Lovia Gyarkye

The movie functions mostly as personal testimony — a riveting, if too often searching, autobiography of a figure whose political transformation is haunted by narrative inconsistencies.

Isolation, emotional distance and (mis)communication are all on display in Love Life, though these subjects are approached with a disorienting but welcome lightness, underlining the absurdity of family life.

Liman flexes his stylish direction, especially during the bloody confrontations.

No Sleep Till does a particularly fine job of portraying an eerie kind of climate adaptation, one in which people acquiesce to their fate in the face of the elements. That’s especially true of the families for whom the idea of evacuating doesn’t seem to cross their mind.

It’s an introspective portrait of how grief forces Maron, who spent a career metabolizing his feelings into cantankerous jokes, to finally confront his emotions.

Davies Jr. deftly connects the broken promises of the nation state with the fragility of the family at the center of his story. It’s in these final scenes of this impressive debut that he displays his full promise as a filmmaker.

Rare is the reflection on Black cinema that even tries to address all these critical points. Still, it makes digestion, especially on the first watch, overwhelming. Is That Black Enough for You?!? is layered and informative but, like a scholarly thesis, requires a bit of work to unpack. It’s a challenge worth accepting.

If making a film is challenging under fortunate circumstances, one can only imagine the obstacles faced by filmmakers trying to survive annihilation.

The film aims to inspire action and stave off despair with a reminder that the most powerful tool younger generations can wield is their imagination.

The feature is a visual poem, an enveloping four-stanza ode to experiences shared by a man and his daughters.

The artist’s charm is never more apparent than in the final section of Apolonia, Apolonia, in which we hear Glob and Apolonia’s phone conversations. Apolonia is no longer just a subject but a confidant. She has pulled not only Glob but us, too, into her orbit.

Mars One revels in the lives of its characters, taking a leisurely and scenic route to understanding their dreams and realities.

As Santosh closes in on the suspect, who has absconded for another town, Suri’s film embraces the nail-biting aesthetics — dark and shadowy locales, heart-racing music — of a classic procedural. This assured sense of direction coupled with controlled performances make Santosh a compelling drama. But it’s Suri’s screenplay that renders the film immersive.

An appreciation for grief’s minor moments coupled with a striking visual language elevate this slender drama. Runarsson is attuned to the details of loss and recognizes the narrative power of these instances. He lingers where others might cut, hordes what, at first, seems disposable and homes in on the familiar long enough to render it uncanny.

In this way Across the Spider-Verse gets even more serious about recreating the experience of reading a comic book. The animations are not just striking, but incredibly absorbing in each new dimension.

One of Them Days, produced by Issa Rae, is the kind of big-laughs, mid-budget theatrical comedy that used to be more common; it’s a shame TriStar scheduled a January release, because the film had the potential to be a summer hit. Its two charismatic leads alone make it worth seeing in a theater, surrounded by a crowd primed for a good time.

Collaborating again with The Unknown Country cinematographer Andrew Hajek, Maltz plays with close-ups and other snug camera angles to make viewers co-conspirators in Jazzy’s adventures. There’s an endearing clumsiness to the film, too, reflecting the awkward pauses and missteps of real life.

The film is not merely an observation of aging. It is also about how this process echoes the emotional dramas of adolescence, and Friedland liberates the story of older adults from the confines of melancholy.

Through a pointed script and propulsive storytelling, Moratto smartly makes the stakes of living within such a perverse system clear.

The Phoenician Scheme tethers the filmmaker’s existential interests (the unfettered power of the billionaire class, unchecked greed and environmentalism) to the kind of poignant humanistic narrative that’s been missing from his latest offerings.

What’s nice about Migration is how, between the comedic bits and tangential adventures, it never loses sight of the lessons embedded in the Mallards’ story.

Wolff (Hereditary) impresses, deftly modulating his performance so we can’t land too easily in one emotional camp — excessive sympathy or complete ire.

Not only does it offer a damning lesson about how the United States abandons its veterans, but it tries, with honesty and feeling, to honor a man who just wanted to survive.

Charlie Polinger opens his thrilling and uneasy directorial debut feature The Plague with an arresting sequence that quickly establishes the haunting undertones of this adolescent psychological thriller.

Despite its subject matter, Playground is not a call to action masked as a film. It’s a gripping work of observation more concerned with identifying patterns, teasing out motivations and laying bare the reality of how we come to relate to one another.

What makes Twinless special and surprisingly compassionate is how this director handles grieving characters.

There’s a satisfaction to hearing Blume, a sharp woman with a winking sense of humor, talk about her path to writing. Her meandering trajectory toward the medium and her challenging journey to harnessing her craft are a refreshing contrast to the contemporary system of publishing, which rewards the young, gifted and confessional.

American Fiction is smart and, thanks to its fine cast, has genuine heart.