Robert Abele

With so much conversation these days about the effects of rape culture, Felt, with its atmospheric DIY aesthetics, enters the discussion as a corrective chiller that can best be described as compassionately perverse about one type of pushback.

Wherever you stand on healthcare and the fact that uninsured people nationwide use emergency rooms for basic services, the documentary The Waiting Room is a revealing portrait of the often tough transactions between patients and hospital staff at the urgency level.

As long as the world worshiped fame, Hunt realized, that light could be redirected where it was most needed, and in our toxically fused celebrity-political climate, that focused, principled, humane simplicity of purpose feels as resonant as ever.

Director David Bowers keeps things peppy and brightly lighted, but the movie's swiftest pleasures come from moment-seizing cast members.

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.

While Thomas and Eyre slip occasionally into feel-good vibes, they ultimately leave intact his narrative’s essential anger about the bureaucratic threat to community health care.

Larraín, who wrote the movie with Guillermo Calderón and Daniel Villalobos, approaches the material like a scientist both fascinated and cynically bemused by how a particularly virulent sickness operates.

Less a hand-wringing dispatch from a repressive land than a judiciously glossy nudge toward a better world, The Perfect Candidate isn’t complicated, yet earns its mixed/hopeful conclusion.

As externalized visions of high school hellishness go, Shaw’s doesn’t always translate into the most cohesively entertaining of mash-ups, but his techniques are attention-grabbers.

Eubank's fizzy mix of self-conscious, set-piece image-making and small-scale human detail is admirable.

Although the sentiment threatens to flatten out an intriguingly nervy vibe, Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best has plenty of rhythmic charm about its responsibility-challenged strivers.

Dragon has enough interesting left turns in style, mood and psychodrama to make it stand out.

Bullet to the Head is an adrenaline shot to your movie memory if the blunt, gleefully dumb, no-nonsense ways of '80s-style action flicks are your nostalgia drug of choice.

It’s a fascinating story of endurance, shaky scientific methods, and solidarity that’s been given a thoughtful resurrection thanks to the writings of Genovés himself – acted in voiceover by “Zama” star Daniel Giménez Cacho – and the recollections of seven participants.

“More with less” is a rewarding concept when it comes to indie movies, and writer-director Peter Livolsi’s The House of Tomorrow delivers just that in a brisk 90 minutes, telling a sweet, tart, and intelligently life-affirming story of teenage friendship and outsider spirit with a supremely light touch, and a winning collection of performances.

The archival footage, the impassioned interviews, and the inspiring story of how warriors for solutions can overcome entrenched views on poverty and health, make for something genuinely stirring.

Ultimately, Ferrara makes a convincing case for being Pasolini’s biographical caretaker, one troublemaker looking after another’s legacy, albeit with a more serious, thoughtful approach than a transgressive one.

The result may not be terribly illuminating about the (sub)human condition, despite the shout-outs to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Eden is probably closer to an expensive reality show about mismatched survivalists. But as August fare goes, it’s a sticky, sweaty hoot, well cast and paced like a disreputable beach read, even if you might sporadically wish Werner Herzog had gotten first crack at this material.

Jacquot pays tribute to his mentor and friend, by adapting Suzanna Andler less as the movie you want than as an intimate walk along that precipice of desire or nothingness.

In lieu of a literal fulfillment of the title’s promise, Dunn gives us a spiritual one, an aggressively poetic elegy to the pre-industrialized agrarian work/life ethic Berry made his most deeply felt cause.

Corben’s account is a prideful slab of snark, about Florida, its usual suspects, and the glittering allure of fraud, which one interviewee states is “the unofficial state business.”

More of the same, for all the good and acceptably routine that that implies.

The movie treats a girl's burgeoning sexuality as neither epic nor problematic, or mutually exclusive of feelings of love, but rather simply, refreshingly, as one part of maturing.

Whether you see Lévy, a spritely 74, as a hot spot gadfly or a dedicated war reporter, there’s no denying his dedication to the cause.

Though its chronological organization and issue management is rough around the edges, Esquenazi’s passionately argued film...easily convinces that the charges are impossible to believe.

Has a necessary charge to it, but also a distractingly goofy side.

The gory final act can't help but be an explanatory letdown after so much enigmatic fizz, but that's little bother when the rest of "Honeymoon" delivers a steady dose of newlywed nightmare.

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.

When I, Daniel Blake regrettably piles it on at the end, it’s Loach growing weary of humanizing details and desperate to shake you up with consequences, didacticism and speechifying. It’s the finger-pointer in him, but as this movie frequently shows in its best moments, he’s still a practiced veteran at open-arms affection for the dignity of the downtrodden.

The Viking saga Valhalla Rising, from the brutally stylish Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, has the bones of an action epic but the soul of something cultier.

As doomed as Noredin’s actions often seem, they’re tinged with enough simmering humanity to keep us caring.

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.

Should your New Year’s watching require the occasional break from grim awards fare and grimmer real-world news, you could do a lot worse than this well-intentioned tale of mirthful mouthfuls and other appetites.

The movie isn't exactly scary, and it has a tendency to meander. But the crumbling, ornate sets are an atmospheric marvel.

While the movie balances a spirited celebration of America’s space race ingenuity with a satire about the cleverness of mass deceit, it’s hard to ignore the one thing Operation Avalanche understands implicitly: whether you’re a believer or a skeptic, a well-crafted image can sell anything.

