Robert Abele

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.

Though assured in execution and not without a few moments of genuine tension — mainly emanating from Combs' flinty weirdness — Would You Rather is hardly a most dangerous game night at the movies.

“Brimstone” is less successful as it edges toward an impressionistic immersion into fire and fiesta, but as you-are-there experiences go, it has energy to burn.

Being privy to this proud, close family at such a heavy, teetering moment is naturally emotional, which means Sbarge’s occasional voice-over commentary and the overactive music score can feel superfluous. But it’s well-intentioned empathy.

If Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue and its intimate tapestry of peasant fortitude and artistic endeavor won’t be as immediately resonant to audiences outside of China as his expansive masterpieces “A Touch of Sin” or “Still Life” are, it’s still a valuable document.

Garland’s active engagement with his themes, moods, and show-stopping ick is still something to be reckoned with in today’s climate of fear in the film industry regarding original stories.

The totality of Fantastic Fungi is so entertaining, informative and appealingly hopeful about the hard-working cure-all for our ailing world lying beneath our feet.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The takeaway of Reversing Roe is that Stern and Sundberg are issuing a warning, one backed by a grim timeline, forcefully presented, that makes it all too clear what’s at stake if a landmark ruling on women’s rights is overturned.

Too bad the only thrill you get from all the bloodletting is that you know each cartoony death brings you that much closer to the end credits.

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

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.

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

Perhaps the best thing you can say about Kicks is that its strengths and weaknesses make for intriguing bedfellows, like a cautionary fable that’s as much about the hazards of forging an artistic authenticity as it is the pitfalls of a corrosive approach to manhood.

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

Like any good purveyor of noir, Boyle, who wrote the film with Joel Clark and Michael Lerman, understands that identifying someone is only one endgame while the mystery of identity is naggingly, tragically endless.

Reminiscent of the naturalistic social dramas made by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Scaffolding combines the nervous tension of a thriller about a bomb waiting to go off — Lax’s volatility is as nail-biting as his bursts of compassion are relief-inducing — and the mournful clarity of a fly-on-the-wall documentary about troubled students.

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.

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.

Suffice to say, unrelenting material like this isn't for everybody. That it is a gloriously filmic gesture - by turns jaw-dropping, elusive, silly, obnoxious, painful and beautiful - is celebration enough.

If it sounds critical to say that the resolution of the murder at the center of the narrative is the least interesting aspect of the movie’s intrigue, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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.

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.

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

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.

Demolition is a state of mind in White Building, Cambodian filmmaker Kavich Neang’s sad, beautiful feature debut, an urban elegy about what’s thick in the air when the home one has always known is not long for the world.

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.

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.

This film beams and buzzes inside its closed loop with the hard-won wisdom of acceptance. And it does so while staying in awe of what can never be understood, only appreciated — and if we’re lucky, enjoyed.

Most assuredly, though, this is a duo of director and star once more moving in concert together, maybe not as confidently as with some previous efforts, but with a knowing intelligence.

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.

A skillfully rendered narrative that should satisfy fans and pique the interest of the uninitiated.

A stirring ode to cultural bridge-building.

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.

Private Violence makes painfully clear the emotional and legal hurdles battered women endure just to feel safe again in or outside the home.

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.”

As messy (and even physical) as the family’s exchanges can get, Benguigui always has the sisters’ inherent solidarity in mind. But it’s still a jarring mix of tones to contend with, and the many narrative strands — which include a trip to Algeria — aren’t all satisfactorily resolved.

Thanks to the deadpan chops of the cast, the low-grade silliness is funny enough to offset the occasional feeling that a shorter, tighter version built around its biggest laughs might have been more effective.

A beautifully filmed, subtly political travelogue with some central conundrums.

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.

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

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.

Whether we read about someone like Hasna or watch such a sad journey dramatized, it’s worth being reminded that stories like these always leave behind many who are forced to reckon with a society’s notion of what and whom they resemble.

