “Like Father, Like Son” (2014), works in a quiet cinematic register, and the slightest error in tone could upend the whole enterprise. Slow-paced, sad, rueful and sometimes warmly funny, After the Storm is one of his sturdiest, and most sensitive, constructions.

Despite the urgency of the situation the musicians face, when they’re not doing their work, the movie is quiet, observant, taking in the austere beauty of the land and the people.

Morrison, who is the producer, director and editor of this strangely intoxicating film, is a cinematic investigator of the first stripe.

The movie is a fascinating portrait that is if anything too brief.

Do’s tale is resolutely earthbound. He uses animation as an interrogation into the practice of fictional depiction derived from actual atrocities.

In its poetic, elliptical, concise way, this film makes a grand statement: The black mother is the mother of life itself. And the gaze directed at the black faces and bodies in “Black Mother” is not a male gaze, or a documentarian’s gaze. It is a gaze of love.

Isadora’s Children is made with such unusual delicacy that it may elude the grasp of audiences who demand things such as, well, plot. But its sensitivity is rare and valuable.

While the movie steers around the details of how post-fame Sacks became something of a brand, it beautifully presents a portrait of his compassion and bravery.

Possessor is a shocking work that moves from disquieting to stressful with ruthless dispatch.

There’s such a disconcerting rush of lush imagery and action in the first 40 minutes or so of “Invisible Life” that one is apt to wonder whether there’s any kind of focused narrative. But the casual misdirection is setting the viewer up for an emotional kill.

This is not an objective film. It is a polemic, a work of activism, a challenge to the viewer.

It took a while for this digressive movie to get its hooks in me, but once it did, Sorry Angel didn’t let go.

Each individual shot creates a frisson of desolation that resonates far beyond the facile irony suggested by the movie’s title.

It’s a film of scenes rather than of one unified narrative, but each scene is a showcase for the magnificent talents of Ms. Balibar, a multifaceted performer of spectacular magnetism and intelligence.

The filmmaker has what seems like a torrent of anecdotes and attendant ideas to impart, but the movie never feels rushed.

While the movie has allegorical resonances with the political and human rights disasters of 20th-century Romania, by the end, its surfaces, while remaining superficially unimpressive, open up as the film moves from epistemological speculation onto a plane of mysticism. This relatively short film contains worlds.

It’s very fresh and often very funny stuff, communicated in a direct, unforced style.

Always Shine is a deft, assured movie with a sly self-reflexive undercurrent containing commentary on sexism and self-idealization that’s provocative, and sometimes disturbing.

Wonder is that rare thing, a family picture that moves and amuses while never overtly pandering.

Burning Cane is short and difficult. It does not aspire to entertain. Its realism is shot through with a constant dull ache.

Superbly acted and confidently shot, Who We Are Now delivers substantial dramatic pleasures while posing pertinent questions.

The substantial pleasures of the movie are supplemented by the gratification of seeing an emerging talent with concerns far outside the conventional indie realm asserting himself with such authority.

The tragedies in this family’s life are nearly constant, but Mr. Matuszynski approaches them with a tone that’s matter-of-fact while also partaking in the particular wry irony that has been a hallmark of Polish cinema since the early 1960s.

There is gentle comedy here, and a real rooting interest deriving from Ms. Zhang’s committed, never-a-false-note performance. The film’s unusual perspective makes it a distinctive and potentially enriching experience.

In its alternating of Parvana’s day-to-day struggle with the tale she tells herself, the movie doesn’t promote bromides about stories and storytelling transcending reality. Rather, it demonstrates that the way imagination refracts reality can provide not only solace but also real-world strategy.

This is a work that looks as if it were evolving even as portions of it were completed. That’s entirely appropriate. For all its rough edges, Personal Problems retains a vitality and an integrity that practically bounds off the screen.

The movie’s inconclusiveness is the source of its appeal; Zombi Child is fueled by insinuation and fascination.

Asako proceeds from a premise that flirts with the mystic, but Hamaguchi executes it with elegantly rendered realism. (It is adapted from a 2010 novel by Tomoka Shibasaki.) The result is a picture that is simultaneously engaging and disconcerting.

The ingenuity of the movie’s structure is stimulating and delightful, but there’s one aspect of “Hill” that some may find a trifle exasperating: Even more than any of the sad-sack men who populate the director’s other movies, Mori is kind of a stiff.

[A] heady, fascinating movie.

