Robert Abele

The movie offers hope in the form of a survivors’ network started by another maligned victim who attempted suicide.

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

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

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

Keene made only a couple of films in her abbreviated life, but The Juniper Tree is absorbing enough to make one rue there weren’t more.

Rodeo takes its blind corners and open roads with plenty of ferocity, but also a necessary compassion for the searching force of nature at its center.

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

Power could just as easily have benefited from the docuseries treatment, although at under 90 minutes, it lands plenty of hard truths and harder questions.

Even when the epidemic of violence touches a beloved character, Ness’ careful quilting of compassion and action across her years of filming suggests a fight that won’t diminish for these citizens.

[A] stunningly assured, darkly gripping first feature.

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.

Satisfyingly emotional without ever feeling sensationalized.

In one sense, Sundown is a bleak window into the corrosive effect wealth and privilege have on relationships and the psyche, and even with a final reveal that fills in some of why Neil is the way he is, it still doesn’t feel that explanatory. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing for this taut, confidently unsettling film.

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.

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.

She may have a terrible co-star inside trying to upstage her, but with humor, strength and messy honesty, Blair makes a memorable case for why her show must go on.

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.

Decidedly not for everyone. But for those who like a deep dive art film that caresses the dark and calls to mind the mesmerizing pull of Carl Dreyer, Sivan’s movie offers a powerfully enigmatic experience.

Reality reaches beyond Winner’s experience on one momentous Saturday afternoon to prod us all into contemplating our own relationship to actions over words, and the powerfully wielded consequences that keep many — but thankfully, not all of us — from doing nothing.

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.

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

NightLights achieves something admirably genuine about the queasy mixture of anguish and joy attached to caretaking for the most needy of loved ones.

Tremblay’s template for on-the-run suspense is effective, primarily by avoiding the exploitative in favor of scenes that drive home the feeling of lives susceptible to being uprooted.

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

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.

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.

The overall effect of the film is a case study in how dispassionate leaders sow mistrust in their most needy citizens.

In its gently atmospheric camerawork and nicely underplayed moments between Mike and Chris, Resolution manages to keep its eerier moments surprising and its emotional life arresting.