Bastards is a thriller truly etched in darkness, pools of black broken mostly by the stricken yet soldiering faces of her main characters, like ships in a sea of stormy nights.

The filmmaking has a certain paint-by-numbers frankness that works in some ways, not in others.

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.

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.

Though never disorienting or obnoxious (à la “Euphoria”), it can get tiring: a restlessness of spirit and technique that occasionally separates us from this lost antihero when we crave a closer connection to him. Especially since first-time actor Marini is stellar casting.

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.

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.

At times a beautiful wandering, at other times an admirable character study, but rarely a powerful whole.

It’s an unapologetically soft ride in the slice-of-life sweepstakes, flecked with era-specific archival footage as connective tissue, but with a sneaky, gathering poignancy that prioritizes the journey over story payoffs.

What The Outfit doesn’t generate much of is organic suspense. With an air of duplicitousness telegraphed early on, and a handful of scenes coming off like information dumps instead of natural exchanges, many of the story mechanics strain for believability.

The film explores what’s funny — and terrifyingly truthful — about being wrenched into adulthood.

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

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.

Biyi Bandele's adaptation of Adichie's novel of loyalty and betrayal set against the turbulence of the 1960s Biafran war, certainly makes for an honorably propulsive wartime soap. It's just not stirring enough as historical drama.

If you’re game for an emerging filmmaking talent’s stingingly uncanny foretelling, The Pink Cloud is an arresting examination of what it can look like when existence is misshaped into a compromised destiny.

As a representative display of historical-but-reimagined players on well-worn ground, The Harder They Fall has undeniable pop, but as a movie needing character, narrative, and pacing beyond revitalized nostalgia, it’s all too often a bloody, showy mishmash that rarely holds its clichés and archetypes together with any lasting resonance.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

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

For the most part this is an engaging refresher course in what fighting the power looks like.

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

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

[A] briskly informative, convincing documentary.

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

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.

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.

Queen & Country — though often charming — has a tendency to wander and strain.

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.

Outside of its major assets, which include “I, Tonya” scene-stealer Paul Walter Hauser’s unapologetically showy performance as Jewell and Sam Rockwell’s sardonic turn as his underdog lawyer, there’s a mystifying lack of clarity to the dramatic impact this retelling is seeking.

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.

“Love, Charlie” plays like a whirlwind story, and an often entertaining one, but there’s no breathing room to process anything beyond hitting the highs and lows. We’re left in some unresolved limbo between celebrating what makes a high-end restaurant sing and considering this culinary legend’s life a cautionary tale.

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.

Something tells me a documentary on Hancock simply navigating the rigors of Edie, as well as acting it to the fullest, might have been more readily inspiring.

It's a B movie made with A-student love for the relentless thrill of bodies in brutal motion.

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.

Jack Bryan’s thorough, chilling rabbit-hole inquiry into our president’s connections to Russia — Active Measures — is as good a place as any to fuel one’s fear/outrage.

With the indie two-hander I Think We’re Alone Now, starring Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning, this talented director is stuck in neutral with the illogical, unremarkable concerns in Mike Makowsky’s ham-fisted screenplay.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Ascher is too content to let repetition of experience take over his film.

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

Though Monsters and Men isn’t the most fully realized work, its innate intelligence and matter-of-fact sensitivity are the kinds of storytelling assets we need more of, especially when the fabric of life for many continues to fray and tear in ways that demand a larger societal reassessing.

Schwentke’s grim history lesson carries an undeniable propulsiveness. But it’s ultimately too ugly a story to be truly resonant.

[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.

Though the thin mystery at the center becomes a narrative albatross, and Lillard and Gugino seem hamstrung by the schematic nature of their characters, Stewart's melancholic electricity manages to maintain its appeal.

Its low-gear celebration of fandom-inspired ingenuity, and belief in the power of creating as a reparative balm, earns it enough well-deserved smiles when things fall predictably into place in the latter stages.

