Robert Abele

Directing his first documentary feature, Corbijn, a longtime music photographer who made the Joy Division docudrama “Control,” is well suited to this material’s creative highs and human dimensions.

By the end, as you dry your eyes, it’s their futures you want them to win — as scientists, optimists and change agents — not just a science fair prize.

As adult animation goes, Birdboy is its own weird, woolly and surprisingly sensitive foray into the grimmer corners of life. But at its best, when Vázquez and Rivero hit the right mix of melancholy and acidic in their battered fever dream, it plays like a troubled schoolkid’s secret drawings brought to colorful, if unapologetically horrific, life.

The tale of a kid whose rebellion is in feeding his knowledge is rousing enough, but it’s to Ejiofor’s credit that he takes care to meaningfully dramatize how the systems around William — social, economic and political — create a perfect storm of obstacles for anyone in a struggling community trying to seed a future.

The journey to that lethal, rolling boil is, in the hands of Japan’s premier suspense director, certainly a nail-biting one, a tale of carefully weighed clicks that lead to a lot of rashly pulled triggers.

Barnabás Tóth’s richly acted film exudes a faith in human connection as relevant today as such relationships needed to be in the years after World War II for survivors of unimaginable trauma.

Tomboy stands out as an especially affecting delicacy about the thrills and pitfalls of exploring who one is.

In truth (there’s that word again), Morris’ movie isn’t so much a debriefing as a very entertaining recruitment tool for the pleasures of Cornwell’s storytelling.

This is Krieps’ show, another elegantly virtuosic, intelligent turn that, in this case, imbues sickness with dignity so that every strained grasp for breath feels like a victory for autonomy.

Becoming Cousteau may not be as deep a journey as some would hope, but for having to chart a lot of years, it hits its points about passion, fame and activism smartly, even movingly.

The nexus of perversion, pain and sexual purpose driving writer-director Elliot Tuttle’s dark, discursive chamber drama is of a stripe rarely attempted in even the most self-consciously daring movies.

Sensitively handled yet unafraid to elicit squirming, and boasting a seriously affecting turn by Lindon — who won last year’s Cannes award for Best Actor — it’s a miniature portrait of quotidian desperation that nevertheless speaks to the collective psychic moan of job-seekers and those barely holding on everywhere.

The world is full of ego-massaging celebrity documentaries, in which legends we know star in glorified tribute reels. But the zesty, illuminating The World According to Allee Willis feels like what the showbiz biodoc was meant for, to give voice to someone who was so much more than a ubiquitous album-sleeve credit.

Even at its most emotionally awkward or loose, it signals a filmmaking sensibility where Bellocchio — whose nearly 60-year career has been built on a provocative rendering of the social and political fractures around him — is refreshingly averse to viewing his own past through rose-colored glasses.

Thankfully, filmmaker Bruce David Klein finds the sweet spot between admirer and honest broker with the warm, engaging tribute biodoc Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story.

As a portrait of a marriage forged in respect, love and companionship, Itzhak is in its casually wonderful way proof that life is rarely lived as a virtuosic solo.

Johnson is nothing if not a punchy ringmaster of deadpan humor and his grab-bag mindset generates enough goodwill to appreciate the DIY brashness of it all. I’m one of those who had no clue of this act’s history and I’m fairly certain I’d look forward to Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Sequel.

It’s also worth remembering that someone as complex as Alvin Ailey isn’t going to be captured in any one film. Ailey is, therefore, best absorbed as an elegant, impressionistic primer, a chance to bask in his mastery of movement and dance, as framed by those near enough to him to know what it took out of him to gift it to the world.

With her feature debut, Alberto keenly understands that any story of self-discovery is as much a constellation as it is a journey, and that’s how her adaptation plays, as a mature accumulation of the tender, the uneasy and the clarifying.

As always, what’s so joyously, infectiously funny about “Jackass” is rarely the prank itself, but how funny they all find it to reduce each other to writhing heaps.

Our Father, the Devil is the type of movie for which a satisfying ending is less about tidy resolution than potent insight, and in that respect, Foumbi delivers something befitting her grueling, clenched character study.

