Robert Abele

As a first film, it is incredibly accomplished, its influences (French New Wave, Wong Kar-Wai) apparent but integrated.

The movie is practically a textbook about how ravenous corporations and feckless government can strip-mine the souls of workers, and replace them with a political narrative about their problems that keeps reality forever hidden behind a fine, dusty fog.

It’s all a very believable, close-quarters theater of exhaustion and pain, with moments of lightness and warmth that only add to the difficulty of Mickey’s predicament, and all of it captured in alluring fixed images of depth and color by cinematographer Conor Murphy.

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.

Eden is never less than suspenseful, but rather than sentimentally pander to easy outrage, or indulge in icky women-in-distress titillation, the movie...zeros in on the details of how dignity can be stripped like bark from a tree, and the queasy determination it takes to stay alive in a living hell.

The artfully kaleidoscopic nightmare of a collapsed state has rarely been so imaginatively portrayed. The unintentionally awkward moments come from a few of the more overwrought voice-over performances, in conjunction with the often-pinched rendering of human faces.

Summer Pasture has an earthy intimacy and compassion for its subjects that will have you thinking about their plight long after they've packed up and moved on for winter.

Prophet's Prey is a sobering reminder that tyrannical monsters who hide behind religion can be homegrown too.

The result is a sharply assembled multiformat collage of memory and investigation that starts like a trip any of us might make into a what-made-him-tick past, but ends in the present with scattered feelings and tenuous bonds.

Avant’s skin color is one aspect of his inspiring story, for sure, but the heart inside The Black Godfather — and the ways an honorable soul with personal power can effect meaningful change — spins its own joyful melody.

Unlike the thick directness in Maud’s work, the movie about her is almost pointillist in detailing the tiny steps that make up an enduring marriage.

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

As breezy primers go in a life that’s as full as it gets, this collection of the archival and the anecdotal, with the occasional preparing of dishes as mouth-watering interludes, is decidedly more feast than fast food.

Sometimes, The Unknown Country may be more a feeling than a movie, but that’s more than satisfactory. Attentive and artful, Maltz is a talent to watch, and in Gladstone, she’s fortunate enough to have a star (and guide) whose presence binds us to all this soulful roaming.

Wang approaches storytelling through the internal weather of his characters and long, fixed takes marked by naturalistic dialogue — blink and you might not catch a time-fracturing, nuanced gesture, or crucial piece of information.

The atmospheric heft of Il Futuro is invariably more bracing than oppressive, and in the complexly stoic Martelli and masterfully craggy, haunted Hauer, an alluringly opaque pas de deux of loss and uncertainty is wonderfully realized.

It’s Klein at his most conservatively verité and least pointedly judgmental — he was a fan of the game and setting, after all — but he still offers up a tapestry of personalities, playing and performing that captures what is ineffably beautiful and edgy about tennis, at a time when it was as popular as it had ever been.

What obviously matters to Stewart is the totality of experience and The Chronology of Water, arty and naturalistic in equal measure, is no toe-dip into directing — it’s deep-end stuff from start to finish.

There are plenty of disturbing revelations, but it’s the totality of Boeing’s self-sabotaging, money-grubbing descent — starting with a post-merger change in leadership in the 1990s — that brings home how irresponsible corporate stewardship is a global harm worth correcting.

A rich, occasionally stirring and ultimately plaintive ode to the craft of velvet gloves, iron fists and how to point with either or both.

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.

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.

What comes through are highs and valleys seen from the inside, a clarifying memoir from an unsentimental woman who endured being called every shaming name, with powerful grace notes of understanding from a son whose eyes betray a tough childhood.

For anyone who needs a gut-punch primer in what the lack of reproductive freedom looks like now, the propulsive documentary Zurawski v Texas from co-directors Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault is here to put your voting decisions into sharply delineated, heart-rending focus.

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.

