Robert Abele

Jauja makes one cryptic leap too many at the end, but until then it evocatively confounds.

Don’t Call Me Son, although built on conflicts that have fractured many a family, thankfully never veers into melodrama.

Though Dheepan is another triumph for Audiard, it could have just as easily not worked had its leads not been so affecting

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is just the kind of percolating, wry probe we need into this fast-moving, digitally monopolizing age.

Every Irish speaker in Kneecap wants to be seen, felt and heard in their fight for freedom. That funny, funky riot of attention-seeking pain and pleasure, inspired by the pioneering voices of American hip-hop, makes for a bracing, entertaining transatlantic dispatch.

Its oddball colors and willful wanderings betray a sweet, savory, uncompromising air that showcases Russell's uniquely fused brand of American harmony with rascally ebullience.

Leon’s New York has plenty of uncertainty, but it hums with possibility, especially the notion that if you miss one connection, another one’s right around the corner. In that respect, Tramps is beautifully breathless.

By its bittersweet end, Fifi Howls From Happiness has stayed almost entirely in one apartment and yet somehow unveiled both a life in full and a blank canvas.

The Quiet Girl is both the best reason movies should look to more compact narratives for adaptation and, in a few instances, indicative of where cinematic choices can leave unnecessary footprints. But everything in this heartfelt tale is made with the deepest sincerity, and gently packed with soulful portrayals and lovely imagery.

Lowell, a sitcom actor ("Enlisted") and photographer, lards his "The Big Chill" ripoff with plenty of arty touches... He assumes this will lend the needed heft to paper-thin characters, witless exchanges and emotional recriminations you can see coming a mile away.

It rewards the attention of a committed voyeur, which all proper cineastes and many of our best provocateurs are anyway. The pinched of mind and the humorless need not bother. Invariably more welcome (one imagines Oren thinking) are those who enjoy their senses and perspectives pried open while their heads get a thorough scratching.

In charting that road from disorienting fragility to determined independence, Ebrahimi serves up a memorably nuanced performance.

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.

A unique glimpse into the recovery mechanism of damaged hearts and bewildered minds, how a visage of hollowed-out sorrow after one year becomes a look of more peaceful acceptance down the road.

Overall, Corsage shows a tantalizing way forward for the hopelessly staid biopic genre: honoring, provoking and upending with verve and humor as it liberates a complex woman from iconography’s deadening glamour.

The ambitions toward '70s-era paranoia thrillers aside, as a connect-the-dots narrative, Dirty Wars is eye-opening, a fierce argument that there are chilling ramifications to endless, vague aggression.

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.

Cohn’s slickly edited verité-style storytelling lets each person’s humanity rise to the top, just enough to mix expected poignancy with a simple clarity about the struggles of low-income, opportunity-challenged souls.

It never succumbs to making poverty a graphic ornament.

As Lane wends her way to a conclusion of her own, it’d be a mistake to view “Confessions of a Good Samaritan,” with its serious curiosity balanced by a quirky theremin score and humorous asides, as Lane turning personal experience into public advocacy. She’s cagier than that.

Heineman’s trust in what his camera reveals — in the forlorn faces of U.S. soldiers, in the slump of Sadat’s demeanor, in the distraught eyes of a mother caught in that Kabul airport scrum of the desperate — tells its own necessary story of war wreckage.

Needless to say, this kind of thing wouldn’t work if its leads didn’t have chemistry, and Duplass and Falco do a wonderful job keeping up our hopes for them as we fear the slightest dip in the outlook for their lives, whether together or apart.

While Cruz wins us over with her emotionally charged amateur sleuthing, the weight of a constant struggle to not just gain acceptance, but survive fighting for it, gives France’s documentary a stirring poignancy.

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.

The blurring of real testimony with a compassionate filmmaker’s inventions is so compelling that when the documentary portion arrives, the movie can’t help but sink a bit.

Say Her Name doesn’t have answers, but it does re-emphasize how unnecessarily tragic Bland’s death was, and why her name should be a boldfaced one in the nationwide call for police reform.

