Neil Young

While there is no doubting the filmmakers’ admirably humanistic and progressive intentions, however, the picture itself somehow ends up less than the sum of its often-impressive parts.

A likeably offbeat and disarmingly self-aware documentary essay on how humans deal with the immutable transience of the universe, Ian Cheney’s globetrotting Arc Of Oblivion should leave a trace in the minds of receptive viewers.

Very much a collaborative affair between subject Apolonia Sokol and Danish filmmaker Lea Glob, it also functions as a snapshot of millennial creatives and their struggles to balance public and private lives amid external financial and psychological pressures.

It is a film in which, over two hours, the maverick Argentinian virtuoso quietly blows up and rebuilds the established language of cinema in challenging but ultimately exhilarating ways.

The result is an engrossing exercise in empathetic humanism, unhurried and uninflected; the various sections of the film are divided by ruminative fades to black.

It’s an offbeat combination of erudite esoterica and sensory pleasures (many of them music-related) that patient viewers may find beguiling.

Using simple means, Kang and his team take banal situations and settings — much of the action unfolds in a city-centre apartment building — and render them just eerie enough to be unsettling.

Matter Out Of Place is a typically sober, observational and engrossing work of ecological-anthropological documentary from Austrian maestro Nikolaus Geyrhalter.

The structure of The Plains is playful and idiosyncratic, rather than formalist or rigid.

It takes a little while to adjust to the film’s strong and deliberately oppressive stylistic approach, but Hinterland successfully avoids being swallowed up by its own aesthetic via the narrative’s propulsive momentum and the magnetic central performance by Muslu.

A pleasant and sometimes stimulating viewing experience.

Rising like Olympus above the general run of low-budget debut features, Israeli writer-director Oren Gerner’s Africa is a touchingly well-observed study of long-time marrieds starring the filmmaker’s own parents as lightly fictionalized versions of themselves.

Herrero Garvin and company have evidently earned the trust of Dona Olga and her customers, their film winningly emerging as warm, humanistic evocation of sisterhood against a fascinating demi-monde backdrop.

If nothing else, the period picture represents an impressive change of pace from Ostrochovsky’s hard-knock feature directorial debut.

It’s a deliciously rug-pulling affair which, like the “catfishing” protagonist — i.e. a person hiding behind a fake online persona for deceitful purposes — comes across as one thing and gradually reveals itself to be quite another.

A challenging work which punctuates taxing stretches of austere stasis with interludes of sublime beauty — including a ravishingly spectacular underwater finale — it uses a slight fable of a story as framework for some extravagant sensory stimulations.

The most sympathetic, illuminating study of domestic labor since Roma.

Of obvious interest to arthouse audiences in Cullen, Wright and Jensen's native Australia, this ambitious and stimulating glimpse into the dark abyss of creativity deserves widespread international exposure at festivals and via receptive theatrical settings.

It's an unassuming and delicate work which demands but ultimately repays close attention.

Rocky roads to romance, self-realization and adulthood are quirkily mapped in Take Me Somewhere Nice, a distinctive and ultimately quite promising debut by Bosnian-born Dutch writer-director Ena Sendijarevic.

A shaggy-seeming but carefully modulated affair, To the Ends of the Earth gradually emerges as an offbeat but persuasive investigation of culture-clashes and the potential for trans-global bridge-building.

Punctuated with moments of illumination, humor and even occasional visual flair —the opening shot executes a stately 360-degree cityscape pan from a high crane — Present. Perfect manages to retain interest despite a certain repetitiveness and some patience-taxing longueurs.

An undeniably demanding but cumulatively rewarding mood piece.

A pleasant, if in the end slightly inconsequential picture, perhaps primarily of interest to those currently experiencing Mullins-style sibling frictions and joys, those who have fresh memories of the same and ethnographers/anthropologists keen to see how some of the world's most economically fortunate minors currently make the ever-rocky transition from youth to adulthood.

A range of camera positions, from wide landscape shots to ultra-intimate close-ups, instead allows us to appreciate the two hounds in their adopted setting of the Parque de los Reyes.

An easygoing, unashamedly old-fashioned picture executed with a light touch that conceals a serious and sharply topical subtext.

An infectiously enjoyable slice of knockabout nostalgia that wears its Trainspotting heritage proudly on its rough-edged tartan sleeve.

Observing how six service dogs provide crucial daily help and companionship for their grateful owners, the ruminative, accessible affair proves as soothing to the viewer as the faithful pets are to their humans.

A fundamentally serious film leavened by a streak of deadpan, droll humor, its quality will ensure even greater interest in Ailhaud's memoir in the run-up to its impending centenary.

Bustamante's screenplay is a philosophically and theologically nuanced affair, intermittently elliptical, concentrating on the bigger picture without bothering to sketch in the smaller details. This becomes something of an issue, given that these are often the pivots upon which the somewhat telenovela-like plot hinges.