If you meet the fiendishly deadpan Rubber halfway, its assured mix of cinephile artiness and grindhouse spoof will offer some oddball surprises.

In its interlocking parts and willfully impenetrable details, Serebrennikov wants you to know that being Russian is too complicated to foreground one emotion or experience, or to rely on the safety of the linear when one day can feel like nothing and everything. This brazenly packed movie isn’t for everyone. Neither, we grasp, is being Russian.

Sollers Point boasts a cool, classically observational tone marked by Sabier Kirchner’s invitingly elegant cinematography that eschews the vogue for artificial shaky-cam edginess, and the naturalistic detail of a lived-in neighborhood populated by at least a dozen instantly memorable characters — by turns stressed, satisfied, curious, weird and sad — just doing their thing.

The Desert Bride is nothing complicated, but in its unforced humanity, visually poetic landscapes and agreeably metaphoric storytelling suggests the intimate pleasures of a well-turned short story.

Basquiat's energetic brilliance is mourned as much as revered in "Boom for Real," which ends with his cannon shot into the money-mad, drug-fueled '80s. What lingers, though, is a heartfelt reminiscence for what's memorable about emergent talent, the spark that precipitates the well-fanned blaze.

Rapt fuses strands of dramatic tension in a shrewd enough way that it even saves its sharpest cuts for the kidnapping's aftermath, when a well-heeled life laid bare must reconcile with a much different form of enforced solitude.

At times it’s as if you’re onstage with the cast. And yet that simple approach, in confident hands, reflects the magic that only cameras and cutting can do: collapse distance and time into a special intimacy, letting strong actors with expert-level songs be the greatest of special effects.

In its perceptions and mood, Angels Wear White plays like acutely serious female noir.

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.

The trappings are thriller-ish, but the playing field is recognizably timely: a fast-changing economic/cultural world in which some youth are up for the challenge to reconcile a vanished past with a roiling present — France's terrorism woes are explicitly referenced — while others are dangerously indifferent to it.

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.

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.

One of the biggest takeaways from "My Journey” and Tavernier’s enthusiasm for the confluence of image, performance, writing and sound is something hard to ignore the next time you see a contemporary film: the care of shot selection that previous generations deployed, and that barely exists in today’s sloppy, keep-filming-and-figure-it-out-later ethos.

It's a character study about faith in connectedness, with an unforced love for cross-generational companionship that's special indeed.

It’s a soulful, pointed and unconventional grappling with the mysteries of the deeply Catholic, norm-shattering Georgia native’s life and work.

The movie is a powerfully blunt instrument of empathy. Ben Hania’s insistence on close-up melodramatics — faces in anguish, a handheld camera glued to them — sometimes overshadows a thirst for something more analytical. But it’s decidedly a vision, one steeped in roiling pain.

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.

Visual sumptuousness trumps the coldly erotic dastardliness of previous incarnations, but where this version feasts is on close-ups, with exchanges between pairs of eyes - the predatory versus the hesitant, the manipulatively comforting opposite the blindly vulnerable - that recall the silent era.

When Masear dedicates herself to something as simple as an impaired hummingbird’s hesitant first jump from one stick to another, the tension is both unexpectedly beautiful and poignant. These are small, scary steps for hummingbirds, seeding faith in giant leaps for humankind.

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 Cleaners makes clear how when it comes to the Internet, the more private corporations decide what we all get to “like,” the worse off we’re all going to be.

What we’re left with is, thankfully, sharp exchanges about loss and conscience, a director’s sincere approach to potentially melodramatic material, and in-the-moment actors like Keaton, who makes the humbling weight of adding up lives into the stuff of compellingly sober contemplation.

Hermanus, as a Black, queer South African, isn’t about to paint Nicholas’ predicament as on a par with apartheid’s true victims. But the emotional intelligence he infuses Moffie with — all the way through its inevitable march to the front line — feels personal nonetheless, and empathetically inquisitive about the kind of masculine indoctrination that fuels oppression through rituals of violence and the criminalizing of identity.

