Guy Lodge

Rather than taking a detached anthropological tour of the community, Bolognesi lets the Yanomami present themselves in their own words and on their own terms, thus enlivening everything from their mealtimes to their mythology.

Agnostically observant in its approach to spiritual matters, but more devout in its quiet celebration of human compassion, this film’s most complicated lines of inquiry largely play out on the young, unformed face of its protagonist Thomas — impressively played by breakthrough star Anthony Bajon.

The Human Voice, in all its delicious absurdity and kitsch extravagance, ties into the concerns of emotional abandonment and disrupted communication that have long run through his [Almodóvar's] more ostensibly serious works.

It’s a script and a production tightly built around its performers, both superb individually, but most importantly, warmly attentive to each other on screen, and capable of sharing a silence.

Rampantly horny and unapologetically silly, Will-o’-the-Wisp appeals to more primal desires and thought processes in its audience, even as it repurposes a Greta Thunberg speech or references the racially charged work of 18th-century Portuguese painter José Conrado Roza.

Tsemel’s hard demands on her family and co-workers alike are kept in view: “Advocate” isn’t a bland hagiography, but a textured nonfiction character study of complicated heroism. You can’t challenge the system, after all, without being a bit challenging yourself.

Substantial ideas underpin all the flippant historical cosplay, as Bezinović — himself a Croatian — ponders D’Annunzio’s reputation on either side of the Italo-Croatian border, and in turn the long-term societal effects of failed despots being either romanticized or forgotten entirely.

In this hard, unblinking film, even a moral victory feels like defeat.

Just as Niccol’s narrative structure is at once fraught and immaculate in its escalation of ideas and character friction, so his arguments remain ever-so-slightly oblique despite the tidiness of their presentation.

This is a predominantly observational affair, marked by unusual tenderness and human interest, shot with a camera that feels all but invisible to its subjects — belying the director’s delicate, precise approach to light and framing.

Faith is as disciplined and intriguingly opaque as the men and women it studies, attempting to unlock the nature of the group through mesmeric observation of routine and ritual.

Nobody is exactly who they appear to be in “When Fall is Coming,” but Ozon’s nimble, perceptive little film takes that as a given: When winter and mortality are beckoning, the past only counts for so much.

Death isn’t an ending in this achingly funny-sad film, just an anxiety passed between loved ones.

It knows the fragility of quiet, which is sometimes the sound of inner peace, and sometimes, per that Prévert poem, the echoing unrest of an empty space.

The film demonstrates its director’s characteristic nose for strong material and knack for gripping, straightforward storytelling.

Bone Tomahawk may seem over-indulgent at 132 minutes, yet it’s the wayward digressions of Zahler’s script — navigated with palpable enjoyment by an expert, Kurt Russell-led ensemble — that are most treasurable in a film that commits wholeheartedly to its own curiosity value.

The filmmaking is muscular and immersive, with athletic camerawork and ringing sound design keeping us in the stressed headspace of its young protagonist throughout.

Spare and pared-back in all respects ranging from performance to its clean, airily-lensed aesthetic, After Love carries bulky baggage with an elegant lightness, leaving its audience with further unpacking to do.

Faya Dayi is predominantly a mood piece that seeks to evoke the leaf’s own perception-altering properties.

Inspired by the life and roots of her children’s father, Serraille’s original screenplay embeds tacit, national-scale socioeconomic commentary in its intimate domestic story, though smartly avoids making blunt symbols of its sharp, specific characters.

Beautifully written and performed by the director and real-life BFF Kyle Marvin, Covino’s film gets precisely the balance of dependency and denial that keeps a bad bromance afloat.

Narrative and reality clash, tussle, and are eventually rendered indistinguishable in a witty, tortured puzzle picture — one in a growing subgenre of hybrid inquiries into the nature and limits of performance, which is not to say there’s anything quite like it out there.

It’s a simple but stirring tale, lent character by the boys’ endearingly eager telling and atmospheric texture by Coker’s inspired visual interpretation.

I Was at Home, But… works as a mood piece in the truest sense of the term: once you stop trying to logically assemble the narrative and submit instead to its clashing, enveloping currents of feeling, they form a persuasive story of their own.

The poignancy of Super Happy Forever lies in its unseen tensions, its negative spaces, and the ellipsis of five years where its characters assumed they had all the time in the world to recreate this level of happiness.

Me Captain is surprisingly classical in construction and style, wisely guiding our attention away from its sure directorial touch and toward the story at hand — pieced together by a small army of screenwriters and collaborating contributors from first-hand migrant accounts.

The ensemble commits to the premise with utmost gravity and conviction, enabling our belief in even the most improbable interpretations of its core enigma.

The alternately playful and elegiac Stories We Tell is wholly of a piece with her fiction work, and just as rewarding.