It's an uncompromising, sophisticated, multi-layered work of art which demands to be met at least halfway.

Medel, seldom off-screen, turns in a marvelous, utterly engaging portrait of an intelligent, caring person slowly stretched to breaking point.

A work of admirable journalistic seriousness.

An admirably audacious feat of documentarian access, Of Fathers and Sons is of obvious topical and anthropological interest as a glimpse into the gradual radicalization of young males and the deep community ties which underpin the process.

Obtaining all-areas access to Olympic-competing Russian star athlete Margarita Mamun, Prus records in intense detail the verbal and physical pressures to which the young woman is subjected by her fiercely determined coaches.

Stands on its own as a small-scale enterprise which makes some telling points about much bigger issues relating to American society, sports and community ties.

Russell Mulcahy's In Like Flynn triumphs as a disgracefully entertaining romp that packs an unexpected emotional wallop.

The first hour is the strongest, graced as it is by Estiano's nuanced performance as a conventional-seeming young woman who gradually and very sympathetically reveals her inner self after welcoming Clara into her life.

Thierry is utterly convincing and compelling from first to last, in a deglamorized but sensual performance of tautly controlled severity and uncompromising rigor.

Accessible, informative and wryly humorous, the film uses Srbijanka's tastefully decorated residence as a prism through which to view the woman, her turbulent times and the complicated history of the former Yugoslavia.

A brutally effective little thriller which rings welcome changes on hackneyed urbanites-vs-backwoodsfolk templates.

An intriguingly structured, multilayered road movie in which an ordinary working-class dude looks back over a nation-wandering decade of his life, this second collaboration by the writer-directors is a cumulatively engrossing and ultimately very moving work of clear-eyed political intent.

The Image You Missed arguably functions most effectively as an impressionistic primer on tumultuous Ulster affairs during and after the Troubles, providing vivid glimpses of a violent epoch whose controversial repercussions continue to periodically reverberate across the British Isles and beyond.

Paradise is predictably problematic for the protagonists of Jet Trash, a flashily seductive and darkly comic crime-thriller that sidewinds between grimy London and the sun-kissed coasts of Goa.

While very much a film of two unequal halves, there's more than enough cinematic chutzpah on display here, especially in the early sections, to confirm the Floridian writer-director as a name to watch.

[Devor] displays a relentless curiosity in tandem with an evidently sympathetic eye to human foibles and peccadillos, yielding numerous fleeting insights without ever really aiming to find a grand overall conclusion.

The result is a lovely, upbeat, even life-affirming film. It's a work which certainly doesn't soft-pedal the less appealing sides of children's behavior, but shows that empathy, given appropriate circumstances and resources, can be taught just as effectively as arithmetic and spelling.

A work of old-school humanism that hovers between pro-Revolutionary fervor and a more objective documentary stance, Cuba and the Cameraman is sustained by the strong bonds of trust which the gregarious Alpert has evidently been able to maintain with Cubans from various echelons of this theoretically classless society.

Belly-laughs are duly reaped courtesy of the game ensemble, who throw themselves into proceedings with suitable brio — egged on by Shunsuke Kida's infectious, percussively jaunty-jazzy score — while Shiota's screenplay is good for intermittent belly-laughs before dribbling away somewhat post-climax.

Neatly divided into seven discrete chapters plus prologue and epilogue, it's a necessarily repetitive but engrossing and ultimately optimistic glimpse into a troubled situation entering belated turnaround.

It takes skill to successfully handle heavy issues with a light touch, but that's what German-born, Argentina-based writer-director Nele Wohlatz pulls off with her delightfully original documentary/fiction hybrid.

Showing levels of controlled concentration and unfussy flair far beyond what may be expected from a "student film," Machines powerfully evokes the sights and sounds — and almost even the smells — of a sprawling, stygian textiles plant south of India's eighth-largest (but very seldom filmed) city, Surat.

Santoalla isn't without its longueurs, even at 83 minutes, and can veer into the repetitive at times. But it scores in its judicious combination of archival materials (some of it shot by camcorder-fan Verfondern himself) with the directors' own interview-based footage, taking that most ancient of squabbles — a feud between farmers — and turning it into a poignant elegy for tragically lost opportunities.

The genial, relentlessly curious Sharif proves an excellent guide as the security situation spirals from instability into nightmare and the so-called Islamic State (aka ISIS or Daesh) advances inexorably advances towards Jalawla.

A conventionally mounted tribute to a genial, decidedly British form of eccentricity.

Skilfully manipulating romantic and social frictions which in lesser hands might have come across as soapily melodramatic, Rauniyar and Barker construct a parable-like tale whose allegorical aspects are there for those who wish to find them. But their priority is the creation of believable characters in a pungently atmospheric setting.