As things play out, however, Loach and Laverty are realistic enough in their tale of invigorating compassion to grasp that, as difficult as it is to find and nurture hope, just as essential is recognizing the danger lurking in festering grievance.

Mothers are complicated. Children are complicated. Daughter of Mine doesn’t try to explain this bond — it just wants to revel in its glorious, enriching messiness.

Zhang uses quiet to suggest an active calmness, so when a particular sound punctures the air — gurgling water, the music on a videotape, a child’s questions — it feels like the notes of life, the stuff that’s supposed to spark us.

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

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.

Considering its subject often enjoys the simple wonder inherent in characters who look into the distance, Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny does an extra-fine job of looking back with similarly rich and appreciative curiosity.

Mostly, Lenz is committed to showing as much of Kusama’s considerable output as possible, often lovingly panned over with an admiring camera. Think an exhibition program at 24 frames a second. But Kusama – Infinity is also a genuinely felt portrait of the artist as a dedicated survivor, ever in service to her vision of the world and fighting for her place in it.

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.

Often exhibiting the best of DIY cinema sensibilities — a mixture of focus, mood, and lived-in characterizations — Green is Gold augurs good things for the multi-hyphenate Baxter.

Kelly, who is credited with Stacey Miller for the screenplay, is shrewd enough to keep the movie from being a dramatized op-ed piece about betrayal, instead making roiling uncertainty, loneliness and melancholy the marquee emotions.

The Ross brothers augment the teams’ richly choreographed, competition-tested routines with slow motion, superimpositions, and separately shot material with individual color guard members. But these artful divergences feel naturally expressive, the filmmakers’ way of honoring the expressiveness, and wanting in on the inspiration.

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.

Private and odd, archly dreamy and intimate, A Bigger Splash remains one of the more uniquely hypnotic movies about the connection between presented life and pulsating art.

For moviegoers who prefer cheeky wit, down-and-dirty mayhem and grown-up suspense in their air-conditioned escapism, The Prey deserves to light up the summer art house.

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

The brutally serene documentary Iron Moon from Qin Xiaoyu and Wu Feiyue spotlights a handful of bottom-rung workers who write achingly clear-eyed poetry that spotlights the contours of their lives.

Gillan, returning to her Highlands roots to spotlight a depressingly high suicide rate there among young people, has not only given herself an expectedly meaty role that walks a fine line between sad and bitterly funny, but she’s proven to be a director with a keen eye for expressive visuals.

If it’s too much to ask of Arnold that her bid for heightened naturalism make a ton of sense, “Bird” at least maintains a heartbeat of ache and affection for youth in all its rudeness, revealing a filmmaker who isn’t afraid of losing her claws if she traffics in the thing with feathers.

Poetic and painterly, personal and political.

The result, anchored by enchanting performances and Kormákur’s reliably visceral storytelling, is an appealing pivot for a filmmaker who tends to gravitate toward adrenalized tales of survival.

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.

Restless and bracing, Wojnarowicz gives a notorious life its due. Even at its clunkiest, it leaves you breathless at the heights of personal expression he achieved.

Taguchi and Lefferman approach it all less like journalists or vérité documentarians than friendly guests who want to be respectful yet connect to something deeper about pain, mourning and forward movement.

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.

Unabashedly theatrical in presentation but broken up with interludes of nature, this Four Quartets is a multi-course feast of concentrated flavors: mesmerizing language, masterly invocation, and the kind of poetic imagery that in the hands of a great actor feels like a direct line from Eliot’s pen to our mind’s landscape.

The film practically vibrates with youthful aggression, sly humor and gathering tension, hurling itself forward like a junkie toward the next fix.

It’s bracing to watch a movie whose very flow communicates how to experience it, which can also be said of Zhou’s captivating turn as a young woman committed to being elusive as a ward against what being still and reflective might bring up.