DuVall shows a welcome light touch with tone, easing back and forth between humor and neurosis and never treating her material as the last word on relationships.

It’s a movie that ultimately may mean more to those raised in heavily Catholic cultures, but it has an engaging prickliness as a satiric peek into the life of a brooding idealist.

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.

Youthful self-expression is a joyride in a minefield in Danny Madden’s Beast Beast, an adrenalized, tone-shifting indie bringing the technology-fueled lives of three suburban souls of varying circumstances, hopes and concerns into pathways destined to converge.

The film is a relatively smooth blend of optimism for a rejuvenated emphasis on human exploration in the beyond, and branded content promoting a controversial businessman.

A little of Ted Kaczynski can go a long way — especially at two hours — even as one’s appreciation for Copley’s intensity and cinematographer Nathan Corbin’s artful shotmaking never wanes. But in the well-trod realm of forensic examinations of the notorious, Stone’s considered hike into the life and times of a very American-made extremist does have undeniable power.

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.

Not all the right notes are hit in Grand Piano, but for an elegantly schizoid B movie, it's more B-sharp than B-flat.

Resourceful writer-director Jim Mickle covers both in his realism-tinged indie Stake Land and shows that a savvy mixture of characterization, atmosphere and gore-eographed suspense can make even the most familiar fright tropes feel vaguely organic again.

The Price of Free benefits from a potent mix of compassionate heroism and hard-won hopefulness.

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.

Touzani, an unfussy, patient director with a fondness for the simplicity of human interaction, implicitly trusts her star to carry the film’s effervescence and complexity, although you may wish the filmmaking was a little less straightforward.

Redoubt is slow going but not uninvolving. Barney’s filmmaking is less about the manipulation of image, or the roiling power of editing to create emotional states, than it is about dutifully documenting what he’s created, what he’s seeing, what’s on his mind.

As far as shutdown-inspired projects go, Erēmīta (Anthologies) has a certain felicitous intimacy, proof that when called to action, artists can meet a given moment — and the boundaries that come with it — with ideas at the ready, their eyes primed to see.

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.

A documentary that begs to be seen in a theater, Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang offers an inviting glimpse into the life of a truly international artist, one whose colorful fireworks displays literally paint the air.

The result is a film made of loosely connected scenes, the best ones floating between observation and storytelling, not unlike a dream.

A chunky spectacle, to be sure – overstuffed with plot and characters - but at times, it's an insanely entertaining one.

Can you tell it’s a play? Absolutely. Does that mean a damn thing? Not when the writing is this richly evocative, and the cast so often soars with it.

This is Pedersen's second movie for Sen in the same role (after "Mystery Road," with a reported Australian television series in the works), and his Jay is the kind of compellingly gloomy, intelligent and tough justice-seeker easily worth a whole series of politically thorny, culturally resonant crime sagas.

The getting-to-know-them is the best part of this Ghostbusters: these women are a true democratic caucus of funny. That leaves the aforementioned bloat — CGI bigness and the current vogue for drawn-out showdowns — the only nagging glitch, although it’s all slickly rendered by the visual effects team.

Ash is categorically a vibe more than it is an especially unique story or illuminating character study, even if González’s steely beauty conveys plenty about the psychological stakes at hand. But in this age of expensive and overwrought world-building, it’s Ellison’s experiential care with well-worn material that delivers the goods.

A movie you keep expecting to fizzle because of its punching-the-air gracelessness, but there's something weirdly effective about the artistic desperation, which includes inserts of chalkboard animation and to-the-camera testimonials.

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.

The bread and butter of good kids with talent and dreams, a committed coach, loyal followers and game footage does the expected task of charming us into becoming new fans, wherever we are.

Through interviews with survivors of the massacre, loved ones and congregants, as well as reporters, politicians and activists, Ivie has made something heartfelt and messy, focused on what’s devotional in testifying about a joy that’s never coming back, and pardoning a malevolence that’s never gone away.

With its gorgeous photography, charismatic participants and unabashed love for discovery, The Most Unknown feels like a science documentary cross-fertilized with that sentimental old Coke commercial — the smartest among us holding hands across the globe, charting our universe in happy harmony.

You may tire of the onion-peeling by the time it’s all laid bare, but for fans of the buffet-style of crime capers it’s a slick diversion, engagingly assembled and acted.

Though not the most sure-footed of superhero entries, as an offbeat perspective on the genre, They Call Me Jeeg merits an enthusiast’s look.

When it comes to climate change, our media diet is starved. So if you need that refresher course in the importance of saving the Amazon, We Are Guardians, like a well-made pamphlet, does the job with plenty of efficiency and heat.

Its modest (if occasionally gross-out) stabs at genre parody rarely insult our intelligence and even allow for the kind of retro deadpan silliness Mel Brooks used to underline his louder punch lines.

Though the documentary’s early musings about athletic integrity in general are ultimately usurped by a tale of personal responsibility and nefarious global power, the disruption feels acute and essential.

There's nothing terribly original about Safe, but it's a suitably grimy playground for action cinema's reigning pit bull.

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.

“Jazz Fest” isn’t without flavor and rhythm, but what’s lacking is the thickness.

A Space Program may find cheeky humor in our quest for meaningful science. But it certainly hints that there's something worshipful in the details.