Strikingly shot, edited and scored, with convincing and vivid performances from a youthful cast, the picture loses its footing in the final stretch but should still take high rank among U.S. debuts of its ilk this year

The smartest touch of Burman's bouncy, unobtrusively informative screenplay is to make Usher such a dominant offscreen presence before he finally shows up in the closing minutes.

Sometimes all a documentary needs is one strong, charismatic personality to keep things watchable: Garnet's Gold boasts two in the form of the middle-aged eponymous protagonist and his feisty octogenarian mother.

With all farces, timing and rhythms are absolutely crucial and Zulawski — working with editor Julia Gregory — maintains a disarming brio from the very first seconds.

Much like the legendary glam-metal band whose grindingly arduous rise to fame it lovingly chronicles, shock-rock-doc We Are Twisted F—ing Sister! is superficially "controversial" (profanity in the title!), essentially conventional, but very, very, very entertaining.

A confident and quietly promising feature debut from director/co-writer Fellipe Barbosa.

Making potent use of spectacularly extraterrestrial locations in the country's sunbaked far north around the ghost town of Dallol, the film takes an exotic and sometimes surreal approach to what's essentially a simple, touching love story.

As a poetic dispatch from society's lower depths, Field Niggas is an oblique but inescapably topical slice of slick but rough-edged humanism — a polyphonic roundelay that hits some powerfully discordant notes before the director decides to start tooting his own horn.

A solid example of low-key, well-observed, humanistically sympathetic ethnography.

Rising to the challenge of delivering a rousing finale, Hosoda does sock over a spectacular climactic battle on and below the streets of Tokyo with imaginative aplomb.

Meru is an engaging and cumulatively exhilarating debut from wife-and-husband team Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin.

A pungently immersive evocation of traveling on Chinese trains.

While wall-to-wall music is generally the bane and blight of contemporary documentaries, here Honigmann sensitively interpolates generous helpings of the orchestra's recordings to envelopingly persuasive effect.

A bit of community spirit and camaraderie, it seems, can go a very long way, and sequences of spectacularly dystopian-apocalyptic, third-world bleakness are leavened by moments of incongruous beauty, even grace.

[A] likeably modest study of veteran, well-traveled American musicologist Louis Sarno.

While this near two-hour feature debut does betray occasional signs of inexperience, on the whole it's a work of striking confidence.

A phantasmagorical vision of psychological purgatory, Horse Money (Cavalo dinheiro) will enrapture some while leaving others dangling in frustrated limbo.

An upbeat chronicle of very hard rock in a very hard place, Death Metal Angola is one of the livelier and more enticingly exotic additions to the ever-burgeoning music-documentary sub-genre.

A superbly sensual character study of a young woman navigating emotional and professional crossroads.

This quietly impassioned indictment of child-labor takes its time to get going but then builds steadily to a surprisingly strong finale.

Hogg achieves remarkable results with the most minimal of means. Camerawork and editing are consistently on the money, while performances and dialogue feel utterly fresh, spontaneous and believable.

Derki and his experienced editor Anne Fabini have crafted a sober, sobering bulletin of unambiguous intention and undeniable power.

De Oliveira evokes the suffocating, stultifying confines of the family dwelling all too convincingly, to an extent that requires considerable indulgence and attention from his audience. This investment is duly repaid in the second half.

An exceptional animated feature from Spain, Wrinkles imaginatively and sensitively explore one of the major issues confronting most of the developed world: how to look after senior citizens in a rapidly aging population.

Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case is a professional, straightforward example of the behind-the-headlines sub-genre, executed in slick high-toned digital video and eschewing the soundtrack music so ubiquitous in documentaries nowadays.

Crucially, Jung and Boileau manage to convey the bonds of affection and love that hold this unusual family together, in a manner that will ring a moving chord with many who have experienced similar circumstances.

A deliberately distanced but often harrowing vision of a living hell.

An unassuming and suitably gentle-paced charmer.

Berliner crafts a quietly touching and illuminating memento mori from the steady dying of an intellectual light.

The last couple of years in one tragically truncated life are chronicled with a winning combination of sensitivity and humor in I Am Breathing.

A luminous central performance from Golshifteh Farahani distinguishes an ambitious if somewhat monotonously wordy adaptation of a prize-winning best-seller.

[A] claustrophobically discomfiting but quizzically comic study of social unease and embarrassment.

[A] solidly effective addition to Britain's social realism tradition, elevated by excellent performances by the young leads and some unexpectedly poetic touches.

Augustine's script is a coherent and valid artistic reinterpretation of the case, told against an unfussily atmospheric evocation of late 19-century Paris - persuasive even though the dialogue seldom sounds particularly old-fashioned.