Helen T. Verongos

The lack of local color notwithstanding, the movie more than fulfills its promise to unsettle and to incite shivers — and it doesn’t quit.

The delight of Echo in the Canyon is in the delicious details its subjects impart.

It’s rare that a director’s first feature film, accomplished with an ensemble of nonprofessional actors, proves to be as quietly powerful as Jean-Bernard Marlin’s simple but lyrical “Shéhérazade.”

Mouret manipulates our sympathies effortlessly as the story zigzags its way from there to its ultimately surprising and quite satisfying resolution.

In Grace’s stifling house, the electricity is dicey and the internet nonexistent. There isn’t a shower or extra bed. Just the third-world glaze of sweat and privation you see everywhere in this richly endowed land of economic imbalance, an atmosphere the film, Faraday Okoro’s feature debut, captures expertly.

Painful to watch and uncomfortably intimate at times, perhaps by design, It’s Not Yet Dark could have been very dark indeed.

A surplus of wisdom and benevolence radiates from The Last Dalai Lama?.

Birthright: A War Story packs a powerful message: that reproduction has become perilous for women in America.

It conveys a satisfying, informative portrait of a well-read man who looks back at his life, good decisions and bad, with wisdom and intelligence.

While any explanation of this fraught phenomenon feels like an oversimplification, Mr. Dotan sorts out the forces and personalities that shaped the movement.

In the film, a student of Mr. deLeyer’s recalls some of his advice: “Throw your heart over the top, and your horse will follow.” Harry & Snowman makes you want to do the same.

Will fluffy, poodlelike chickens replace cats on the internet? Maybe not, but these chicken people, with deep connections to their birds, make for a fun and at times astonishing film.

A parable about the contagious nature of corruption and the curse of dirty money, 1000 Rupee Note asks, How valuable is a windfall to people who live their lives largely without money?

Broader than it is deep, Equal Means Equal still drills down into enough specific issues to shock us afresh.

What Ms. Tragos succeeds in illustrating is that if you take away the signs and listen to the stories, there is little difference between women on opposite sides of the debate — at least in the region she covers.

The title, by the way, is Trinidadian slang for being disoriented or dizzy or just a little bit crazy, possibly because of romance. And you might go bazodee over that contagious soca beat.

Humor creeps in from strange sources, including a seller of funeral packages and a march through a Paris graveyard. And while not every motivation is clear, subtext isn’t everything in a movie as complex and satisfying as this one.

For everyone who ever had a close call as an adolescent and kept it from the grown-ups, King Jack will hit you where you live. The same for everyone who’s been pummeled by a bully or been left vulnerable by releasing a graphic selfie into the textosphere.

There is a delicate beauty to this movie and its visual composition.

A clever film written and directed by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia, H. keeps the viewer watchful, waiting for it to splatter into a familiar horror plot or spin off into an alien abduction.

The director, Andrew Nackman, in making a super-mainstream film, leans so far toward the feel-good end of the spectrum that he forgoes the opportunity to make something that is more real, more fraught, more complex.

Overall, the arguments are persuasive, the message from the birds powerful, and the film a rich and satisfying call to action that is presented with some novel ideas for how to restore the ecological balance.

Gentle, coaxing questions from off camera draw out their stories.