Robert Abele

To the less patient viewer, the lack of clarity on the finer points of high finance and characters’ backgrounds and not getting period-orienting news updates about the political situation, might seem confounding. But Azor works without them, because those details would only disrupt the artfully portentous chill Fontana gets from the pitch-perfect performances and design, and Gabriel Sandru’s cinematography.

Hell or High Water is that rare offering that both feels old-fashioned in its action-thriller gratification and in-the-moment about everything else.

2000 Meters to Andriivka is a war chronicle like no other.

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

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

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

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

Genèse concludes as a sober reminder that the young always feel intensely, but that the years between the crush that shines and the ardor that confounds are short ones, indeed.

Friedland’s acute debut feature, drawn from her experience in the memory-care field, is a small miracle of realigned empathy, turning away from the condescension and easy sentiment of so many narratives about late-in-life adaptation.

The spiritual truth of Haynes’ spellbinding The Velvet Underground is that ultimately it’s about the thing that can’t be described, that defies parsing when gifted outcasts make great art — it’s to be experienced.

As deliberate as the image-making often is, it’s always to train us in looking as the brothers do, to consider the breadth of life and interconnectedness in our world: Wherever you are, All That Breathes is asking, can you see what’s there, what needs your attention?

It’s easy to be reminded of silent film’s who-needs-words heyday while watching Mami Wata, even when the foreboding sound design is doing its part and the actors are delivering their sparely written lines as if their characters’ lives depended on it.

It humanely, intelligently questions the very nature of our desire to make sense of the past with the tools of the present, when the human mind remains the most aggressively obliterating battlefield of all.

With Descendant, Brown wisely chooses to be respectfully, poetically alert instead of imposing, as her use of archival footage shot by Hurston suggests: She’s adding to a pioneering Black filmmaker’s anthropological empathy, updating the conversation, witnessing the witnessers.

If Scorsese’s 2005 Dylan documentary “No Direction Home” was the exhaustive origins portrait that reveals how a man and myth were launched, “Rolling Thunder Revue” is the home movie party that energizes and humanizes while still preserving a counterculture god’s mystique.

The notion of Naples as a place in perpetual contact with its ghostly, grand history, whether you’re a citizen living on top of it or a visitor passing through, is what gives Gianfranco Rosi’s patient, eccentric documentary Pompei: Below the Clouds its strangely beautiful atmosphere of reflection and restlessness.

Hope isn’t about getting you to cry, even as some of its characters occasionally do, but rather giving you an invigorating, even uplifting sense of what hearts can do under duress; nothing is forcibly tragic here, just experienced fully and openly.

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

In its atmosphere of gnawing discomfort with imposed secrecy about bad men, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” is a uniquely dimensional work of character and temporality. Nyoni’s brilliance is in portraying the gap between public and private, past and present, as spaces where submerged feelings awkwardly co-exist, leaving nobody able to feel truly whole.

Oakley’s interrogating approach of a moral moment and McEwen’s portrayal of see-through armor help us understand the viewpoint of someone who was never going to be a hero, but who could tragically internalize a rising hatred that might upend her life at any moment.

If there’s a quibble with this graphically imagined The Tragedy of Macbeth, it’s one common to the movies Coen made with his brother: It’s ruthless, intelligent, and entertaining, and mightily drinkable as filmmaking, without necessarily raising the emotional temperature past a clinical, grim efficiency. Often, even with the never-not-human Washington going for it, dazzlingly so.

In its simple, generous spirit of giving these creatures palpable narrative power, there’s a profundity: Flow might only be imagining their coping skills without us, but it’s a charming, poignant vision of community and perseverance we could stand to be inspired by.

In its lived-in quality and gathering churn, Good One is a dream of an indie, from the craft in every frame to the humor, epiphanies and mysteries that gird its portraiture.

The fertility of Shults' image-making and storytelling skills is almost breathtaking, and much of Krisha draws on the subconscious power of his direction in tandem with Krisha Fairchild's mesmerizing turn.

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

Marriages have been used before as prisms of a wider critique. But Loveless has a careful alchemy of psychological acuity and societal insight that imbues nearly every shot (a close-up of a face, an epic vista, a tension-filled pan) with a gathering insight into the ripple effects of turning private miseries into petty wars.

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