Jeannette Catsoulis

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.

Working with grace and patience, Mr. Fernández makes the mundane captivating.

Every moment rings true, the vividly textured locations and knockabout relationships more visited than created.

Red White & Blue proves the director a bona fide storyteller with more tools in his arsenal than shock and awe.

By introducing funky licks, fancy footwork and many of his own compositions to the band's stodgy set list of jazz standards, this indomitable leader (whose declining health adds a poignant twang to the film's final scenes) instilled racial pride alongside musical competency.

Unspooling with virtually no music and a seriously unsettling sound design, Goodnight Mommy gains significant traction from small moments.

Summer 1993 is movingly understated and beautifully acted.

Dazed but far from confused, “She Dies Tomorrow” tugs at you, nagging to be viewed more than once. Eerie and at times impenetrable, the movie (which was completed pre-pandemic) presents a rapidly spreading psychological contagion that feels uncomfortably timely.

It’s the film’s sounds that really wrench. If you’ve ever wondered what a breaking heart sounds like, it’s right here in the futile warble of the last male of a species of songbird, singing for a mate that will never come.

Rich in information and dense with quiet outrage, Shraysi Tandon’s debut feature, the investigative documentary Invisible Hands, jumps into the murky and shameful world of child trafficking and forced labor.

A misbegotten blend of the futuristic and the antiquated, “Divinity” is an unintentionally comical sci-fi diatribe obsessed with beautiful bodies, bickering brothers and biblical symbolism.

The killings themselves may remain off-camera, but the movie is still an uncomfortable watch. In Jones’s smoldering performance, we see a man stretched beyond his limits, a rubber band just waiting to snap back.

Approaching weighty themes with a very light touch, Benedikt Erlingsson’s Woman at War is an environmental drama wrapped in whimsical comedy and tied with a bow of midlife soul-searching.

Detailing at once an art project and a rescue mission, a love triangle and an elaborate, outlandish bargain, the movie has a surface serenity that belies its fuming emotions.

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.

Preparation for the Next Life is all the more potent for choosing naturalism over melodrama and sensitivity over sentiment.

Infused with the D.N.A. of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Heel is an uneasy study of subjugation and transformation. Rock-solid performances from Boon and Graham maintain its precarious balance between anxiety and absurdity.

What should be a volcano of betrayal and acrimony never fully erupts; even Moore’s brief meltdown feels staged, and Isabel is so irritatingly tranquil that Williams has no room to breathe in the role.

Maintaining a strict formal allegiance to reserve and restraint, [Mr. Zobel] shapes a dreamily elegant emotional ballet from glances and gestures and subtle shifts in power.

The intimacy of the film’s images and the surprising candor of its participants are disarming: Whatever your initial response, be prepared to re-evaluate.

This soulless, sterile romantic comedy has slipped under the wire to give audiences a headache and Matt LeBlanc’s reputation a relapse.

The men refused to be deterred by institutional rigidity, political apathy or a skeptical scientific community. Their perseverance is cheering, giving the movie a brightly buoyant tone that belies the suffering at its center and renders the sometimes distracting musical score largely unnecessary.

In its cheerfully disordered way, “Housekeeping” tells us that families, like last-minute meals, must sometimes be created from whatever ingredients are at hand.

Irena Salina's astonishingly wide-ranging film is less depressing than galvanizing, an informed and heartfelt examination of the tug of war between public health and private interests.

Leaving aside its cheesy, colorized dramatizations, Jon Brewer’s movie offers a strangely bifurcated portrait.

Fragile yet resilient, We the Animals has an elemental quality that’s hugely endearing, using air and water and the deep, damp earth to fashion a dreamworld where big changes occur in small, sometimes symbolic ways.

This smart but uneven horror movie has little interest in fun.

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.