Jeannette Catsoulis

There’s a headlong temerity to Mr. Johnson’s style that places the dippy thrill of moviemaking front and center, revealing a director (and a character) so high on his power to misrepresent reality that a future in politics seems all but assured.

Filmed almost entirely in real time, and using a series of long, intimate takes, “The Body Remembers” is about privilege and its lack, motherhood and its absence, race and its legacy.

Unfolding in New England over four vibrantly represented seasons, "Feelings" is a small-scale wonder. Pivotal events play out in the spaces between scenes, leaving only emotional imprints that we interpret within a timeline that may not be entirely linear.

Impressively lean and rigidly controlled, “The Survivalist” achieves, at times, the primitive allure of a silent movie.

A mood poem to summer loving and sexual awakening, It Felt Like Love powerfully evokes a time when flesh is paramount, and peer behavior is the standard by which we judge our own.

Ray Meets Helen has a wistful, whimsical sophistication that has all but disappeared from movies. Filled with imaginative visuals populated by the ghosts of the gone and hopes for the future, the movie is wonderfully, magically humane.

Exquisitely captured in natural light by the cinematographer Alexis Zabé, Juan’s journey is framed by sherbet-colored houses and lemon sidewalks, dipping palm fronds and a burnished, turquoise horizon. The director calls his style "artisan cinema"; I just call it dreamy.

Only a superficial reading of The Lost Daughter would describe it as a meditation on the twin tugs of children and career. It is, instead, a dark and deeply disturbing exploration of something much more raw, and even radical: the notion that motherhood can plunder the self in irreparable ways.

Less an epic poem than a showcase for two of cinema’s finest actors, The Return is visually bleak and emotionally gripping.

Buoyed by a fully integrated soundtrack, Kati With an I delivers a lovingly personal observation of young people at a crossroads. The film's sound is not always crisp, but no matter: Kati's story is written in every vital, vérité frame.

A wonky workplace comedy that slowly shades into tragedy.

Capped by a truly lovely final shot, The Yellow Birds (the title comes from a particularly cruel Army cadence) is about unseen wounds and wasted lives. The closer we get to these young men, the closer we are to wondering how many more of these stories we can bear to hear.

The Damned is shaped as a wistful and laconic study of the minutiae of survival. Though billed as his first fiction film, it wobbles tantalizingly on a permeable line between narrative and documentary.

This gently humorous movie operates so smoothly you may not notice its subversiveness.

Raw, melancholy and unquestionably mature, Hope understands that some wounds may never be healed. Even so, it takes a brave movie to hold that stance until its very last second.

A deliciously warped wallow in misogyny, depravity and dead-eyed manipulation, Cold Fish charts the twisted alliance of two tropical-fish salesmen with baleful glee.

Playing out in six, ingeniously scrambled chapters, this headlong thriller transforms a simple cat-and-mouse premise — and maybe even a toxic love story — into an impertinent rebuke to genre clichés and our own preprogrammed assumptions.

But instead of a dignified stroll down genealogy lane, Mr. Solnicki has made a sparking, gossipy soap opera that’s riddled with emotion and stuffed with strong characters.

Woven together, these monologues of bereavement and confusion, illustrated with images so terrible they repel rational explanation, form a tapestry of human misery that's impossible to shake off.

This pull-no-punches portrait shocks and amuses with equal frequency.

At times, Jenkin’s bold, experimental style can perplex; but his vision is so unwavering and beholden to local history that his message is clear: On Enys Men, the earth remembers what the sea has taken.

Spasmodically funny, though hardly a comedy, Vulcanizadora is raw, moving and, briefly, horrifying.

The directors, Brian McGinn and Rod Blackhurst, have produced a tightly edited, coherently structured and ultimately moving reassessment that burrows beneath the lurid in search of the illuminating.

With its fastidious framing and angry-tough temperament, Loveless...earns its air of careful foreboding.

Astonishingly, this is neither as depressing nor as arm-twistingly uplifting as you might expect. Mr. DaSilva’s experience behind a camera shows in his brisk pacing, clear narrative structure and the awareness that a story of sickness needs lighthearted distractions.

Like a Ken Loach drama stripped to bare bones, The Arbor springs to life in the bright bitterness of Dunbar's prose, showcased in alfresco performances of contentious scenes from the play.

Wrapping damage and poverty in bubbles and sunshine, Kajillionaire is about intimacy and neglect, brainwashing and independence.

The focus of this bizarre Finnish fairy tale - as black as anything the Brothers Grimm could have dreamed up - is a sinister old codger who chews off ears and whose demon minion kidnaps innocent children. Ho ho no!