Though this look back is formidably researched and should appeal to both obsessives and the uninformed, it’s the insistent echo to our present upheaval, and the refreshing reminder that a polarized nation only got more unified in its desire for the truth, that gives “Watergate” its peculiarly of-the-moment power.

Gleefully dumb but eager to entertain, this is cheeseball stuff baked with deliciously outsized performances and low comedy and photographed across mighty beautiful landscapes.

In key spots, thanks to Simmons' brilliantly wounded gruffness and Pucci's nimble toggling act between vacancy and awakened spirit, The Music Never Stopped achieves an admirable poignancy about our emotional, healing relationship to the songs we love.

Under Komasa’s direction, the mix of fractured fable and terroristic morality play in Bartek Bartosik’s screenplay is absurd but potent, giving Heel enough psychologically twisted juju to nearly always feel like more than the sum of its parts.

[Woo] may have tamped down some of his more sentimental and tragic impulses, but he definitely flexes for the climactic melee in a deconsecrated church, which is beautifully bananas, but also, in a funny way, a personal statement on the intimacy that quality action filmmaking should create.

Out of Plain Sight doesn’t need to be earthshaking filmmaking to relay a valuable ongoing story about a hidden nightmare for all of us.

“Above and Beyond” is a slick, engrossing sizzle reel of the agency’s triumphs at turning curiosity about the universe into data about our place in it.

If its wobbliness doesn't always serve its commanding central performance, the movie does mark a sensitive, low-key approach to outsiders of any kind, one that legitimizes their struggle without selling them as ready-made saints.

Less a journalistic endeavor than an admirer’s tour — with room for blackly funny Herzog-ian touches in his choice of archival clip or patently demonic voice-over.

The brusque teen humor, underpinning turmoil and sentiment all seem to be pulled and massaged from the same organic whole, and that's refreshing in a genre so often built on gimmicks and stereotypes.

Salazar’s deliberateness of image and tone can sometimes feel like its own archly overemphasized meaning, but it’s never less than an artfully sincere companion to the drama of missing years and reconsidered choices that fortifies Sunday’s Illness.

There's a chic emptiness to Entertainment, undoubtedly, and anti-comedy constructs that may rub the wrong way, but there's also a spiky intelligence at work too, one that engages through the artifice of disengagement and the illusion of "performance."

Writer-director Clark's commitment to a deadpan vibe of crisp comic kink amid eccentric, left-turn sorrow can sometimes feel condescending. But within this not-so-jolly trip into the detailed recesses of simmering suburban emptiness, Hollyman takes this woman's barely controlled dignity on a quietly brave, revealing ride.

Backcountry inevitably brings on the bloody, but it finds atmospheric ways to depict how the bucolic hush of a nature getaway can morph into a survival nightmare for the unprepared.

Ego-stroking bio docs being a cottage industry these days, Balvin is one of the more disarmingly open figures to get this kind of treatment. But it’s also nice that The Boy From Medellín makes the most of its allotted time with a busy phenomenon to at least dabble in the ins and outs of an artist contemplating his place in the world.

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

By keeping things short, sweet and dutifully tuneful, Echo in the Canyon is like the doc version of one of the period’s sonic nuggets, leaving you with a peace/love/understanding high and a desire to break out the vinyl for more of the same.

With storytelling economy and dramatic precision often missing from today's independent films, Batmanglij augments the building blocks for a nifty paranoid thriller with sharp commentary on our faction-centered society and the pitfalls of reinvention.

Like a lush ballad that’s somehow both off-key and in total harmony, it’s unlike anything else out there, and certainly more interesting in its swings and misses than a lot of the machine-stamped celebrity biopics littering the movie landscape these days.

In a world increasingly obsessed with the notion of homelands and borders, it’s good to be reminded by a chill hang with an open-arms message that the world is strongest when we get to make our best lives anywhere we choose.

Whose Streets? vitally offers — despite its birth in sorrow and its many war-zone-like stretches — is a tale of alertness and awakening.

A movie that, if never exactly a cathartic experience, carries you along in its clenched grip with an undeniable power. It’s sad and funny and real.

It’s a wealth of information The Ivory Game vitally offers, and action it means to incite. That may well be enough to get audiences involved.

Prickly, suspenseful, even coolly humorous, Mojave finds noirish fun in the existential woes of a successful artist and old-fashioned movie pleasure in the parry and thrust of sharp dialogue.

Its dizzying strength is as a visceral journey, a detour from the privileged freedom represented by a horizon to the tragic limbo of displacement, an ocean that’s both a confinement and an abyss.

It’s made with campfire-spooky care rather than an abiding need to impress you with his gifts.

Though the careful mood is invariably dissipated when it comes time to kill, kill, kill, Arnby's ace in the hole remains Suhl, a young actress of Streep-ian intensity.

Marked by stunning locations and Jakub Bejnarowicz’s fleet, evocative cinematography, Iceman is almost like something unearthed itself: a recognizable B western sharpened as much by its glints of psychology as by its kinetic savagery.

The picture benefits from its performances, notably Evans' roguish appeal as a guy simultaneously driven and destructive.

It’s not uncommon that the most intriguing first films are the ones that stumble on their way to purposefulness, and Mutt easily meets that standard, presenting us with a vivid character we unabashedly root for as the day’s challenges try to pierce a newly armored soul.

Director Stephanie Soechtig’s passionately contended, slickly produced film may not sway the most fervid 2nd Amendment defenders, but in its problem-solving vigor could spur a lot of others who believe in change to make that call, join that group, or vote a certain way.