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.

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

Magician may not be its own rich experience, but like Workman's many breathlessly compiled odes to the history of movies, it'll certainly spur a meaty living room film festival.

Bhargava's naturalistic approach to capturing the sights and sounds of a city in full revelry on rooftops and in the streets is colorfully vivid - reminiscent of Wong Kar-Wai's silky urban baths - but it threatens to keep the human drama at arm's length.

Though the film is well made, the all-aftermath approach to Meadowland leaves a lot — an establishing, enlightening character stability, for one thing — to be desired.

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 confused about whether it wants to be a ticking-bomb tale of heroics or a complex insider account.

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

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

A tart, seriocomic morsel of desire and doubt.

At a certain point, though, the movie runs out of eccentricity capital and becomes just another contest documentary about determined participants — in this case, mostly obsessive young white men — and the well-worn narrative of defeat or accomplishment.

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.

Clermont-Tonnerre’s emphasis on playfulness and energy is understandable, but an opportunity to bring back a layered epicness to sex on film feels lost.

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.

Writer-director Saxon’s own virtuosity, occasionally aggressive, eventually leaves our hopes for real emotions wanting, once we’ve become attuned to the dazzle.

The color riot, the polyester/shag décor and the cartoon portrayals detract. Girl Asleep thinks it’s a stylishly resonant fairy tale about identity when the primary takeaway is an exquisitely curated slide show.

Despite the pedestrian screenplay (by Jimenez and Audrey Diwan), Dujardin and Lellouche are magnetic performers who slip easily into their antagonistic roles.

The tricky brilliance of Queen of Hearts is in how el-Toukhy uses a well-worn narrative — the unsuspecting, hidden passion with the appearance of erotic freedom — to unveil what in reality is a poisonous tale of abuse.

Brown's argument is hampered, however, by the chaotic rush of information and speculation, overuse of winking archival footage of commercials and old industrial films, and Brown's charmlessness as a "what's going on?" guide.

It’s got some future-world smarts that sporadically elevate it above the junk that dominates this genre, and they help carry it through the routine spatter-and-gore moments and sci-fi clichés.

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.

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.

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.

Not an exposé, and hardly a case of sports-as-uplift, The Workers Cup feels like a toe dip when the topic calls for at least a deep wade.

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.

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.

Unlike “Spy,” which took great pains to make its cloak-and-dagger shenanigans as exciting, and thematically meaningful, as the raucous comedy around it, A Simple Favor is like two different movies, a sophisticated sisterhood lark you want more of, and a ho-hum buried-secrets murder mystery getting in the way of your good time.

Culkin's performance is never exploitative. His eyes often say everything, appearing simultaneously laser-focused and distant — he can't reconcile his brain with the world.

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.

When you won’t speak the evil of “Speak No Evil,” then a disservice has been done to the source terror and how expertly it refused to deliver us to a safe place.

There's no denying Watts' skill at a certain kind of desolate cat and mouse, but it's in the service of what is ultimately a somewhat heartless exercise.

The movie could use a little more energy — this is Paul Mazursky territory, after all, not Andrei Tarkovsky — but in its sick-but-sweet attempt to reclaim grief from the trappings of tradition, To Dust is its own well-measured godsend.

Even as the low-key mockumentary Brian and Charles impressively scales down a sci-fi concept to fable size, it neither does much to maintain its oddness nor finds that right mix of comedy and pathos to have much impact.

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.

For the most part "Matru" is neatly energetic, a mix of screwball whimsy and softball seriousness.

Unfortunately, the director’s breezy approach doesn’t always make for a captivating viewing experience.

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.

Though Peterloo brims with 19th century authenticity, from its hardscrabble interiors and stately halls of power to the quiet beauty of its rural scenes, it’s no costumes-and-decor drama — Leigh’s focus is on the rhythms of talk in all the ways it influences: as rant, argument, posturing, strained politeness, open skepticism, and full-on performance.

