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.

The real account of Robert Freegard might have been unbelievable. Its dramatization, however, is preposterous.

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.

It’s a stylized spectacle, and the effects can feel discordant. Conceição eventually chips through the horror genre enamel to expose a message about the futility of war, but the tale’s miscellany of moods dulls its ultimate power.

The utility of an energetic character study of depraved opioid kingpins is questionable. But the documentary unspools with enough style and spark to engage.

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.

This is a hermetic story, but one wishes that Siev had balanced its coziness with acuity.

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.

Brazen occasionally scratches the same itch as does a cop procedural, or a Lifetime drama so formulaic you foresee every beat.

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 director, Luis Ortega, doesn’t give much reason to care about Remo’s conflict — the protagonist’s catatonia inspires the same in the viewer — and instead exhausts his efforts on a mannered blankness of style and mood.

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.

The engine of this movie is snark, and Dever, overtaxed with carrying the comedy, brings a dauntlessness to the role, even during more daft moments.

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

While its salute to the artists flicks at the cynical side of their industry, it is less a probing profile than a backstage pass for fans of the band (a.k.a. Blinks) old and new.

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.

It’s a middling entry into the biographical sports movie genre, and the director, Ash Avildsen, cannot resist pummeling his audience with a simplistic girl-power message.

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.

Playing With Sharks would like to position Valerie as both intrepid diver and valiant activist, but with its focus on thrills and gills, the film goes light on the context needed to reconcile these two identities.

In spite of the movie’s tropes, Haapasalo clearly understands that, when you’re young, desire can feel confusing or gratifying, thrilling or overwhelming. In her snapshot of contemporary girlhood, Haapasalo contains all of the above — making the movie an affecting achievement that never feels less than loving.

A tender tale, The Starling Girl twirls through a spate of clichés — many surround Jem’s relationship to her alcoholic father, Paul (Jimmi Simpson) — but sticks the landing thanks to Parmet’s rapt attention to the shifting desires of her central character.

Grooving through the decades, this entertaining documentary aspires to prove that the Bee Gees were more than a hitmaker for disco nightclubs. Rather, Barry, Maurice and Robin were master songwriters and chameleons, continually reinventing themselves to harmonize with the times.

It is a compliment that A Secret Love, which runs under an hour and a half, could stand to be longer, with an expanded portrait of Terry and Pat’s early life as a couple.

Expressive visuals and evocative scenes, including one involving an overactive meerkat, make Left-Handed Girl a memorable family affair. It’s only when the film introduces one too many social realist tropes . . . that the melodrama grows unwieldy.

This sweeping, stagy movie sags and drags, never quite able to shake the weight of its own loftiness.

Girls State endears, but it also leaves viewers with the sense that, for a film about young women eager to take on the world’s challenges, the movie could stand to tackle a few more.

Changing the Game could have gone further, analyzing how fairness in sports is a myth to begin with. But the movie isn’t interested in rewriting the rules; it would rather introduce us to the brave young people who are.

In her first narrative feature, Niasari, who based the story in part on her own experiences, demonstrates an astounding control of pacing and mood.

By avoiding complexity, Rising Phoenix preserves its inspiring mood, but offers only a platform for champions who already dominate the arena.

What begins as an optimistic piece of advocacy eventually veers into something more complex, ambivalent and even frantic.

Here is a movie notably unafraid to manifest the weirdest of the weird, no matter what the Mr. Moolahs of the world have to say.

Williams, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is an expert orchestrator of naturalism. The trouble is that lucha libre, built on glitz, is anything but naturalistic. The self-assured freedom Saúl channels in bed never makes its way into scenes in the ring, which tend to tire when they should dazzle.

The best that Locked Down has to offer, at least while we remain in the throes of a deadly crisis, is a window into a luxurious space to quarantine.

The trouble with Reptile is that this impressive moment-to-moment control does not extend to the contours of the broader story, which the writers overstuff with clumsy twists and contrived devices.

That marketing campaigns are built on fallacies isn’t exactly revelatory, but in pairing his excavation of the diamond myth with new inquiries into how the industry is evolving (and how it’s stagnating), Kohn strikes on something valuable.

Throughout, the film unabashedly adopts Putnam’s doctrine: Become a joiner or democracy is doomed. Some of the film’s points feel simplistic, and questions linger.

It is the exquisitely relatable messiness of this exceptional family tale that lingers.

In his first feature, Kandhari makes use of morbid humor and expressive imagery, including stop-motion effects. He rarely relies on dialogue and favors a fuzzier plot, which leaves the story with a shapeless and sometimes confusing midsection.

Because she lacks a conception of colonialism, Davidtz sometimes struggles to negotiate the film’s fidelity to her point of view with a more complete picture of the war.

Raim is interested in how Jewison sought to preserve the story’s essence while making creative updates, and in doing so “Fiddler’s Journey” touches on issues of Jewish representation but does not interrogate them.

Rodgers, a sheepish and at times bewildered guide, seems ill-equipped to reconcile Adams’s reflections with his admiration for Smith and “Chasing Amy,” and instead pivots the story to focus on his own personal and professional evolution.

Narrative beats aren’t what make East of Wall worth watching. That would be the people — particularly Porshia and her jubilant pals, whose skills in the saddle leave a lasting impression.

The Smartest Kids in the World aspires to offer a study of teaching methods worldwide, but the documentary (on Discovery+) contains little rigor. It’s a dippy lecture in motion.

Affecting, sincere, and most importantly socially astute ... it’s one of the sharpest and most promising first films I’ve seen in some time.

Even during more analytic or crusading sections, the documentary’s mood never strays from inspirational.