“Burt” isn’t driven by narrative. Director Burke is way more invested in the interpersonal dynamics of oddballs than anything else and, to that end, a fair amount of humorous tension is maintained.

It’s not a complete journalistic picture, unfortunately, and it’s ham-fistedly structured to withhold information for maximum dramatic impact. But that impact, as predictable as it is, hits hard.

It looks exhilarating, and if the filmmakers are ultimately there to play, not probe, that’s fine, even if you may not know these kids at the end any better than you did at the beginning.

The object isn't to stir you into what-if feminist outrage so much as to let a culturally magnificent era's societal inequalities act as a dissonant countermelody to a famous artist's biography.

The Wonder undeniably resonates in these confounding times concerning belief, fact and manipulation.

When its cinematic influences aren’t so obvious and its story particulars aren’t distractingly fuzzy, this earnestly moody film serves notice that indie urban noir can still be a potent calling card for up-and-coming talents.

The darkly funny Australian charmer Griff the Invisible introduces its titular hero to us as nighttime caped crusader first, mild-mannered daytime office drone second.

Take Me to the River reaches its end sadder and wiser if not satisfactorily complete as a psychodrama. But Sobel thrives on the unevenness, and it gives his admirably off-putting wade into fractured-family waters its own specialized charge.

At its most absorbing, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles makes it clear there are no easy answers, perhaps especially when the art itself isn’t easy.

Guzzoni’s movie is an unsparing portrait of aimlessness told mostly in the queasiest shades.

Conquering time travel may be a big deal, but Greer’s affecting portrait of a woman processing a second chance keeps the miracles of Aporia grounded and not flashy — a portal to human epiphanies, not digitally rendered spectacle.

Touches of empathy and self-awareness invariably crystallize the unsettling emotions of revisiting one’s past life.

It’s all plenty inventive and heart-conscious, grim without being punishing and, in its openness about impermanence and humility, could spark some significant parent-child exchanges about love, flaws and the necessity of meaningful time together.

Where the filmmakers’ approach sets itself apart in these days of image-massaged biographies is in juxtaposing the bookending health catastrophes of Fauci’s career as an especially illuminating lens through which to examine his drive, decisions and personality.

Whether poking at superhero cliches (there’s a choice post-credit scene) or trying to be kill-clever, it’s all in dopey, gruesome fun, although, to reiterate, a “Toxic Avenger” even normies can enjoy doesn’t exactly sound like a true Troma tribute.

What Salmerón is after, however, is a simple portrait of hilarious exuberance, hard-won togetherness and strange wisdom. That search yields results.

The movie exists in a space beyond arguments about immigration policy and border security, and while sometimes a little too willfully pokey, it speaks to something indelibly human about dreams and their costs.

As an ensemble movie, The Commune isn’t the most gripping, but when it zeroes in on Dyrholm’s affecting portrayal, it’s like Tolstoy’s famous line about the uniqueness of unhappy families, poignantly adapted for group living.

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.

There is much that is finely wrought here as a tactile slice of women’s history told in careful observances, hidden textures and the sights and sounds of nature unbound.

With every line and look, Loren both reminds us of her legacy playing tenacious women and paints Rosa’s distinctive fire and grief like an artisan. It’s a compact master class in the movie star’s craft: exquisitely tailored glamour and deft characterization working seamlessly in tandem.

As Mama Weed makes deliciously apparent, where its iconic star goes, we will gladly follow.

The combination of technique and message is ultimately winning. It’s tempting to think of Biggest Little Farm as the real-life equivalent of an epic pastoral storybook tale, but with the kind of happy ending that suggests a blueprint for saving the earth.

While Christine the movie may leave you in a coldly analytical space about sad people — even its dollops of humor have a chilliness — Christine the woman stays with you, thanks to a career-best performance from Hall that’s stark, thoughtful, and mesmerizing.

Like a fan excitedly showing off their record collection, the documentary Streetlight Harmonies flips through its history of doo-wop telling a tale both tuneful and essential in the development of rhythm & blues, rock and roll and civil rights.

Chuck is, in certain ways, not unlike its flawed hero: a lot of personality, just enough ambition, more interested in a good time and simple insight than a lasting impression.

If Coup de Chance is an exit for Allen, it’s at least a gracefully made one. To see where it’s heading doesn’t devalue its breezy appeal as a shaggy-dog tale about regret, power and luck.

Men Go to Battle isn’t always effective, in that way DIY filmmaking sometimes irritates by deliberately avoiding “moments.” But as an offbeat lens through which to view an oft-mined era, it has a quiet pull.

While The Conductor isn’t redrawing the documentary form, it’s nevertheless pleasurably illuminating as admiration cinema about a feminist hero who bucked tradition and broke rules to make herself — and the significant music she’s curated — heard on her terms.

Often an engrossing example of the sweeping, stirring biography.

The compulsively watchable oddness of Lamb and its commingling of innocence and peril keep it from easy categorization.

The cheeky title How to Live Forever belongs to a wry, hopeful yet enigma-appreciating documentary about the perils and possibilities that come with growing old.

There’s not much in the way of bruising insight into the makeup of a deteriorating personality, but for a compact spin through well-trod fields of lustful, sad-mad blindness, “Thirst Street” has its share of disreputably perverse pleasures.