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.

"Everything” — anchored by strong performances from Marceau and Dussollier — is a refreshingly in-the-moment chronicle of what it means to love someone enough to grant them something so final, and, in a society that doesn’t fully accept it, to see it through legally and logistically.

Wife of a Spy doesn’t necessarily change its tone when the stakes are raised so much as shift its concerns from what’s on the surface to what courses underneath in a time of war.

The Painted Bird ... is not the wallowing miserablist parade you might fear, yet not quite the Holocaust-themed masterpiece it wishes to be. But it’s always starkly compelling as a reminder of why war survival stories are essential to our understanding of innocence and beastliness.

The movie ultimately serves as an coiled and heartfelt tribute to Jesse’s powerful trajectory, and Paul’s own chemically active, emotionally reactive brilliance in one of our peak TV era’s defining series.

Though The Work leaves a lot unanswered about this unusual program (run by the Inside Circle Foundation), and the characters who participate in it, it’s an often tense and exhilarating glimpse into a moment in time that lets men prioritize honesty and tears over superficial displays of strength.

The competition in Step isn’t just to hit a stage and win a talent prize, but to beat the odds in life. Start figuring out now how to clap and dab away tears at the same time; it’s that kind of experience.

What makes Eternals feel special is that, for once, the director genuinely cares as much about the character within that spectacle, as the spectacle itself.

The Death of Dick Long may be a made-up story, but inside this crisis management suspense-comedy is a weirdly down-to-earth humanity about the ripple effects of out-of-nowhere recklessness.

The condensing of consequential shifts in fortune into relateably tense, humanly funny scenes is admirable, and the tech aspects are never too confusing that they pull away from the story’s stakes.

[A] fleet, gripping documentary.

A deadpan crime story with eccentric and fantastical touches, and a healthy sense of the absurd, “Have a Nice Day” makes a bold argument for Chinese animation as a fertile outlet for exploring the country’s more desperate, constricted lives, and the choices these people make.

As information-age documents go, it’s as necessary a glimpse of 21st century heroism and ideology warfare as you’re going to encounter, and a brutally effective argument for compassion toward those forced from their homeland.

It’s all great fun, even if there’s no central performance as riveting as Cho’s in “Searching.” Then again, acting in movies like this is an admittedly uphill battle, one that Reid is better at when not having to rely on the occasionally tinny dialogue. Long, Leung and de Almeida, meanwhile, fill the tapestry of intrigue efficiently and appealingly.

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.

With so many documentaries on Bergman already in existence, that von Trotta has made her own uniquely inviting tour of his triumphs, anguishes, and longstanding themes — in essence a roomy portrait of the artist as an engaged, fallible searcher — is its own gift of sorts, from one acolyte of cinema to another.

The result, as directed by the promising Jeremiah Zagar (“We The Animals”), is an agreeable combination drill of humor, hurt, on-court action and redemptive uplift that’s closer to simply being a solidly inspiring sports movie than anything notably representative of the Sandler oeuvre.

Amanda Knox delivers its own justice by covering all the complexities of its ever-fascinating true crime tale.

Miss Stevens bears a maturity and genuineness that thankfully feels miles apart from the inspirational assembly line of Hollywood product.

Activist in tone, and paced like a thriller, Reed’s movie painstakingly details how an election can be brusquely seized and swayed by unseen forces. Candidates need do little but sign on to be successfully co-opted.

When Ask Dr. Ruth is over, you’ll believe a human being can be as special as any computer-generated effect.

Hal entertainingly reminds us, his influence as a righteous, challenging, humanist chronicler of mortal foibles — and as a filmmaker on a quest for a greater understanding of our world — remains a force among today’s more conscientious directors.

Thankfully the creators of this expansive adventure, a crime-solving saga starring a bunny who wants to be a cop, have a bit more in mind than the usual strains of aww-dorable humor and frenetic action.