Set in the high-rises of the Cabrini-Green housing project in 1992, when the beleaguered complex’s decline was palpable, it sounds like a recipe for doleful poverty-gazing. But in Windy City native Baig’s solid hands, it’s a resolutely poetic, at times even golden-hued portrait of lives unafraid to hope amid growing despair.

The film is a real "whew"-factor yarn, a hearty soup of thick accents, bold personalities and complicated motives, with an unmistakable taste of charismatic, ornery American hedonism.

It's Stevens, as the all-American cover-model mercenary both friendly and fatal, who gives The Guest its literally killer personality.

The first hour’s parade of oddballs and exaggerated vignettes under the bright Neapolitan pop of Daria D’Antonio’s cinematography can be broad to a fault, but there’s an honest perspective at work about what lands in an awkward boy’s memory.

That measured approach, exemplified in star Billerbeck’s arresting simplicity and the many fine supporting turns around him, allows us to clock Nanning’s growing awareness of what matters to others, what’s impossible to ignore and how to interpret an unjust world that’s still full of beauty and kindness if you know where to look. Which, of course, includes inside himself.

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.

Filmed by the great Romanian cinematographer and frequent Loznitsa collaborator Oleg Mutu in long, patient takes that intensify each sequence’s brittle contrasts, Donbass coalesces into an unflinching dispatch from a state of embattlement both region-specific and 21st century-pervasive.

Is the relentlessness too much? At two and a half hours, perhaps, but inventiveness abounds.

Though its vibe is often too meandering, A Kid Like Jake shows that even the most accepting of environments aren’t immune to the vulnerabilities and worries coursing through any well-intended parent’s soul.

The film is never just some glassy exercise in the idly loaded’s languorous cruelty, though. In each magnetic performance (especially Schneider’s), in the sparse but piquant lines from the script co-written with the great, recently departed screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière (working from an Alain Page story), and in Deray’s attention to emotional humidity, lies something resolutely curious about human frailty in relationships.

At times exquisitely attuned to the commingling of the bitterly funny and tragic, and at other times an eye-roll-worthy collection of ready-made fetish videos (Flores is one brave avatar of outré sexuality), The Dance of Reality is nonetheless proof that the legendary provocateur is still a font of out-there invention.

Garrone achieves something uniquely colorful, disturbing and trenchant about self-perception in an increasingly fishbowl-like society.

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.

“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.

Kore-eda furthers his storied reputation as an artist humanely attuned to what transpires between those who know each other all too well.

West, one of the genre’s true artisans of sticky dread, certainly has fun seeding a handsomely mounted and shot (by Eliot Rockett) period melodrama with the trappings of imminent violence, from the crimson red wallpaper to a maggot-swarmed suckling pig. But Pearl rarely justifies itself as a franchised standalone built on the early psychosis of its bloodthirsty, unstable ingenue.

By turns opaque, harsh, self-aware, indulgent and wickedly funny. It's never dull, pummeling you with its prickly smarts.

Hypnotic and heartbreaking, Identifying Features is a feature debut to marvel at, but only once you’re able to shake off the bone-deep chills emanating from Mexican filmmaker Fernanda Valadez’s disorienting tale of a mother’s search for her missing son.

While the boxing is kinetically directed, Morrison grasps that the movie’s fiercest stands are taken outside the ring, when Claressa — faced with tough choices about her future — asserts herself to the people who need to hear it.

The movie is both a painful reminder of how Muslims are most often the victims of terrorism and the kind of behind-the-scenes glimpse at everyday evil...that reveals a confounding bizarro world where the inexplicable and mundane mix.

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.

Sometimes an experiment feels like just an experiment, and that’s where the well-intentioned query The Hottest August ultimately lands.

A wonderfully unforced, lightly intimate experience existing in a dramatic arena between observational nonfiction and bare-bones theater’s nowhere-to-go focus.

What’s surprising is how ethereally effective Birney’s DIY gestalt is as a reverse state of consciousness: an outside where before there was only inside.