As A Private Life moves along, with Lilian negotiating a break-in, threats and lapses in judgment, it never exactly coheres. Yet it somehow entertains, which is a testament to Zlotowski’s energy juggling her various theme-colored story balls.

It’s an invitingly austere movie, designed for both searching believers and curious others. The film can be cinematically rigorous, but it’s never ritualistically flashy.

If you’re looking for a quick medicinal shot of how we got to Trump in the White House, the bracing “Divide and Conquer” feels like one of the more alarming civics courses you’ll ever take.

One wishes Bernstein had more cleanly presented the arc of Purcell’s life and career and how her representative eye evolved. Nevertheless, the sheer number of images shown gives this brisk foray into Purcell’s work an admirable guided-tour feel.

It would be a mistake to call X a misfire — in its artisanal, period textures and delight in old-school atmospherics, it’s too well made. But it’s better at teasing than following through.

That Neither Confirm Nor Deny doesn’t ignore the wider controversies of the CIA is welcome . . . But at heart, this is a heist saga designed to enthrall in its ingenuity and ambition, one of the more presentable cases of cowboy spycraft from an us-versus-them time.

There is surely more to be mined from this extraordinary, complicated trailblazer’s life than one suitably enjoyable love letter to his brilliance and bravery.

An even-tempered slice of pro-animal sentimentality that may not be the smoothest piece of filmmaking, but wears its emotions honestly and benefits from offering a look at a rarely explored arena of human-animal relationships: dogs trained for combat.

In the modest but sneakily affecting Australian father-son drama West of Sunshine, your sympathies for a problematic dad come and go in waves, sometimes within the span of a few seconds.

Fahrenheit 11/9 may be a scattered summing-up of bad origins, and a loose blame game about our present corrosiveness, but what gives it its sear is its message of a ruptured country as eminently fixable, as long as wishing and hoping is replaced by organizing and doing.

Though overlong, and pitched a little too heavily toward cable-TV sensationalism...Killing for Love is still a gripping murder mystery about the fated coupling of a pair of calculating romantics too smart for their own good, and the limits of the American justice system

[An] engaging portrait of a complicated but vivid sports figure.

As overdue tales of history go, Palestine ‘36 (currently one of the last films with access to its real-world locations) is certainly more of a blunt instrument than a novelistic endeavor. But its broad strokes and rooted passions easily earn their place, and deserve to inspire more such stories.

Downloaded is still a vigorous retelling of Fanning's and Parker's wildfire achievement and its ethical pitfalls, even if there's little in the way of journalistic balance.

The effect is both visceral and thoughtful, demonstrating a knack for cinematic dread rarely shown by today's manipulative horror meisters.

As for Polsky’s own directorial style, it’s breathlessly, haphazardly eccentric, a little too prone to the clichés sports docs use to pump up our adrenaline. But his subjects — kings of the puck, the pigskin and the pitch — are engagingly self-analytical and honest.

It wants you to feel that nightmare scenario of being stuck, but it also wants to be meditative. It’s not always successful at merging those experiences — as experimentation it falls short, and the horror label is also a stretch — but it ultimately earns a liminal fascination as it fuses your perspective to the protagonist’s.

It’s a well-meaning impression of a soul-searching documentary (and only an impression), but impressions can still be plenty entertaining.

As with many well-intentioned scare flicks, the wrapping-up feels dissipated and obvious, but for a good while The Last Exorcism makes for an atmospheric, character-rich stab at movie fright.

Before the Flood is neither dull screed nor stat-heavy pamphlet, thanks largely to the questing intensity of its marquee guide.

As a mood killer and conscience-raiser it’s woefully obvious, but also unlikely to erase the sense memory of all the scintillatingly captured fauna that came before it.

It hasn’t always been easy trying to figure out what’s going through the mind of the 44th president of the United States, but Barry is a satisfyingly curious, honest attempt to make his inner struggle a beautiful part of this groundbreaking statesman’s biography.

There’s something oddly appealing in witnessing this dutiful, besieged parent make do with nothing to offer but himself, wherever that takes him.

It’s a confident weirdness that Buster’s Mal Heart boasts as it dissects a damaged soul for signs of what’s eternal and what’s triggered when a man breaks in two.

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.

Sleight is slight in the good way, because it floats along and draws your attention instead of yanking it by the collar.

Cunningham’s beguiling openness, coupled with as many estate-sanctioned photographs from his collection as Bozek can squeeze into the brisk running time, easily overcome a general roughness of assembly.

Shot in the Dark is a sobering reminder that places like Chicago are more than sensationalistic national headlines about crime and sports: they're where kids struggle every day to balance their dreams with the obstacle course of their surroundings.

Directors Tim Golden and Ross McDonnell, with the help of narrator Raul Esparza, do justice to all sides.

A sincere, sensitive entry in that niche genre of family drama scenarios involving culinary legacy.

In its modest, quiet maturity, Luxor avoids the cliché of presenting the East as exotic or renewal as a catharsis — it’s the rare travel story that understands how sometimes being someplace else is as much about the “being” as it is the “someplace else.”

Whether you agree with his system-damning rhetoric or see him as no better than anyone else in our clogged punditocracy, Brand: A Second Coming is, if not a careful portrait, at least an orgy of personality.

Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down never fully escapes its branded-content vibes, but as a parallel love story and back-to-battle story, it succeeds.