Here is a documentary that invites us to delight in the unexpected pairing of a famed funny lady and a hunky musician — but without analysis or nuance. Better to flip on a few “I Love Lucy” reruns instead.

Lamont and Singleton effortlessly mix the silly with the sincere, and although “One of Them Days” favors razzing over heart-to-hearts, our belief in this pairing never wavers. For that, hats off to SZA and especially Palmer, who lights up the screen with starry zeal.

Though thin on story, the film (streaming on Mubi) is a majestic vision. But most captivating are the settings.

Frías de la Parra is thoughtful and precise in conveying the cultural identity of these young people, and their spirit pulses through the story.

Conventional but genuine, Metal Lords comprehends the riot of adolescent emotions and the many ways teenagers manage them.

The film’s grand achievement is that it positions its subject as a mediator between humans and the natural world. Life cycles on, and if we make the right choices, ruin can become regrowth.

Bunny is a New York movie that eschews realism but still brims with authentic affection, and in doing so, bursts with life.

A finely gradated study of race and masculinity in the age of Trump, Tyrel is also an engrossing portrait of the revealing power of language.

Seeking Mavis Beacon still goes down smoothly, at least until its conclusion; while other films tie up too neatly, this one could use a bow at all. It helps that Jones and Ross are clever and likable guides.

This implication that virility trumps effeteness is, amid an otherwise straightforward comedy, an uncomfortably regressive way to tell the story of how people vie for power in hard times.

Any genuine feeling emanates from Lily. Ferreira pitches herself into the trite story line with enthusiasm, and her verve breathes life into even the most leaden lines.

While DaCosta’s intelligence as a writer and director makes Hedda a standout film, her penchant for play makes it a delightful one.

A tale of romance and revenge that culminates in a shootout, The Dead Don’t Hurt is not a total misfire. There are moments of excitement, and the film’s semi-nonlinearity allows for a few midpoint surprises about characters we thought we knew.

The film’s biggest letdown lies in its cursory tour of who Hutchins was apart from her final hours. Despite testimony from Hutchins’s friends that repeatedly references her artistry, Mason rarely incorporates clips of Hutchins’s cinematography outside “Rust.”

No Sleep Till is an understated — and somewhat sleepy — film. Its mood of boredom tinged with dread sometimes verges on outright listlessness.

Despite its foundation in reality, Radical is as by the books as it gets.

God’s Creatures is ultimately a movie about the collision between a mother’s fidelity and her moral conscience, and Watson is terrific at telegraphing how these instincts grind against each other to terrifying ends.

The quiet candor with which Hannam addresses issues of masculinity, and how it intersects with an Indigenous and queer identity, elevates this otherwise conventional story.

There is charm in the film’s allusions to New York City indie filmmaking, like the crew member who fibs that he’s shooting a mayonnaise commercial. But that specificity does not extend to Simon and Bruce’s bond, which consists of parallel play or the odd story about getting too stoned.

The American dream gets a quirky wardrobe upgrade in Idiotka, a lightweight but winning comedy that feels like a Netflix movie’s indie cousin.

If the dearth of character development is a gag, Diciannove doesn’t offer much of a punchline. But Tortorici’s filmmaking is stylish enough to make even the slipperiest sequences pop.

We learn precious little about the personal lives of these impressive individuals. When it comes to what drove them, how they associated with others or how they dealt with danger, The Deepest Breath offers only surface-level observations.

While watching Andrew Ahn’s amiable dramedy, which expands on the original premise while maintaining its central themes of found family and tolerance, one rarely questions the story’s relevance. More vitally, it lacks panache.

I Think We’re Alone Now is an exercise in ambiance, and Morano is nothing if not a brilliant conductor of tone. Favoring dreamy over dreary, the movie is a handsome and often mesmerizing addition to Morano’s expanding oeuvre.

With her feature debut, Branham exposes her hand as filmmaker, and reminds us that Being BeBe is only a snapshot of Ngwa’s persona; the real thing is so much richer.

Knappenberger does, thankfully, make space for survivors to share their own accounts, and their vulnerability lends authority to an otherwise anonymous film.

It could take a lifetime, or at least the sustained attention of an aficionado, to untangle all the lore. But the themes — solidarity and self-interest, allegiance and betrayal, love and loathing — are easy to follow. For the casual fan, the chief reason to seek out “Infinity Castle” is for its visuals, which position passionately emotive characters over impressionistic backdrops.

The film, which examines cases in which sexual assault survivors are charged with false reporting, is the rare entry whose revelations feel cogent, earned and memorable.

Cave has an imaginative sense of camera placement, and she’s an expert at inserting ultra-close-up shots at precisely the right moment to induce a laugh, gasp, or shiver. Her camera is always in service of the story, rather than distracting from it with artifice.

Its revelations about gender, sexuality and identity tend toward the obvious, and sometimes veer into the facile.

If Guadagnino sought to reflect the romance of Ferragamo’s red carpet creations, his storytelling is at once more conventional and more awkward in construction. Forget feet; defter hands might have helped.

Consistently intriguing and occasionally hilarious, the movie does not depict sex itself. Instead, the characters eat food items that become objects of titillation, lust and pleasure: the sticky goo around soybeans, chili oil sizzling in a wok.

Hollywood Stargirl could be seen as a filmmaking exercise. How do you build a story around a character who was auxiliary by design? Hart’s solutions are manifold, but her most effective one is to quash the grating altruism that drove Stargirl in the first movie.

Peren is clever to favor mischief against a backdrop of gloom, but in doing so she draws a frustrating distance between her subject and the audience.