Predictable if measured uplift aside, Fox keeps Yossi effortlessly affecting, graced with deadpan humor and a knowingness about lonely lives.

The truth is that “Rocky IV” and Creed II sharing the same cinematic universe requires supreme suspension of disbelief. But taken as descendants of the original, “Rocky IV” is the delinquent you never talk about, while Creed II at least knows how to keep the family business humming.

That Les isn't one of LaBute's garden variety sadists is the best thing you can say about Dirty Weekend.

As you watch Argentina, it truly is about the all-as-one: the music, the dance, the light Saura provides, and the illumination these performers bring themselves.

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

Chilly yet compassionate, anchored by both a characteristically deep-set portrait of off-putting intelligence from Peter Sarsgaard and a poignant turn by Rashida Jones, it’s a delicate oddity that won’t necessarily replace any of your favorite cinematic New York couplings, but it’ll remind you why we often respond to an unlikely pairing built around smarts, sadness and hope.

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.

There’s no denying that Driver — with film after film cementing his status as a top-tier actor — is excellent at exasperated outrage, but it’s not enough emotion to save The Report from feeling like a handsomely mounted, expertly researched op-ed.

Take Me to the River is at its most interesting when zeroing in on the back-and-forth between musicians of different eras who rely on unique jam-session skills.

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

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.

The need to make an ordinary life extraordinary is so prevalent it smothers any genuine emotion from family members losing a loved one.

Crumbling nuclear families are a well-worn movie genre; you could even add “in Manhattan” to that description and the examples would be many. “Landline” is simply another one, not appreciably worse than the average, but not much better, either.

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.

Between the defensive driving and offensive behavior, and vice versa, The Road Movie is a gleeful rubbernecker’s large popcorn’s worth of crazy.

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.

A surprisingly effective slice of dystopian noir.

Baumbach’s textural/visual/sonic approach is stylish enough that even when White Noise is just churning along, there’s always a keen detail to absorb or killer observation to take in, if not an emotion to latch onto.

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

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

Even with three charismatic leads, the talky, convoluted nature of the cat-and-mouse between Zhang and Huang and their respective gangs is impossible to follow or care about, and the mix of identity comedy, cartoonish violence, philosophizing and grief over killed loved ones is hardly smooth.

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.

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.

Boseman’s roiling magnetism goes a long way toward making it all work.

Thirteen Lives may be a vivid rescue procedural first and foremost, but it’s also a testament to the guardian spirit possible in any of us.

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

It’s an unhurried reverie that’s sometimes as wonderfully sustained as a fermata but also occasionally stifling due to filmmaker Eva Husson’s dedication to that tonal approach above all else.

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

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.

“Steve,” sincere in its hardcore concern, believably acted, is too scattered and schematically plotted to fully pull us into the emotional toll and scruffy joys of this work.

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.

As tributes go, the documentary is always lively. Archival clips zip by and nobody ever gets more than a sentence or two before the film cuts away, which means it never burrows in as often as you might want it to, considering the colorful, thick life on display.

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.

There’s little doubt prison reform needs to address the severe effects of locking up kids for life, but They Call Us Monsters feels like a well-meaning skim rather than an impassioned, expertly reasoned plea for mercy.

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

As the satire retains its acridness to the very end, Sick of Myself proves itself well-aware that narcissists don’t learn lessons — they learn how to adapt.

Any caseworking suspense is drowned out by an over-abundance of visual pizazz: disjointed shootouts, arbitrary camera angles and cinematography that draws the eye to lighting patterns, not people.

The provocative noir experience that Talaash promises, with its jazzily scored, moodily lighted opening montage of a Mumbai red-light district at night, is nowhere to be found once this meandering mystery begins.

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.

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.

Though the plot turns aren't necessarily surprising and characterizations a bit facile, Wladyka manages tense moments.