It takes some getting used to, and there are sequences more awkward in their motley-ness than pointed. But overall, it’s an effectively crashing intimacy created by the performances (especially the fizz and warmth Schilling and Rosendahl have together), Claudia Wolscht’s restless editing and Hanno Lentz’s camerawork.

Aram, Aram is almost too lightweight to have real power, but its snapshot of a vibrant local community and a hollowed-out transplant's very real identity crisis feels genuine.

It’s a mostly enjoyably overstuffed model kit of adventure ingredients: talking dog heroes, an intrepid boy aviator, an outspoken girl reporter, garbage playgrounds, mechanical worlds, robot peril and mischievous humor. It’s even, for this director, tantalizingly political, venturing into dark territory about such utopia-bursting ills as bigotry and authoritarianism.

Without gimmicks or pomp (save a picturesque setting) and through the supreme talents of Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds, it offers up an affecting two-hander about a couple on the brink who’ve never really acknowledged said precipice. As directed with low-key confidence by Polly Findlay, the movie is both good and, in a certain way, good enough.

Annabelle: Creation is a professional jitters-fest, made with deep-seated esteem for the genre rather than cynicism about a box-office sure thing.

Though there’s never a smooth path toward narrative or emotional enlightenment as you watch CRD, Kanadé’s willingness to explore the creative impulse through impish experimentation is amusing and infectious.

The Lure may not be everybody’s siren song, but as debut features go, it counts as a splash.

In its garishness, Mommy is a weirdly compelling overreach for this young filmmaker. It's the work of someone clearly passionate, if not disciplined yet, about his cinematic interests.

The plot is predictable, but the inevitable showdown is, appropriately, the movie's highlight, a ferocious hands-on battle — save for the balletic bamboo pole interlude — on a busy, night-lit expressway, with semis and cars roaring past. It's a climax worthy of the tribute thread running through Kung Fu Killer.

Ponciroli shows natural flair for holstered and unholstered suspense (if not always story logic), plus he’s got a worthy partner in the muted exteriors and sparsely lit interiors of John Matysiak’s cinematography, and a cast that dutifully plays along with every stare-down and line of colorfully poetic cowboy dialogue.

In the end, despite the clunky mix of narrative formats, My Father and the Man in Black makes for an illuminating alternate history of sorts to the Hollywoodized version of Cash's ascendancy in "Walk the Line."

Part biopic, part mystery, part exposé, Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed is ultimately a cooled celebration, one eager to acknowledge that gurus are complicated, showbiz is treacherous, and some landscapes hide things.

With its mix of collected video, on-the-ground scenes in more than a dozen cities, interviews with Ukrainians (including some dissenting Russian voices), and media coverage, “Freedom on Fire” is a pulsating jumble of hearts and minds making do amid war and wreckage.

Grief is universal, and yet no two stories about it are alike, a distinction that keeps Koji Fukada’s tender drama “Love Life” unpredictable as it mixes the mundane with the inexplicable, and empathy with alienation, to nuanced, if never fully stirring effect.

This one's all about the next jaunty, jangly guitar riff on the soundtrack that signals a new day, the next bit of inspiration or opportunity, and sometimes that's just fine.

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.

As bad-taste splatter comedies go, "Dead Snow 2" is one of the more charitably nutty ones, less about gorging on gore than reveling in how silly the whole genre can be.

Neither agonizing nor ecstatic, but solidly cinematic, Andrei Konchalovsky’s Michelangelo biopic Sin sees the veteran Russian filmmaker tackling the mystery of genius with what might be described as sumptuous grit.

In Haynes’s psychologically and atmospherically astute compositions and careful nursing of the emotional impact on Bilott and wife Sarah (Anne Hathaway), it’s more a brittle ache of a quest than a righteous melodrama.

Its determined ambition and atmospheric skill keeps Saulnier firmly in the category of directors to watch.

The message is clear, and memorably rendered: Care about where your meat comes from, because then you might eat less of it, feel better when you do eat it, and cause a little less suffering in the world.

Downriver is the kind of graceful provocation that slips around a corner before you can pinpoint its intentions, and that keeps it arresting as both an inquiry and a character study.

In a year that’s seen a valuable rethink of how we process crime stories — from the eye-opening documentaries “Predators” and “The Perfect Neighbor” to Caroline Fraser’s deeply researched book “Murderland” — Shackleton’s perspective is still an intriguing, worthy provocation regarding our cultural bloodlust.

Shéhérazade wins us over with what we love about love: its strength in even the direst of circumstances.

The nuances in Derki’s portraits are what deepen the elements that could easily have been a distancing turnoff.

An agreeable visit with comedy titans who clearly cherish the opportunity to regale their peers with war stories and opinions about the state of comedy today.

You may see Flitcroft as a figure of ridicule or a hoax icon sticking it to gatekeepers or the ultimate aspiring amateur. The movie, however, shrewdly relishes all identities in its mix of the humor inherent in his prankish folly and the sentimentality of a pie-in-the-sky dream.

Though modestly assembled, Beijing Spring benefits from its historical richness as a portrait of artistic dissent.

The actors sell it, especially when Dern is unafraid to mix revitalized pleasure with pushing for answers. But the stand-up storyline, so promising, is dropped and it feels like a missed opportunity. Still, the highs and lows of marriage aren’t merely a punch line in “Is This Thing On?” — and that’s good.

Ultimately, When Two Worlds Collide has a breathless urgency to it, even if its structuring of events feels a bit ramshackle, and the directness of its environmental warnings feel no different than a thousand other message docs.

