Natalia Winkelman

More than anything else, Diwan seems interested in exploring how, at many points in history, young women had no choice but to bear this particular burden alone.

This is a filmmaker able to wrest real feeling from his actors, and from his audience.

While the film centers on the comfort Anand finds with Balya and vice versa, it is also an elegantly reserved study of Anand’s grief, finding a rhythm in its scenes of ritual that allows us to ache alongside.

The movie is a dazzling triumph of animation in which you feel the filmmakers’ attention on every frame. In a revivifying turn away from the gag-a-minute, computer-generated extravaganzas clogging up the animated zoological canon, this is a work that cares most about two things: big feelings and great beauty.

A triumph of sensitivity.

If earlier segments of Middletown suggest that we’re building to something revelatory, the latter half feels a bit like a train that chugs on aimlessly after passing its destination. It’s a pleasant ride. It just lacks a little edge.

Leviticus is not a perfect horror film . . . But the film’s moody atmosphere — including a soundtrack full of clanks and bangs — makes it an enjoyably disquieting ride.

Boris Lojkine’s Souleymane’s Story, an affecting film about struggle set over two days in Paris, is the rare character study that does not only build empathy with its hero’s pain but channels its sensation.

Beauty is pleasurable, but the film’s use of evocative visuals to focus on storytelling more broadly is what makes it a quiet knockout.

The Girl With the Needle is most intriguing when it lingers in its disturbing fictions, which come to life with exceptional style.

For the most part, Black Box Diaries — per its title — is a personal testimony of a stressful journey, illustrating how survivors struggle, cope and find relief in support.

The film’s most extraordinary trick is how Pat’s presence hovers over the film. It is a feat of filmmaking and performance that a character only onscreen for a few scenes can feel truly missed by the audience. The home Pat and Angie built together aches with her absence, and so does the film.

Although it tells of a production gone ostensibly wrong, My First Film is, at its core, a movie not about upheaval but about yearning — and about how, sometimes, giving that yearning up can be a beautiful, generous act of creation all its own.

"Huesera" is the type of staggering supernatural nightmare that is as transfixing as it is terrifying.

Cinema prizes a good man making history, but this story’s heroes are manifold.

In his first feature, the writer and director Joel Alfonso Vargas takes a rather unremarkable premise and unspools it with sedulous care.

Apocalypse ’45 knows that war is hell for everyone. But it’s difficult to escape the sense that, in this film’s view of history, America is top of mind.

The result evokes an adult puppet show crossed with a graphic novel, and like the budding female identity the film untangles, the whole thing takes a little time getting used to. Once you do, it is remarkably beautiful.

The documentary tries to heighten the stakes of Talankin’s story by casting his efforts under a pall of danger, dread or distress. But these bids for drama are far less persuasive than the horrifying raw footage Talankin captures, such as one scene in which young students are coached to march down a hallway, as if preparing for battle.

In interviews, the director Patricia E. Gillespie has said that while pitching the film, people often asked whether she could cover or blur Judy’s face to shield audiences from her burns. Gillespie refused, and her resolve to train her camera on Judy gives the film an unflinching quality.

This energetic, enjoyable movie does not set out to break ground, but in putting centerstage those who are typically left on the sidelines, the movie emerges as a rousing success.

The screenplay suffers from some unevenness, but it never wavers in its empathy. It helps that Talati demonstrates a keen eye for composition.

Lovingly detailed and accented by an aching score from Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March, Monster is one of the finest films of the year, and its structure — like its circle of characters — carries secrets that can only be unraveled through patience and empathy.

While the immediacy of the storytelling may blur out precise details, it excels at building stakes.

If Lurker eventually succumbs to certain genre tropes and a handful of story bumps, it makes up for its limitations in perspicacity and the overall strength of its filmmaking.

Malta’s views are arresting, but the images Camilleri chooses would never be found in a travel brochure. In his subtle, vérité approach, he captures something special — not one man’s crisis, but a community’s culture.

In a film whose moral emphasizes the necessity of artistic freedom, there is a deceptive simplicity to this aesthetic style that makes it all the more special.

Ostrochovsky often begins shots with characters frozen in place for several seconds before they launch into action, as if they were chess pieces moved by God across the bare lines of the seminary’s crumbling stone architecture.