Thankfully, in the stretches when Monk is playing, he gets to be exactly who he is, his exhilarating music doing the talking, his exquisite dissonance suddenly more revelatory than perhaps intended.

The result is a kind of rolling theater of racially targeted, manufactured peril that exploits the underprivileged, rewards corruption and ultimately — when the farce plays itself out — isn’t actually funny. But that’s only after it brilliantly is funny, producing plenty of acrid, world-upside-down laughter about the ridiculous truth behind some serious modern delusions about whom we should be scared of.

Both riveting character study and experiential glimpse at the Africa-to-Europe sex slave trade, Austrian-Iranian filmmaker Sudabeh Mortezai’s “Joy” builds its reservoir of sadness with pulsing efficiency.

A transgender icon with a life as tragically short as some of the idols she worshipped, she's the deserving subject of an archivally rich remembrance, and such is James Rasin's poignant documentary Beautiful Darling.

In its thumbnail sketches simmering with risk, humor, and melancholy, illuminating a world of worsening disparities but spikier solidarity, it entertainingly takes stock.

Breath boasts no unique truths about maturing, but its serene roar under gray skies makes it a softly roiling, ultimately affecting gem.

“Cassandro,” which recalls the grabbed verve of a ‘60s-era verité snapshot, charts the reluctant dimming of this extravagant icon with affectionate energy and lasting poignance.

In Kawase’s delicate hands, however, it breathes with an everyday poignancy.

Fusing exquisitely shot color 16mm footage from 1964 of the team’s training sessions, drone-like music and splices of animation, we get a delirious sense of what these committed women endured six out of seven days a week.

The filmmakers' approach is inherently positive.

Instead of sinking into crude, one-night-stand joke territory, Night Owls roots around for the spark of real chemistry and, in the winning turns of Pally and Salazar, finds it.

In conjuring a fantastical slippery slope in which technology, pharmaceuticals and the entertainment industry co-star in a takeover of our lives, The Congress boasts a propulsive image-making pull.

At its intimate best, Merata is an embrace and an education, a son’s love letter and for cineastes, a celebration of inclusion and voice.

Buenos Aires and New York are forests of romantic entanglement, identity-searching and adventure in Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro’s artfully frothy Hermia & Helena.

Pieta, which won last year's Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, is disturbing, for sure, but its larger points save it from being a quick and dirty wallow.

The surprisingly adept mixture of tones — naturalism, dysfunctional family satire, winking slasher nostalgia, twisty vengeance thriller — is offbeat enough to keep even hardened connoisseurs of body-count entertainment on their toes.

It’s a quietly shattering place All Shall Be Well goes to, in which a time of consoling devolves into petty matters of consolation.

The bitter truths in Black Ice paint a sobering picture of a sport with a lot to reckon with, especially in a country that prides itself on embracing its diversity of culture.

However one ultimately feels about Fisk’s reportorial compass, This Is Not a Movie presents a necessary, thought-provoking portrait of a dedicated truth-seeker.

This two-part, three-hour film is marked by immediacy and breadth, as if an on-the-fly news bulletin had naturally morphed into the richest of character-driven sagas.

Grimly powerful and intersectionally acute, Thomas' serious, haunted period saga is a portrait of colonial rot and patriarchal cruelty as experienced by characters inextricably linked — male and female, free and chained, native and not, even sane and otherwise — in one remote outpost.

This underground festival hit is a feverish fit of creative buffoonery — you haven’t experienced anything remotely like it.

It’s a touching glimpse at a community solution to an inclusion problem, where the water’s more than just fine.

Manzoor, an instinctive stylist, always finds an honest vibe to win you over, whether it’s sisterly camaraderie (or annoyance), youthful awkwardness or you’re-going-down spunk, which allows the abundant personality in her wonderful cast to hit all the necessary top notes.

None of it would work, however, without the command of this justifiably Cannes-honored cast.

Shadowman is at its unsettling, want-to-look-away best when tiptoeing around the question of what makes for success regarding artists like Hambleton: the hoopla that keeps the work in circulation, or the mysterious inner pilot light that keeps a self-destructive talent going?