The Roache-Turners prove to have the right mix of micro-budget filmmaking ingenuity, action sass and undead splatter to make "Wyrmwood" a tastier than usual exploitation nosh.

That dance of performance and being — mindsets committed artists don’t always manage smoothly — is what makes Val an appealing, at times even touching hodgepodge of the actor’s journey.

The world may never tire of being fascinated with serial killers, but My Friend Dahmer avoids exploitation often enough to forge its own perceptive, tense, character-driven path.

McNaughton shows some signs of directing rust in pacing and tone, but in much the way "Henry" played out, he keeps sensationalism at bay and twisted character drama in his sights, which makes for a more pleasurably icky suspense.

As a brisk, sobering reminder of — if you’re inclined to think this way — where it all went wrong with image over meaningful policy in politics, The Reagan Show may feel like the doc of the moment.

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

Whether snarling behind shades in uniform or off hours in elegant dresswear, Chen is a rule-breaking hoot, never more so than when she’s gearing up to heap abuse on a near-tears little girl in order to break her.

If Pusher III is the trilogy's least effective, that may be because the soured-deal plot line is by now a given, and its theme is the simplest: Old habits die hard.

Director Wendy J.N. Lee, who made the grueling trek with a solar-powered camera operated by a monk, provides plenty of breathtaking footage and a strong sense of both the journey's illuminative highs and treacherous (as in altitude and terrain) lows.

The idiosyncratic earnestness of an experienced horrormeister playing with the classics still makes for a substantial midnight snack.

Piercing is decidedly not for everybody, but it somehow avoids exploitative luridness, thanks in part to the peculiar aura of uneasy innocence that Abbott and Wasikowska create around their roles (which are really more constructs than characters).

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 like a cozy, informational visit with a beloved professor who assumes you come with a cineaste's built-in appreciation, but enjoys connecting the dots for you in a way that makes the movement's creative signposts — nonprofessional actors, street vitality, stories about poverty and desperation — feel freshly indelible.

The movie achieves its own nervy sensitivity about youthful urban despair.

The Last Suit is a bumpy ride tonally, but its stubborn heart is in the right place.

At its best, when theme and visuals are in sync, Arco has the easy charm of something half-remembered from one’s cartoon-packed youth: beguilingly earnest and awkward in equal measure.

Some films benefit from tying their persuasive abilities to sustained righteousness more than careful slickness, and this collaboration between Cheyenne filmmaker West and veteran documentarian Kempner (“The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg”) is one of them.

A surprisingly effective slice of dystopian noir.

As eye-opening and propulsive as the movie is, Amer and Noujaim don’t always keep the thread of their multi-faceted narrative, which was going to be a daunting task for any well-meaning filmmaker trying to give you arresting personalities while parsing complex aspects of the digital world.

Whenever the larkishness thins, though, Sheil — who could easily have modeled her face for Modigliani — grounds it all as a young woman torn between dissecting a mistake and accepting a responsible future.

As a tale of digital power-tripping both exhilarating and terrifying, We Are Legion stands as a useful 21st century narrative.

When it’s merely a guided tour marked by sites and talking historians, Finding Babel can feel a little color-by-numbers. (Which may explain the Schreiber-read interludes.) But there are excursions that feel invigorating.

Although Vaya is plenty watchable as a commercial melodrama energized by its performers (especially the magnetic, star-in-the-making Nyoka), Omotoso’s fleet pacing and Kabelo Thathe’s marvelously textured cinematography, it also shrewdly avoids convenient, well-trod moralizing about small towns versus urban centers.

The wistfulness on display is touching and funny, often both at the same time.

The intimacy, warmth and humor of the memories give the footage of him teaching the feeling of watching home movies from the adoring offspring of a cherished father.

The script (by director Gary Lundgren with James Twyman) is modestly feel-good to a fault and the scenery expectedly beautiful, but it's the unforced acting providing the most nourishment.

Lives Well Lived isn't exactly artful moviemaking, but it's a heartfelt reminder that for many, age is just a number.

You don’t have to be a Deadhead, or even a casual listener, to find in Long Strange Trip a compelling tale of what happens when iconoclasts become icons.

Whenever Rebney gets to be Rebney -- be it insulting, sweet or wearily perturbed -- "-Winnebago Man shows a full tank of irascible charm.

The key to the fun is that Yeon eschews lookie-loo gore for thrilling set pieces: his fleet, imaginative action scenes recall Brad Bird’s crisp transition to real people in peril when he made his “Mission Impossible” movie.

The best nuggets come from the interviews, as when a lawyer remarks that when it comes to white-collar criminals, they historically have no filter on the phone.

Catfish was built to charm, not indict, and on that front it makes for a diverting seriocomic wade into the pitfalls of Internet-based immediacy, and by extension, the manipulative mysteries of documentary assemblage.

As summer movies go, Logan Lucky is especially tasty bar food, slung by a master.

In its empathy-driven terror and ghoulish wit — including the Chekhov’s-gun rule hilariously applied to the placenta — “Baby Ruby” won’t be for everyone, although it only ever feels steeped in the honesty of experience, which, according to the press materials, was partly Wohl’s own.

Low-key and likable, the Nassers’ Gaza Mon Amour is a movie with no use for sentimentality but in which the timing of a simple kindness, a nervous smile or a cathartic laugh means everything. Which it often can.