It’s a bit of an irony for ¡Viva Maestro! that Braun’s having to fit unexpected events and thorny issues of arts and politics, into what was surely intended to be a straightforwardly image-burnishing biodoc, has ultimately created a better in-the-moment movie.

There may be little that’s psychologically fresh about Plainclothes, but the fact that its low-key, close-framed style suggests a taut, moody gay indie you might have seen in the ’90s works in its favor. It’s also well cast.

As gut-punch storytelling, Viva Riva! delivers much, not the least of which is the promise of an exciting new filmmaking talent.

Perhaps because in giving the jump-around view — introducing us to not just Hart (Jackman) and family, but campaign staff, and reporters from a handful of newspapers — the effect is of a scandal skimmed, rather than explored.

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

A farce of misunderstanding first, body-count nightmare second and at nearly all times a refreshingly upending horror-comedy bromance.

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.

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.

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.

It’s remarkable how Bae’s commitment to the physical mechanics of a trickily metaphoric role in no way interferes with the heart she needs to show, and vice versa.

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."

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

Two of Us is one of those artfully crafted movies that never plays as such, because its proud, beating heart is so front and center, and its faith in the power of love and desire so energizing.

Kruger is entirely commanding.

“The AI Doc” is a well-intentioned but aggravating soup of information and opinion that wants to move at the speed of machine thought.

Once We Are Still Here unsticks itself from hommage mode, it finds something cathartically funny inside the fearsome.

As admirable as it is that “Klaus” in the overall isn’t a sugar-rush cartoon fix of wisecracks and mayhem, it’s also too lazily reliant on insults and insolence as its go-to mode for comedy. But what does work is the snowy, hilly luster of this bygone-era fairy tale environment, and the seasonal soul the filmmakers have tucked inside their invented history about children’s yearly haul.

The performances... are solid, and the conceit is alluringly mind-bending without ever seeming off-puttingly brainy.

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.

The message is lost in this laughably deck-stacked journey, a movie-long version of "They started it!"

The movie’s real showcase gold lies in the magnetic appeal of screwball comedy natural Erskine (Hulu’s “PEN15”); she’s a major talent who rightly runs away with the movie, conjuring in the viewer’s head a constellation of wishful star turns to come.

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

Pintilie has a way of nudging the strangeness of her fiction/documentary hybridization so that your engagement isn’t predicated on narrative catharsis, but simply a desire for the continued frankness of it all.

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

What keeps Les Nôtres from being effective, however, is that it rarely makes the transition from coolly observed case study to compellingly messy, resonant human drama.

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.

The small industry of documentaries about Syria shouldn't deter you from the affecting pull of This Is Home: A Refugee Story, Alexandra Shiva's heartwarming if conventional portrait of four refugee Syrian families navigating new lives in Baltimore.

This soft-jab tragedy never finds the depth of expression to become a truly layered tale about choices, regrets and what we do with the rounds we have left.

It’s a globe-trotting look at the worldwide response to COVID-19, with an emphasis on the unprecedented effort to get a safe, effective vaccine quickly into billions of people.

Despite its bumpy execution and general thinness, Suitable Flesh boasts a playfulness that feels ripe for slicing up and serving anew.

One can appreciate the effort behind this well-made Bonjour Tristesse without necessarily feeling its turmoil.

Goon feels like a movie starring a gimmick, not a person.

There are scenes of nerve-jangling terror that weld you to your seat, but they’re sandwiched in between a lot that feels very much sculpted for three-act character arc effect by Greengrass and co-writer Brad Ingelsby.

Even with all the design-rich invention and admirably committed weirdness on display in “Swiss Army Man,” we’re still in the land of immature males, poor-me feelings and superpowers. While the movie focuses on one end of the body, you might be left sighing from the other.

If “The Great Beauty” was a heady, humming party you wanted to live inside, Youth — its melancholy and splendor too often at odds — never rises above feeling like a pretty, meandering gallery show.