Enthusing over an effect Bergman used in his great 1983 “Fanny and Alexander,” the director Olivier Assayas concludes, “Art defines truth.” Just about every minute of this movie shows how that’s true.

The Cordillera of Dreams is a beautiful film about nightmares that have yet to end.

Moorhead and Benson don’t overlook the more amusing aspects of the scenario . . . . And the duo deliver shocks, scares and a resonant payoff.

Tsai’s motives for stretching his shots become clear after a while, and the film builds an uncanny mood.

An all-star roster of interviewees, including the luminaries Mel Tormé and Buddy Rich, contributes to an unfailingly entertaining saga.

While some institutions are legitimate, Shuffle, a shocking and confounding new documentary directed by Benjamin Flaherty, lays out in painstaking detail the collusion between moneymaking rehab treatment centers, double-dealing insurance entities and predatory social-media “scouts” who make sure cash flows into corporate pockets while the sick and suffering never get well.

The movie, beautifully shot and acted, earns its ultimate sense of hope by confronting real heartbreak head-on, and with compassion.

The variable incongruities of Glory give it a queasy power uncommon in contemporary cinema. It’s the feel-bad movie of the spring.

While Broomfield’s films often take a sardonic, close-to-cynical tone, “Marianne & Leonard” is admiring, affectionate and a little awe-struck.

Aslani pulls story threads together with an elegant moving camera that doesn’t immediately give up all the secrets a scene may contain.

The often-tense mother-daughter dance of recrimination and forgiveness is spectacularly acted.

The movie’s imagery is consistently unearthly; its pacing has a magisterial weight. Call it pulp Tarkovsky, maybe.

Cory Michael Smith’s performance as Adrian is a quiet marvel in a movie that’s superbly acted all around. The film’s intimate consideration of still-enormous issues is intelligent, surprising and emotionally resonant.

Mr. Gomis’s cinematic style is spectacularly multifaceted.

Almodóvar’s sense of cinema design — the décor simulates a luxe apartment and lays it bare as a soundstage illusion — is acutely keyed to Swinton’s performance here, which projects mercurial emotion with Swiss watch precision.

Redoubt reaches for intimations and apprehensions of the cosmic.

Ms. Huppert’s presence — steady, warm, thoughtful but with a casual air — keeps the entire enterprise classically comedic.

Klein weaves all these moments into a story one could call spectacularly earthbound.

The bohemian paradise of this environment had a dark side, and the movie doesn’t give it short shrift. Nevertheless, a genuine exhilaration holds throughout.

The movie looks like a 40-year-old mix of talking-head and archival footage. What makes it extraordinary is the story it tells of an uncanny musician and his beautiful playing and songs.

Double Lover, which Mr. Ozon “freely adapted” from the Joyce Carol Oates book “Lives of the Twins,” spins its influences into a frenzy that ultimately reveals the story to be very much its own thing. And a crazy, and eventually strangely moving, thing it is. As elaborate as its visuals are, the movie is also intimate.

The result is an emotionally wringing film, equally effective in the narrative and tone-poem departments.

Whatever “Flipside” ultimately “means,” it’s ninety minutes well, and often amusingly and movingly, spent.

This is a beautifully conceived and executed chamber comedy/drama with tragedy at its core. Potter’s characters are committed to a better world even as they make their own modes of living completely dysfunctional.

The result is a kind of very faux documentary style, which, along with the subject matter, has suggested to some the influence of the BBC television series "The Office." Von Trier says he's never seen an episode, and I believe him.

The film’s final scene is both charming and hilarious and puts a delightful ribbon on top of what the film’s opening so sneakily established.

If this is in fact merely a longer Simpsons episode, it's a damn good Simpsons episode.

It’s a 21st-century version of "The Sting" for these so far rather unkind and ungentle times.

The movie belongs to Wood, who creates a unique portrait of a girl hesitating at the threshold of womanhood; she's smarter, more attuned, and more spiritually ambitious than those around her, but also too decent and loyal to break from the world she knows-and too unformed to have a grasp of what she wants outside of that world. It's fantastic work.

This is one of the most satisfying films, genre or otherwise, of the year.

Evil Does Not Exist is something different, starting out as a character study cum eco parable and morphing into an enigmatic nightmare.

While “A Son” has allegorical parables with the political evolution of not just Tunisia but the whole MENA region, the first rate-acting, the very credible environments, and the straightforward, tight-as-a-drum direction make it hum with a directness that few social problem movies can muster.