Jordan Mintzer

The film playfully critiques certain Muslim customs, but never in a demeaning way, while providing a heartwarming coming-of-age narrative that’s a tad predictable.

By its very existence — and in what it reveals about the IDF’s killing, maiming and wounding of Palestinian civilians over the past few years — the film is a condemnation both of Netanyahu’s far-right war machine and the U.S. government’s steadfast support of it.

Flamingo goes overboard on the surrealism at times, but by ultimately focusing on how Lidia comes to terms with the reality of the AIDS epidemic, it delivers a solid emotional blow by the end.

The Friend’s House Is Here chooses to emphasize love, courage, community. It zeroes in on the sacrifices its characters make for each other, the community that builds around them, the resilience that keeps them going in the face of fear and oppression.

Filipiñana could have benefited from a little more story and a little less contemplation. But some of its images remain embedded in the memory.

Understanding the life and work of Luis Valdez is a way to broaden one’s understanding of what it means to be American, perhaps now more than ever. Watching this enlightening and entertaining documentary is a good way to start.

Directed by first-timer Ben Jacobson, who also plays one of the leads, the film offers up nothing all that new under the sun, with a caper plot that’s too off-the-wall to be convincing. And yet Bunny successfully channels a downtown vibe that seems to be on the verge of extinction.

Sleekly if routinely made, this classic whodunit is ultimately more interesting for what it reveals about the filmmaker’s homeland than for the mystery it unfolds.

The director never sugarcoats life in the Big Apple for Lu, his family, nor for the rest of the striving migrant underclass. There are no moments of triumph or dreams coming true, no holding hands and cheering together at a Yankees game.

At a time when people feel obliged to choose which side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict they stand on, Holding Liat takes a thoughtful middle ground that exposes the situation without exploiting it.

It’s definitely an over-the-top finale, and not everything ultimately seems real in King Ivory. But what makes Swab’s latest rise above your average drug thriller is how he tries to make each moment feel like it’s been drawn from a certain reality.

What’s most striking about Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, whose title is how Hassona describes venturing outdoors when she can be killed at any moment, is the way it forces the viewer to experience the blunt repetition of death and devastation faced by its central figure.

Not everything on screen ultimately works here, with certain characters and situations more credible than others. But the director manages to spin a clever modern-day morality tale mixing art, social class and big bucks.

The film feels at times like Terrence Malick meets Hayao Miyazaki for tykes, combining playful subjectivity with surreal flights of fancy. But it also maintains a narrative throughline that’s simple enough for any kid to follow, showing how its titular heroine literally emerges from her bubble to discover the pleasures and dangers of real life.

At times the movie feels so raw and unedited, it’s as if Loktev dumped all her footage onto the table without shaping it into a definitive cut. Perhaps a leaner two-hour version would have yielded something more dynamic, though the point of My Undesirable Friends isn’t to entertain us, but to capture every detail of a democratic movement that was doomed to fail.

A searing and detailed chronicle of murder, bigotry and robbery on a massive scale that also marks the director’s first feature-length documentary.

The Ice Tower doesn’t grip you as much as it asks you to gaze at its hazy, nightmarish imagery, and either fall under its sway — or not.

Enyedi is a master stylist who knows how to create a certain mood, mixing visual poetry with deadpan humor, and big ideas with quotidian foibles, in a film that explores our mysterious relationship with both the green world and one another.

Most romantic dramas go from meet-cute to hooking up to some kind of major dilemma, but The Sun Rises on Us All heads more or less in the opposite direction.

Time stands still and leaps across the epochs in Below the Clouds, which reveals how much our world has been transformed over the millennia, while also remaining the same.

Remake is certainly a movie about memory, especially bad memories, but in a Proustian sense it’s a movie in search of lost time — both the time McElwee spent with his son and the time slipping away as the director and his peers grow old and die.

Camus’ formidable antihero may be lost to his own demons, as well as to the demons of colonialism, but Ozon boldly suggests that the memory of his Algerian victim may live on as a harbinger of what’s to come — that is, of a time when rebels like Meursault no longer exist, in a country finally free of them.

The Smashing Machine’s greatest attribute may be the way much of it doesn’t feel fake at all.

Megalopolis, the film, may not be lots of fun to sit through, but its making-of, Megadoc, is a blast, offering a rare inside glimpse at a major movie artist at work.

Matarrese may be capturing a tiny utopia in one public hospital in northern Italy, but his movie leaves us with the hope that, sooner than later, such a place may not be so unique.

Shot in grainy 16mm to better capture the mood of the epoch, Broken Voices keeps its drama grounded in the social and cultural realities of its time. Provaznik coaxes strong performances from the young cast, whether in their chorus rehearsals or behind the scenes.

We don’t always know what, exactly, we’re watching in Architecton, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is how the movie offers us a new way of seeing — not only seeing our planet of stone and cement, of rocks and ruins, but seeing movies in general.

Diciannove is unflinchingly honest about what it’s like to be 19, and, for the most part, totally lost. And Tortorici’s insistence on capturing that feeling while avoiding the usual narrative tropes is what makes his film both fascinating and somewhat impenetrable.