What’s attractive about revisiting The Europeans now is how it’s more indie-flavored, its pleasurable finery and delicate ironies — even the filmic stiltedness — befitting a novel whose lightness of tone James himself recognized when he subtitled it “A Sketch.”

Although Whiteley's unrestricted there-ness effortlessly yields an avuncular striver... it means little when the viewpoint is so hermetic.

In much the way "Crystal Fairy" blossomed when we were snapped out of our chuckling repulsion, Nasty Baby rights itself intriguingly when Silva pushes his characters into unknown territory and lifestyle is imposed upon by life.

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 all leaves "Drewe" and its often jarring turns of motivation and tone - feeling haphazard and cartoony, and the whole thing more a vibrant mess than something comically disarming.

In the end, there’s a point about black struggle alongside white dominance in The Cotton Club Encore that Coppola can’t get quite right because, ultimately, atmosphere won out over emotion.

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.

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.

Between the forced artistry and the confused tones, it leaves this well-intentioned tale of transgressive imagination and transactional humanity more temporary in its effect than permanent.

Light, frenetic and anecdote-rich, it's the kind of back-patting Hollywood toast to the guy behind the guy that's breezy good fun if you don't examine it too hard.

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.

A well-cast, modestly affecting drama of the kind studios regularly programmed in the before-IP times, it boasts a generous heart gently dusted with life’s complications as it beats a familiar rhythm of easygoing redemption.

For all the movie’s crisp attention to bifurcated lives, The History of Sound more aptly resembles a painstakingly dry still life than a moving picture.

This is a movie that could probably have done with less chronological vérité or media moments and more wide-ranging interviews drawing out observations from Prakash, Gunn-Wright, Rojas and AOC, because whenever we do get to hear them, we can see how smart, interesting and perceptive they are, and why they’re needed for the challenges ahead.

A capably rendered, urgently argued portrait in courage that never quite rises above curious-footnote status.

An attempt to counter noisy, hyper effects-laden alien invasion flicks with something teasing, indie and good for you. Instead, it's like a pendulum swing too far in the other direction.

It’s an atmosphere piece first and foremost, and an effective one. But the characters, particularly the teens, feel primarily like micro-vignette archetypes of scattershot resonance rather than flesh-and-blood figures forming a tapestry in a taut tale.

Flowers is too exquisitely formalist — symmetric framings followed by willfully asymmetric shots — to ever feel flushed with real feeling.

Unlocking the Cage, despite its cameras being on hand for a historic animal rights push, shouldn’t be confused for some hot-button doc ready to slap you into sensibility about its fight. Hegedus/Pennebaker are too smart to get ahead of themselves about something they clearly believe in, when simply hewing to a can-do guy provides enough momentum.

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

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.

Just when the central characters’ fascinating messiness achieves peak interest, you realize this movie’s earnest commercial shimmer is never going to segue into a denser, darker poetry.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Roth, who is no Michael Haneke (or even Adrian Lyne), seems unconcerned with creating genuine tension or digging into an allegory of moral consequence.

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

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

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.

Though not without its mini-heartbreaks and melancholic turns, North Sea Texas explores emergent sexuality and first love with a refreshing optimism.

Even with a thinly drawn lead, Blizzard of Souls maintains an undeniably raw power as a small country’s coming-of-age story, told through a bright-eyed wannabe hero and forged in a maelstrom of death and disillusionment.

The movie is an arty lark of ambiguous entertainment value, pulsing with melancholy. It's rarely less than interesting visually or tonally, thanks in large part to Korine's prurient sense of humor and the rich location textures and Crayola sweep provided by gifted cinematographer Benoit Debie ("Enter the Void").

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?

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

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

As push-pull friendships in churning waters go, Mia’s and Gianna’s is the visceral heart of Brühlmann’s film, which otherwise isn’t the greatest mix of teen angst and body horror you’re likely to see, but also nowhere near the worst.

Heightened but airless, this “Castle” is like a checklist of the novel’s peculiarities, rather than its singular soul brought to life.

