Peter Keough

Perhaps the elusive, uncanny soundtrack of Tangerine Dream brings this about, or maybe it’s Friedkin’s juxtapositions of close-ups and stark long shots of the tiny trucks lost in jungle or desert landscapes, but Sorcerer eventually seems to be happening someplace not of this world. Not hell, exactly; maybe Limbo.

Such miserable people; why should we care? Maybe because Ceylan does. By staging this petulant misery in a snow-filled world of melancholy, unearthly beauty, he underscores their tragedy.

The government, even under the new, more moderate leadership of President Hassan Rouhani, has reason for concern. Unlike Rasoulof and Panahi’s previous, more metaphorical films, this one confronts its subject head-on with unflinching candor.

The story offers many opportunities for glibness and sentimentality. Walsh falls for none of them. She enhances the grimness of Lewis’s surroundings, but does not exploit it.

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider achieves what cinema is capable of at its best: It reproduces a world with such acuteness, fidelity, and empathy that it transcends the mundane and touches on the universal.

May also be among the best war movies of all time.

Through patience, skill, discretion, and trust, Jesse Moss has taken a seemingly small town story and turned it into both a microcosm of today’s most urgent issues and a portrait of a single suffering soul.

Funny, heartbreaking, impeccably observed, and nearly flawless drama.

Cinematic rarity — a genuinely philosophical film.

After a period of creative drought, Zhang’s homecoming is a cause for celebration.

It takes a few minutes to catch on, and it would be indiscrete to specify what it is, but once you figure out what’s really strange about it you have entered the solipsistic prison of a tormented mind.

As often happens in films about putting on plays, life imitates art, but in this instance obliquely.

“[Dance] gives you nothing back,” says Cage. “No manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” Kovgan’s film comes close to capturing that moment.

The rest of the film consists mostly of Akerman talking with her mother, blithely and lovingly, about everyday ephemera and about the past (Natalia was a survivor of Auschwitz), both via Skype and at her mother’s genteel home in Brussels.

Bi’s singular vision bears comparison to those of other geniuses such as Tarkovsky, Sokurov, David Lynch, Luis Buñuel and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Like those auteurs, he achieves what film is best at but seldom accomplishes — a stirring of a deeper consciousness, a glimpse into a reality transcending the everyday.

Though he might be uncertain about sex, or even kissing and cuddling, Scott is an incurable romantic. And steadfastly loyal and kind. The value of that is made clear when the filmmakers disclose the full tragedy and horror of what Dina has gone through, and when he sings to her “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.”

Another complex and magnificently acted melodrama.

Though the outcome is a matter of public record, it still unfolds like a suspenseful tragedy. Suffice it to say that the wheels of justice turn slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.

Efficient, cogently argued, and visually compelling documentary.

Why do Parker and the other clinic owners and staff persevere despite constant harassment and potential assassination? Not for the money, certainly. Perhaps because no one else will.

Though some of the concepts may be New Age boilerplate, the film’s images linger; especially that of the river, the snake devouring us all.

Kusama’s handling of point of view is diabolically shrewd. She maximizes the terror potential of the vapidly ostentatious modernist mansion without fetishizing it. She intensifies the monstrosity of some of the characters by making them all too human. And as for guessing the ending — good luck.

Just when you were about to give up on the Internet as a swamp full of trolls, bullies, and liars, along comes a documentary like Ido Haar’s Presenting Princess Shaw.

When the effusive Pedro Almodóvar adapts the minimalist Alice Munro, he reveals the passions seething under the bleakness of the latter’s monotone mid-Canada. By setting his version of the Nobel Prize-winner’s interlinked stories “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence” in the vibrant settings of Madrid and other Spanish locales, he adds a Sirkian twist to Munro’s Chekhovian sensibility.

It is part Rorschach test and part theme park ride as the filmmakers shoot from the strangest places and from such odd perspectives that much of the film consists of trying to figure out what the heck is going on.

Despite the fabulism of Tale of Tales, it remains rooted in contemporary issues. Prince Charming does not figure much in this film, but women do.

Like the children’s films of Iranian directors Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, Bad Hair explores such social pathology, in part, in the guise of a kids’ movie. But it also takes on the intensity of more pointed films such as “Bicycle Thieves” (1948) and even Hector Babenco’s sensationalistic “Pixote” (1981).

Huppert’s amazing performance not only masters the physical rigors and deformations of her character, but more importantly captures her cold capriciousness and the enigmatic innocence that one of Maud’s friend’s labels “perverse.”