Sure, there are the kinds of contrivances and roadblocks one expects from a comic drama of this nature, but Lionheart is built more around the abiding sweetness of its message of hope-filled struggle and hard-won enlightenment than the rudiments of a business farce.

Even for the most techno-wary at the Toronto assisted living centers where the movie was primarily filmed, the lure of virtual visitation seems to go a good way toward bridging what's been a large and digitally contoured generation gap.

Maybe the best thing I can say about Hotel Mumbai is that I kept waiting for it to become “Die Hard,” and it thankfully never did.

With the intensified focus on use of force in police departments, the unsettling documentary Killing Them Safely couldn't be timelier.

There's storytelling vigor here and fine performances, plus some pointed exchanges about the burdens of cultural identity and emotional preservation in the aftermath of immense upheaval.

Though often roughly assembled in its sweep of archival footage, witnessing and performance, as a celebration of a monumental figure in politics and culture, A Song for Cesar doesn’t need to be slick to reveal its beating heart.

You’ve probably figured out by now that “The Mountain” isn’t for everybody, but for the art-house faithful who like their critiques of American soullessness made with a humming austerity, this one’s a painstakingly designed (courtesy Jacqueline Abrahams) and visually transfixing beaut, even when it succumbs to its own zombified vibe toward the end.

The news is, sadly, all too consumed still with crime story post-mortems about “good kids” who screw up, but at least American Animals wants to leave you wondering about how we tell stories, and whose we tell, rather than simply satisfied you saw one told well.

Like others in this series (“The Black List,” “The Out List”), it’s a mix of to-the-camera testimonials and archival photos, elegantly packaged, less a movie than a companionable hour spent with a diverse collection of people wonderfully articulate about the road they’ve traveled.

Overall this is a solid portrait of time’s effect on what we miss, and how we miss.

The sights, sounds and sociological quirks of Lyle's and Nina's particular circle of existence are what give Newlyweeds its indie resonance, less a city symphony than an urban alt-fugue.

Even with the thinnest of narrative framing and some arty touches that feel superfluous, there’s an overall portrait of authentic grit and resilience here, of knowing when to hold on and when to let go, that is well-nurtured by Beecroft’s admiring eye for these renegade women.

Roofman plays like an indie drama photobombing a studio rom-com.

Filmmaker Anahí Berneri, through her tough single-mother protagonist, mesmerizingly realized by Sofía Gala Castiglione, offers a no-apologies look at a member of a risk-taking underclass dinged on all sides.

How are the action sequences? They’re fun until they feel familiar, and even then they’re still a trip because the long takes demand admiration for the sheer brute exertion at work.

While it may have started as a spellbinding evening of theater, what Raim’s unfussy, handsomely mounted documentary reinforces is that film is its own spiritually transporting medium, with its own risks and rewards, and its own ability to turn the enjoyment of art into — what else? — tradition!

Never Goin’ Back, which Frizzell has admitted is in ways an honest, personal reckoning with incidents in her own fumbling adolescence, has something many comedies simply fail to care about: a spark-filled joie de vivre about the stupidity of youth that lifts it above many more cynically crass (and typically male) examples of the genre.

No Man of God may have been written by a man, but you can’t help feeling the reason this umpteenth examination of a modern devil works as well as it does is because, as a woman, Sealey knows where the exploitation traps are and avoids them by focusing on the people in her frame, their exchanges well-paced by editor Patrick Nelson Barnes.

Set on a remote farm in the Icelandic tundra that could center either a horror film or a children’s fable, Valdimar Jóhannsson’s debut feature — which is sorta both — is in certain ways unexplainable, and in other ways as straightforward as a family portrait.

There’s no getting around how enjoyable it is to watch Coogan effortlessly play an entitled bastard, whether giving it or getting it. He’s so expert at the darkly witty, cringe-while-laughing insult, it’s like watching a pro athlete in flight; it’s a shame Winterbottom’s ambitions for Greed weren’t greater as a rollicking, truly scary picture of unrepentant gluttony.

Though it’s millennial angst that drives the Andrea/Tara trajectories, Mendelsohn’s portrait of midlife fragility is a strong coloring in Untogether.

It’s easy to fault the egos of actors who want to write and direct themselves, but if they don’t make the most of the star attraction — their own performance strengths — what’s the point?

Where Miyazaki’s wisdom kept his prodigious imagination in the service of intimacy, “Big Fish” is daringly, if haphazardly, epic with its vision and feelings. The urge to awe may feel self-conscious at times, but it’s rarely not heartfelt, even when it’s skirting the edge of incomprehensible.

There’s a refreshingly contained, deadpan sass to many of the characters’ personalities – and even Marino’s direction of the actors — that makes these people appealing, not abrasive, and which never devolves into the needlessly crude or ham-fistedly improvised, as so often happens in the more raucously engineered R-rated comedies.

It’s better than your typical kiddie flick, often gorgeous to behold in its exquisitely painted Yukon wilderness and fierce, majestic canine protagonist.

"Deidra & Laney” shows an easy flair for heartwarming comedy, character eccentricity and issues that sting but resolutions that soothe.

Their street-level stories, frequent Cannes winners since 1999’s “Rosetta,” typically hinge on a central desperation tied to simple survival, but when played out with their trademark visual restlessness and character-driven purposefulness, they’re often as nail-biting as any genre exercise or melodrama.