Jessica Kiang

To reduce a titanic struggle for survival in one of the most inhospitable climes on earth to such by-the-numbers drama is in many ways akin to standing on a jagged frozen peak, gazing across blizzard-assailed permafrost plains to crumbling white cliffs and ice shelfs beyond and thinking “Snow.”

Lê Bảo’s rich film reaches further back too, beyond the politics of globalization and migration, beyond even culture, into a pre-ethnographic past, to see us as trapped animals, paradoxically dehumanized by the sunless concrete ugliness of human civilization.

This is not, in the end, a tale of hubris brought low, or even of a tacky life staring down a long lens at a tawdry, dwindling death. Instead it’s a chilling parable about the sins of the father becoming the punishments of the son, and about the moral arc of the universe bending, across generations, toward the coldest justice imaginable.

Everything in Fassbinder’s rightly canonized movie is fake, except the emotions. In Ozon’s loving, diverting but inessential homage, everything is real except the bitter, glycerine tears.

Marie never seems particularly interested in either man except for how they are interested in her and is revealed to be so self-centered in her pursuit of amours both fou and entirely rational, that she is far less likable than Binoche’s disingenuously bright-eyed and forthright performance can account for.

Superior feels like a John Dahl movie given a “Twin Peaks” vibe on a Hal Hartley budget, with just the odd dash of Old Hollywood thrown in for good measure, like the deliberately “Rear Window”-aping, flashbulb-popping finale.

Columbus and Klein present a palimpsest of erratically overlapping perspectives. The results are untidy and unbalanced, but derive considerable energy from that eccentric approach.

It winds up several stops north of bonkers, in a finale that shoots for transgressive, psycho-biological role-reversal, but plays like 1994’s Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy “Junior” given a torture-porn makeover.

Watcher, if it has an agenda beyond being a fun, shivery, fish-out-of-water chiller, is not so much a manifesto to Believe All Women as it is a reminder to all women watching to at least believe ourselves.

The slower stretches — like the entire first hour — have a tendency to plod, which gives ample opportunity to feast your eyes on Søren Schwarzberg’s grandly gloomy production design and Manon Rasmussen’s superb, elaborate costuming, but also makes the story rather too easy to disengage from.

The thin stereotypes in Silent Night are weirdly uninteresting to observe in this ultimate pressure situation.

If its rueful, midlife nostalgia doesn’t carry quite the same current of vibrant, urgent empathy as “20th Century Women” or “Beginners,” the small, polished pebbles of wisdom it unearths are still a pleasure to observe as they’re sent skimming across the surface of a delicate, compassionate film.

The film may be called “Prayers for the Stolen,” but it is much more a heartbroken lament for the circuits that are broken when the stealing happens, and for the spaces the stolen leave behind.

An abundance of earnestness is hardly a fatal flaw in a story as innately complex and moving as this one, especially once it moves beyond its most obvious crescendo, and instead of bowing out in a note of relief and resolution, dares to re-complicate the situation.

The portrait of Palestinian identity it finally presents is so superficial and regressive that its saving grace is that it’s also very difficult to believe.

[An] aggravatingly wispy and precious film.

In Uppercase Print, the fangs of the past are sharp, but muzzled.

Wandel’s immersive, impressive debut is rigorous in its resolute focus on one little girl fighting a lonely, frightened battle for her future selfhood, in which what hangs in the balance is nothing less than the shape and measure of her developing soul.

A rather pedestrian presentation of a potentially fascinating story, Vanessa Lapa’s Speer Goes to Hollywood expands on a little-known footnote to the Hydra-headed history of the post-war fates of top Nazi lieutenants.

Tottering unsteadily between mining Wain’s vast repertoire of eccentricities for comedy and slathering them in pathos, the movie winds up so busily whimsical it forgets to actually be about anything. If you don’t know who Louis Wain was before you see it, you’ll only be fractionally more illuminated, and possibly a good deal more irritated, after.

The absorbing and entertaining Detention works well enough as a primer on a traumatic period of history, and as a story of semi-supernatural salvation for sins past, that it earns its surprisingly moving final moments, and even its heavily on-the-nose exhortation to modern-day Taiwan to remember and honor its ghosts.

Partly, the balance between gritty, true-life fidelity and pacy, exciting storytelling is achieved because in Rye, to whom Eric Kress’ warm, compassionate camera clings so doggedly, we have such a sympathetic, human protagonist.

The mechanics of the operation boggle the mind, and in presenting them so elegantly, Vasarhelyi and Chin offer more edge-of-your-seat drama than most thrillers — certainly enough to make the Hollywood version in the works from Ron Howard feel surplus to requirements before cameras have even rolled.

Craig reveals himself as perhaps the most generous actor to have inhabited the role. And not only toward the rest of the cast, but toward the very idea of Bond itself. Craig sets Bond free from the prison of forgetfulness that has previously trapped him like a caveman in ice, though the price is steep, and it remains to be seen if future installments can continue to pay it.

Perhaps the highest praise we can lavish on Fuqua’s solid, enjoyable, easily watchable remake, is that beyond the addition of Gyllenhaal, it doesn’t try to fix anything that wasn’t broken in the first place.

The gentle wisdom it contains is less to do with activist and environmentalist issues and more attuned to country, family and lifestyle choices as abstract concepts, as all the things we mean by the word “home,” which is where Akl’s heart is.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is a blast.

Merkulova and Chupov deliver the visceral aspects of this Dostoevskian tale particularly well ... But 'Captain Volkogonov Escaped' is so attuned to the physical that the more metaphysical aspects of Volkogonov’s journey are underdeveloped by comparison.