Selected by Sweden as its entry for the foreign language Oscar, the refreshingly offbeat, sturdily handled Border is not just unlikely to resemble any of its subtitled competition but also anything else you’ll see this year.

As snapshots go of bright kids facing the next step, Try Harder! is winning enough, but considering how much more there is to follow up on, here’s hoping it’s only part one.

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.

An acrobatic, larkish globetrotting adventure about paintings and psychotherapy that defies easy categorization save inclusion on any adult animation fan’s must-see list, its slinky, colorful pleasures and wittily referential joie de vivre are like a lifeline in a season when the art house is typically beholden to severe, award-seeking bids to depress you.

[Labaki] finds a magically resonant space between documentary-like vibe and dramatic performance that honors the characters’ inherent humanity while memorably framing the wretched circumstances that dictate their actions.

A brisk, engaging-enough reminder of why the man’s name is synonymous with press freedom and prizes for the best in reporting.

The man is the movie, and the long stretch of lived road Frank describes as an immigrant grappling with his adopted country’s faults is revealing, at times heartbreakingly so.

Reptile, a studiously atmospheric, layer-peeling mystery from director and co-writer Grant Singer, foregrounds Del Toro — playing a calloused detective investigating a young woman’s murder — in a way that makes you want more of him. But also, regrettably, less of movies like “Reptile,” which tries to match its star’s unpredictable magnetism with a forced eeriness, only growing more ponderous and unfocused, like a case getting colder.

Wolf’s strange, sad and finally exhilarating portrait is one of radical consumerism turned into a searchable legacy — the viewer as activist.

Delaporte and De La Patellière understand that Dumas’ type of novelistic revenge, whether froid or chaud, is best served onscreen in the most picturesque European locations, with cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc’s cameras ready to swoop and soar as needed, and paced to gallop, never dawdle.

Of course, our desire to know more may be the aim in his making art out of civilization’s rubble — that he can get us to pay attention through the sheer majesty of how he pays attention, hopefully making for true engagement, not mere spectating. Still, sometimes you just want more than what you’re given. That’s human too.

One wishes that space in Separated had been saved instead for real stories told by the policy’s victims, or perhaps more historical context. Nonetheless, what we glean from the totality of the interviews and research, and Morris’ well-honed style of coalescing information, is damning enough.

Oldman treats Churchill’s words the way a Broadway virtuoso would: as the showstopper. And who can blame him? It works.

In the new documentary Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato do an ultra-fine job tracing a born provocateur's commitment to his calling.

To watch Santosh is to feel the undeniable power of a discerning, resonant case study. To fully know this character, however, is a goal just outside this otherwise intelligently wrought movie’s considerable reach.

Our Land is the work of a director whose attention is rigorous, whose care is genuine, but who is also conscious of her outsider’s perspective.

What’s best about A Chiara is its totality of naturalism and subjectivity — how it humanely complicates a teenager’s newfound self-possession, so that we admire her quest for clarity and reckoning about her family, while worrying how it will affect the decision she makes about her future.

John Wick’s world is elegant and vicious, full of slaughter and courtesies and, if “Chapter 2” can’t quite replicate the original’s sense of discovery, its ending still made me wish “Chapter 3” could start right away.

You can’t encapsulate the horrors of the Holocaust in 80 minutes, but what the 12 interviewed survivors accomplish in the documentary Destination Unknown is nevertheless a vivid portrait of genocide put into practice, and its everlasting effects on the living.

If anything, you want even more stories from these guys who started out as rock and roll dreamers, transitioned to individual contractors, then came to feel part of something larger than themselves.

Jagged and acrid, yet also slippery and provocative, “The Plagiarists” is a micro-indie talkathon with the edge of something forcibly overheard but fragmented, as if you’d been thrown into a cramped rideshare with many discursive routes and no obvious destination

Considering the amount of such material Welles left behind — sketches, drawings and paintings from his formative childhood travels through decades in movies — it makes for a tantalizing reappraisal sure to appeal to even the most knowledgeable Welles enthusiast.