Anchored by performances that refuse to tell us what to think (especially Hoult’s cagey calm), Juror #2 skillfully depicts how, in practice, the ideal of blind justice too easily becomes the shortsighted, look-the-other-way kind.

Nature nurtured into an eerie consciousness by a celluloid craftsman, it feels like a throwback to “Wicker Man”-era folk-tinged freakouts — confounding enough to not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those ready for a pot of its brew, plenty transporting and tingling.

Relay proves there’s still more room for smart, punchy cloak-and-dagger options.

Neither Heaven Nor Earth is a case of the inexplicable rendered without forced mysticism or explanation, but rather explored with a clinical dramatic focus that somehow boosts the eeriness.

War movies have always made use of spectacle to heighten existential dangers, but Blitz is a welcome reminder that a bruised, searching and flawed home front, in the waning days of empire, was its own fascinating emotional terrain too.

With an unassuming directness, Moretti...toggles between work and life pressures in a way that finds the curious feelings and epiphanies that bind the two, and somehow give meaning to the whole dance.

A refreshing instance of world building where the emphasis is on satirical wit, activist smarts and character, it feels like one of those movies we’ll be looking at decades from now and, however tech has transformed our lives, saying “Yeah, ‘Lapsis’ had that.”

Justine recalls the golden era of the conscientious, well-acted movie of the week: a slice of life built around hardships, but without exploiting them.

Icaros is a mini-epic of serene, intelligent mind-body wooziness.

It never succumbs to making poverty a graphic ornament.

Korengal is a bracing reminder of the inexplicable will to endure hell and come out the other side alive.

Murphy’s resplendent turn anchors a true if predictably told story of showbiz aspirations and can-do spirit, but in the great whoosh of majestically profane, beaming energy he provides from beginning to end, it’s clear that his brand of electrifying, in-the-moment comedy has sorely been missed.

There are times when The Tale of King Crab seems like it could have been made in the silent era, so dedicated are Rigo de Righi and Zoppis to the simple, dramatic power of what they choose to show us. Their characters search for love, justice and gold while the filmmakers make clear what they treasure: ageless tales like these.

In the fleet, pacey manner of the editing, toggling between private and public moments with highlight-reel efficiency, the film is a stirring glimpse of top-down kindness as a winning leadership style.

Deadpan and over-the-top, these scenes make for a view of turbulent reality that is episodic and nonsensical — and wholly Ruizian.

It's a fitting tribute to the influential journalist-essayist-filmmaker: insightful about the life of a successful writer, engaging about how a smart modern woman navigated the world, but also quizzical about how Ephron was as a daughter, sister, wife and mother.

The access that Bécue-Renard got, reportedly after five months of being there without a camera, is remarkable.

The Crash Reel asks pointed questions about hazard, reward and consequence, forcing us to look anew at the rush attached to so many high-stakes sports.

Afterimage may depict a losing battle for one uncompromising artist, but it’s also a bracing final dispatch for the uncompromising artist who survived long enough to tell of it.

The story that Kiss the Future tells — culminating in U2’s 1997 concert in Sarajevo, two years after the Dayton Peace Agreement — offers an admirably potent blend of darkness and light. Specifically, the light that can emerge from darkness.

Whatever your feelings on capital punishment, A Murder in the Park has a gripping story to tell about, oddly enough, the corrosive effects of storytelling on the justice system when it gets the best of reasoned minds.

It’s all music, Wilcha’s sweetly philosophical movie seems to be saying — and being present enough to listen.

The overtly graphic isn’t Glavonic’s visual style, but rather a cold, more powerful image seepage — what a man’s physicality says about complicity, and what a shot of the muddied ground near a hosed-down truck says about what war does to the ground, a land and the soul.

Anchored by a pair of extraordinary child performances and titled like something you’d scrawl fondly under a faded photograph in a well-thumbed album, Summer 1993 is a delicately brushed memory of confusion and joy, as if the movie itself can only smile awkwardly — and eventually, tearfully — as it looks back trying to make sense of it all.

It’s as absorbing as a caper, as maddening as a broken romance, and as thought-provoking as an impassioned editorial.