Robert Abele

A tart, seriocomic morsel of desire and doubt.

There’s little that’s not dispiriting about Among the Believers and its measured, direct entrée into a closed world of hopeless boys and girls memorizing the Koran, but forbidden from learning its meanings.

What ultimately stands is a portrait of a woman for whom the term "cultural ambassador" was meant, whose dynamic range and earth-wide smile made the words and sounds pouring from her like a hand extended, a heart exposed, a story of the world made achingly real.

A guarded Jessica Chastain and a rumpled Peter Sarsgaard make mysterious, sweetly dissonant music together in Memory, a touch-and-go drama about connection that’s as steeped in discomfort as it is cautiously hopeful about one’s ability to find peace within it.

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.

Think Guy Maddin as the long-lost seventh Python. But it’s also one of the more vivid and amusing excursions in a year marked by unclassifiable realities and the need for diverting art.

Like any craftily layered confection, what at first presents itself as colorfully whipped reveals itself to be a more tangy, lasting bite.

As it plays out, it’s only a hard road for these swept-up, damaged lovers, whom Klein and his actors treat with blessedly non-exploitative honesty.

A documentary that shouldn't have to be made, about a law that needn't exist, explored via a crime that could have been avoided: 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets is a thought-provoking, mournful experience, perhaps more so in the wake of the killings in Charleston, S.C.

Akin, a Swedish filmmaker whose family originally hails from Georgia, knows this is a story tinged with sadness for lives that have been ostracized and marginalized. But his wider view starts from a place of optimism about what curiosity engenders.

What this installment energetically proves is that you can ruffle the feathers of a totemic tale and still capture what’s good, galloping fun in Dumas’ storytelling: nefarious plots to be untangled, villains to be exposed and principled heroes to shoulder the risk of certain death while they tease each other mercilessly with heaps of panache.

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.

It makes for one of the more alive portraits of artists in the moment you’re likely to see, a thumping gallery show forged from survival, and assembled out of passion and need.

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.

By the end, DuVernay has, with editor Spencer Averick’s fleet stitching, massaged her adaptation’s various threads into a collage of insight and emotion worth treasuring.

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.

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.

This is when the movie earns its hushed exclusivity and kitschy title, when we see an art form bridge generations with a strange mixture of grace, joy and melancholy.

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

The Friend strips the pet-movie genre from the easy appeal of mawkishness, bringing it closer to what an ongoing dialogue between lonely species stumbling into connection actually feels like.

Anchored by Weixler’s and Pearson’s natural charm, Chained for Life stands up as both a quiet ode to the experimental, dreamlike spirit of moviemaking and a seriocomic corrective to sentimentalized sideshow portrayals.

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

If your recipe for outrage needs a villainous presence, Peck isn’t interested in stoking it that way, and shouldn’t need to. That’s not the oxygen Silver Dollar Road, building off a 2019 ProPublica article by Lizzie Presser, wants to breathe. Rather, it’s the warmth, togetherness and persistence of a family fighting a ruthlessly unfair system, holding onto each other as forces move to expel them.

it's Nowar's ability to tell his tale so firmly from the viewpoint of his quickly growing-up protagonist, and to elicit so unforced a performance from Eid, that may be the most impressive achievement of this intimate, well-paced film.

Life and Nothing More wants to be a window where no part is unsmudged or unnecessarily ornamented, and the view is remarkable for showing what you rarely see in two movie hours: a respect for the naturally compelling immediacy of the everyday struggle.

Peter and the Farm is ultimately a portrait of whatever the opposite of “getting back to nature” is: the cycle of the land as a circle of hell.

A striking and maddening delivery system for art house creepinesss.

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.”