Enthusiasm isn't exactly a replacement for good sense or basic skills, and the film's truest mystery is why no one pulled Metcalf aside and suggested he keep all this to himself.

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.

When “Convergence” feels rushed for trying to squeeze in a global snapshot, its impact is diluted.

Even the landscape speaks to an emotional duality. It captivates with its natural beauty and sweep at the same time it tragically underscores the remoteness of places like St. Joseph’s, where evil could keep secret.

Though smoothly edited and breezily humane, 11/8/16 is still little more than a depiction of parallel roller coasters, one of which many voters felt was headed into a shop of horrors.

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.

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.

At its richest and most riveting, when it’s seizing your breath or making you laugh or opening your eyes, Call Jane is about what it takes to come to that realization about true liberation, and what it means to see it through.

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.

While her résumé of fantastical roles makes her seemingly right for this kind of part, Gillan is directed into a pair of off-puttingly stiff performances, more skit-appropriate than feature-rich.

As with a lot of filmmakers transitioning to long-form narrative after success with bite-sized flash, “The Assessment” is a commanding mood piece until our thirst for deeper emotional and thematic resonance reveals its shortcomings.

Unfortunately, Spot the Painting is this wooden movie’s only sustaining thrill, because the investigation plot rarely generates any lasting interest.

A tender city romance about about gentrification and Black melancholy, “Love, Brooklyn” brings together appealing actors and the charms of New York’s ever-changing borough into soft focus. It feels a little too carefully arranged to ever truly get under your skin as a modern-day affair about disillusioned hearts.

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.

Whether the arc of Marya’s fate feels overly engineered to you or not, Quartet retains its power to unsettle in its accumulation of cuts and bruises, the rare Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala effort that mines a glamorized past not for nuanced dignity but for a kind of elegant, honest sordidness.

The first half is a cautiously dread-inducing tour de force as the suspicious interlopers parse the shiny, happy members for signs of a darker version of paradise... The second half, however, when all hell breaks loose a little too quickly, is the disappointment.

This may be the first movie to apply the Chekhov’s gun rule to vultures, a portent sure to satisfy the more horror-minded ticket buyers, not to mention anyone else eager for the kind of back-to-basics survival excitement “Fall” refreshingly serves up in this dreary age of apocalyptic popcorn emptiness.

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.

It can feel more like an audio/visual presentation for a decarbonization conference than an impassioned, artful work building its message to a fever pitch.

The Hawkins brothers have an envelopingly moody visual style that strives for offbeat touches, at times easily conjuring the existential threat in desolate areas. But that can't make up for the story deficiencies and character superficiality in the script.

Big swings can make for big misses, and that’s the situation writer-director Quinn Shephard’s internet satire-screed “Not Okay” finds itself in, lining up all kinds of juicy targets regarding fame and shame in our social media age, but proving not so discerning about character, humor, and story when it comes to following-through.

If it struggles to make sense emotionally (or logistically), it benefits from the confident pace of a literate, mainstream entertainment, and the tactical showmanship of star Bryan Cranston, who’s made something of a specialty out of the average guy going through a metamorphosis.

Commendably entertaining.

Philippe winds up with a curatorial hodgepodge; the lovingly cited connections about shifting realities, artifice, searching and all those plush Lynchian curtains never coalesce into anything unifying, and sometimes get repeated by different narrators.

Labyrinth of Lies too often feels like machine-stamped issue cinema from a moldy Hollywood playbook.

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

Johnson’s well-rehearsed poise and Penn’s coasting boldness make them seem like the stars of a commercial for a scent called Common Ground rather than flesh-and-blood people. At times, they hardly seem to be sharing the same car interior, leaving Daddio feeling like a safe space, when what it needs is danger.

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

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

Warriors is a bruising, relentless experience, one more tiring than inspiring.

Given its overabundance of empty shock humor, the movie seems afraid to be about much of anything except its toy monkey’s prankish body count.