Neil Young

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.

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.

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

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.

An unassuming and suitably gentle-paced charmer.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A pungently immersive evocation of traveling on Chinese trains.

[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.

Infinite Football has moments of nicely deadpan humor and some deft little touches of insight along the way courtesy of Porumboiu's offbeat protagonist — but major league it certainly is not.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

It's clear that Weerasethakul is even less concerned with conventional narrative considerations here than he was in the free-rangingly imaginative Uncle Boonmee.

An uneven but promising sophomore outing for Montreal-based Italian director Simone Rapisarda Casanova.

The Golden Cage (La Jaula de oro) is a lukewarm examination of a hot-potato political issue.

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.

The sour taste of colonialism is pungently evoked in Sweet Dreams, a largely accomplished second feature by Bosnian-Dutch writer-director Ena Sendijarevic.

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

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

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.