Justin Chang

The resulting genre stew is rich and flavorsome, if also somewhat chunky and uneven. The characters are thinly drawn by design, but Mendonça Filho and Dornelles know how to use the magnetism of their actors to maximum advantage.

It’s hard not to feel stirred, even moved, by the sheer improbable fact of this picture’s existence: Moment by moment, you’re held by its loony flights of lyricism and gorgeous images (shot by Caroline Champetier), and by the mix of sincerity, irony and Sondheimian dissonance that animates every sung-through line.

The screenwriter, Nicole Taylor, and the director, Tom Harper, compose their story in clean, stirring melodic lines that they return to again and again, treating Rose-Lynn’s many setbacks — as well as her small, crucial steps toward growth and self-discovery — like subtle variations on a refrain.

Is The Humans a haunted-house movie? Maybe; Karam is not above unleashing a good jump scare or two. But for all the creeping dread he summons here through sheer formal concentration, the nature of the horror he’s addressing turns out to be much harder to pin down.

Raimi’s sheer passion for his material can sometimes overwhelm the coherence of his storytelling, and his unfashionable sincerity doesn’t always mesh with the breezy quip-a-minute tone that is the Marvel enterprise’s preferred comic idiom. I mean those both as compliments.

The lines between good and evil are clearly demarcated at the outset and remain more or less fixed as the story progresses, a strategy that in no way compromises the filmmaker’s ability to mine fresh complications and surprises from his story.

The result, while fragmented by design, is a politically astute, emotionally layered examination of a violent death and its lingering psychic residue.

Somehow existing both inside and outside the moment, This Is Not Berlin is clear-eyed enough to see that rebellion has its joys as well as its limits, and that coming of age — which is to say, coming into one’s own — means learning to recognize the difference.

This deliberately paced psychological drama builds an ever-tightening knot of tension around an excellent Michael Shannon, here playing a family man slowly driven mad by apocalyptic visions that could be paranoid, prophetic or both.

The Kingmaker may end on a queasy note of alarm about the Philippines’ future, but it also reminds us that we neglect the past at our peril.

Herzog, for his part, remains firmly interested in both nature and man. His camera is enthralled by the animals that occasionally steal into the frame: a venomous spider, covered by its equally dangerous young, gets a frightening cameo. But what absorbs him most is the intense kinship that the San feel with the elephants.

Society’s rampant sexualization of preadolescent girls is one topic that Doucouré subjects to tough critical scrutiny; she’s made an empathetic and analytical movie, not an exploitative one.

Another Round itself often moves and swings like a piece of music: Staccato in its rhythms and symphonic in structure, it’s awash in Scarlatti and Schubert, bar tunes and patriotic songs, and climaxes with a jubilant blast of Danish pop/R&B. It sings, and it sparkles.

The movie, set across a broad swath of Middle America in the late 1980s, is filmed in a rougher, less polished style than Guadagnino’s Italian-set dramas (“I Am Love,” “A Bigger Splash,” “Call Me by Your Name”), but it exerts its own earthy, dreamlike pull. It casts — and sometimes violently breaks — its own lyrical spell.

Emotionally, dramatically and perhaps most of all visually (it’s worth seeing in 3D), this delightful trilogy capper is almost as generously proportioned as its cuddly warrior hero, restoring a winning lightness of touch to the saga while bringing its long-running themes of perseverance and self-knowledge to satisfying fruition.

Lelio and his co-writers have made a smart, subtle disquisition on the necessity of both skepticism and faith, with a particularly keen understanding of religion’s uses and abuses.

You brace yourself for a numbing catalog of stupidity — the title isn’t exactly encouraging — and are instead greeted by amusement, suspense and a curious aftertaste of sweetness and melancholy. You might even call it grace.

Betts, whose first feature was the absorbing monastic drama “Novitiate,” has a gift for subverting and fulfilling expectations at once, and also for turning the strictures of traditional establishments inside out.

For all the impressive authenticity of the various settings, it’s Gerry and Curtis’ continually evolving push-pull dynamic that deservedly takes centerstage here, in a picture driven far less by narrative incident than by its gently pulsing comic undercurrents and vivid contemplation of character.

To merely describe what happens in Rafiki would be to overlook its transporting sense of place, its striking visual pleasures and its credible and moving performances.

An intelligent, solidly argued and almost too-polished takedown of America’s spin factory — that network of professional fabricators, obfuscators and pseudo-scientists who have lately attempted to muddle the scientific debate around global warming — this is a movie so intrigued by its designated villains that it almost conveys a perverse form of admiration, and the fascination proves contagious.

A dazzling suite of emotions plays out within the confines of Boutefeu’s subdued, sensitive, gradually mesmerizing performance. At times she stares with laserlike focus into the camera, as if she had located the object of her scorn seated just behind the lens. Mostly she stares pensively into the middle distance, lost in the phantasms of memory.

A satirical yet sensitive portrait of life in an evangelical Christian community, Higher Ground marks a startlingly bold directing debut for actress Vera Farmiga.

Corbijn succeeds here in large part because his attention to nuance and detail so fully complements that of the German operatives at the story’s core.

The movie is a straightforward, even familiar, tale of survival and recovery, but its grave respect for the unique extremity of its protagonist’s ordeal cancels out any impulse toward exploitation. It doesn’t make the mistake of assuming that your tears are its natural entitlement, which is precisely why you might find yourself shedding a few before it’s over.

Filtering one school year through the eyes of three young instructors and a rookie administrator, this loosely scripted satire mostly steers clear of cheap shots and over-the-top gags, balancing its comic observations with a real measure of affection for teachers and students alike.

This well-acted, beautifully modulated exercise represents director Karyn Kusama’s strongest work in years, revealing an assurance of tone, craft and purpose that haven’t been in evidence since her Sundance prize-winning debut, “Girlfight.”

Soderbergh, shooting and editing under his usual pseudonyms (Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard, respectively), has a gift for satirizing corporate mundanity, and for making everyday minutiae mesmerizing. He can turn typing fingers and blinking cursors into the stuff of quietly engrossing drama.