In its extreme length and precise technique, it’s decidedly not for everybody. But although it is at times distractingly opaque, occasionally Heise’s family’s words, juxtaposed with his sounds and images, crystallize into something singularly wise about the nexus of place, history and trauma.

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.

Director/co-writer Adam Sherman's Bukowski-lite character study is one of those exercises in masculine self-pity and glib misogyny that frustrates because of its shortsightedness.

Sober and heartfelt, Union lets us see what Amazon and the world would soon discover about the power workers have when they invest in their dignity first.

Although Greene swerves unnecessarily into obvious audience indictment at the end, Kate Plays Christine makes for a twisty, unsettling probe into our fascination with transforming lives, and deaths, into digestible storytelling.

Evans has made a touchingly honest ode to the inner life of all artists.

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.

Like a movie DJ, Kandhari is flexing a pulpy mood of big-city dislocation, building a trippy, jarring and blackly funny experience out of a city’s stray colors, sounds and personalities.

By the end, DuVernay has, with editor Spencer Averick’s fleet stitching, massaged her adaptation’s various threads into a collage of insight and emotion worth treasuring.

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 soulful, atmospheric travelogue that toggles between immersing in and removing itself from the chaotic beauty of teeming humanity, El Said's movie gives a humming, on-the-edge metropolis its heart-pumping, reflective due.

If the details of “Kidnapped” aren’t familiar, do yourself the favor of withholding an online search until the full thunder and rigor of Bellocchio’s dramatic instincts can work you over — equivalent to a lavish ’60s period costume drama burnished into an engine of galvanizing narrative intention.

Although its storytelling is at times naggingly staid, its central characterizations teem with complexity and sensitivity, and for that, it’s a modest coming-of-age gem.

At a time when extremes in discourse always seem loudest, the modest pleasures of The Monk and the Gun are appealingly reasonable. Brandishing new ways doesn’t have to mean holstering old ones.

A sublime and stirring documentary.

No matter how reflectively mellow the gray-haired, reminiscing interviewees are, the blizzard of featured illustrations from the magazine's '70s heyday offer scads of they-couldn't-get-away-with-that-today laughter.

At its best — when the flow of voices, archival clips (co-director Pollard being a master at the textural impact of found footage), and nicely blended-in recreations made to look archival, is thematically strongest — "Citizen Ashe" becomes a documentary about how experience becomes voice becomes action.

In its voices tinged with sorrow and re-examined history, this expertly tuned film is simply pro-introspection: a heavy-hearted look at an unnecessary death and a cultural superiority long deserving of scrutiny.

It assuredly can’t be easy for a filmmaker to choose whether to leave viewers motivated by warmth or woe. Yet your capacity to be both awed and enraged is ultimately well-served by “The Territory,” a gripping portrait of an endangered community for whom nature is both their precious environment and the facet of humanity that can all too easily be turned malicious.

In its imaginative depiction of how marginalized souls view home — especially youth, for whom belonging and the future can be fraught concepts — Gagarine bears witness to not only a historic building, but the hearts of people, which is what brings a place alive, anyway.

Youmans’ poetic wade into rural black Louisiana, and the private realms of the faithful and faltering across three generations, is the kind of boldly off-road and unapologetically arty family drama that makes one sit up and take notice.

Although Reynolds rises above the rest as a father consumed by sadness and anger, The Captive quickly devolves into scenes that feel like stilted dramatic re-creations demanding a noirish voice-over by "Cold Case Files" host Bill Kurtis.

Classify Pietro Marcello’s sweet new film Scarlet at your own risk, because its pleasures are as diverse and unexpected as a stroll through uncharted lands: Mapping the terrain wouldn’t be half as enjoyable as letting the place host its own truths and enchantments.

It all remains remarkably free of memorable comic situations, dramatic tension or emotional insight. Adolescence may be bruising, crazy or normal, but it's rarely this staid.

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.

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.