Robert Abele

That measured approach, exemplified in star Billerbeck’s arresting simplicity and the many fine supporting turns around him, allows us to clock Nanning’s growing awareness of what matters to others, what’s impossible to ignore and how to interpret an unjust world that’s still full of beauty and kindness if you know where to look. Which, of course, includes inside himself.

Directing his first documentary feature, Corbijn, a longtime music photographer who made the Joy Division docudrama “Control,” is well suited to this material’s creative highs and human dimensions.

Filmed by the great Romanian cinematographer and frequent Loznitsa collaborator Oleg Mutu in long, patient takes that intensify each sequence’s brittle contrasts, Donbass coalesces into an unflinching dispatch from a state of embattlement both region-specific and 21st century-pervasive.

Is the relentlessness too much? At two and a half hours, perhaps, but inventiveness abounds.

Though its vibe is often too meandering, A Kid Like Jake shows that even the most accepting of environments aren’t immune to the vulnerabilities and worries coursing through any well-intended parent’s soul.

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.

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.

Garrone achieves something uniquely colorful, disturbing and trenchant about self-perception in an increasingly fishbowl-like society.

As adult animation goes, Birdboy is its own weird, woolly and surprisingly sensitive foray into the grimmer corners of life. But at its best, when Vázquez and Rivero hit the right mix of melancholy and acidic in their battered fever dream, it plays like a troubled schoolkid’s secret drawings brought to colorful, if unapologetically horrific, life.

“Cassandro,” which recalls the grabbed verve of a ‘60s-era verité snapshot, charts the reluctant dimming of this extravagant icon with affectionate energy and lasting poignance.

Kore-eda furthers his storied reputation as an artist humanely attuned to what transpires between those who know each other all too well.

West, one of the genre’s true artisans of sticky dread, certainly has fun seeding a handsomely mounted and shot (by Eliot Rockett) period melodrama with the trappings of imminent violence, from the crimson red wallpaper to a maggot-swarmed suckling pig. But Pearl rarely justifies itself as a franchised standalone built on the early psychosis of its bloodthirsty, unstable ingenue.

By turns opaque, harsh, self-aware, indulgent and wickedly funny. It's never dull, pummeling you with its prickly smarts.

Hypnotic and heartbreaking, Identifying Features is a feature debut to marvel at, but only once you’re able to shake off the bone-deep chills emanating from Mexican filmmaker Fernanda Valadez’s disorienting tale of a mother’s search for her missing son.

While the boxing is kinetically directed, Morrison grasps that the movie’s fiercest stands are taken outside the ring, when Claressa — faced with tough choices about her future — asserts herself to the people who need to hear it.

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.

The story that Kiss the Future tells — culminating in U2’s 1997 concert in Sarajevo, two years after the Dayton Peace Agreement — offers an admirably potent blend of darkness and light. Specifically, the light that can emerge from darkness.

Sometimes an experiment feels like just an experiment, and that’s where the well-intentioned query The Hottest August ultimately lands.

A wonderfully unforced, lightly intimate experience existing in a dramatic arena between observational nonfiction and bare-bones theater’s nowhere-to-go focus.

What’s surprising is how ethereally effective Birney’s DIY gestalt is as a reverse state of consciousness: an outside where before there was only inside.

Selected by Sweden as its entry for the foreign language Oscar, the refreshingly offbeat, sturdily handled Border is not just unlikely to resemble any of its subtitled competition but also anything else you’ll see this year.

As snapshots go of bright kids facing the next step, Try Harder! is winning enough, but considering how much more there is to follow up on, here’s hoping it’s only part one.

The overtly graphic isn’t Glavonic’s visual style, but rather a cold, more powerful image seepage — what a man’s physicality says about complicity, and what a shot of the muddied ground near a hosed-down truck says about what war does to the ground, a land and the soul.

An acrobatic, larkish globetrotting adventure about paintings and psychotherapy that defies easy categorization save inclusion on any adult animation fan’s must-see list, its slinky, colorful pleasures and wittily referential joie de vivre are like a lifeline in a season when the art house is typically beholden to severe, award-seeking bids to depress you.

[Labaki] finds a magically resonant space between documentary-like vibe and dramatic performance that honors the characters’ inherent humanity while memorably framing the wretched circumstances that dictate their actions.

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

The man is the movie, and the long stretch of lived road Frank describes as an immigrant grappling with his adopted country’s faults is revealing, at times heartbreakingly so.

Reptile, a studiously atmospheric, layer-peeling mystery from director and co-writer Grant Singer, foregrounds Del Toro — playing a calloused detective investigating a young woman’s murder — in a way that makes you want more of him. But also, regrettably, less of movies like “Reptile,” which tries to match its star’s unpredictable magnetism with a forced eeriness, only growing more ponderous and unfocused, like a case getting colder.