Robert Abele

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.

The supremely watchable pairing of these magnetic actors is what helps lift this lyrically crafted frontier love story above the usual efforts to restore the genre’s appeal.

The edgy appeal of Erupcja is in the way it maps humans as molecules and electrons, fizzed by location, inspired by connection, driven to hover, fuse and release. The characters may get bounced around a bit and some will feel stranded, but you’ll know you’ve been taken somewhere new by this charming indie.

If anything, you want even more stories from these guys who started out as rock and roll dreamers, transitioned to individual contractors, then came to feel part of something larger than themselves.

As the memory of it washes back over you, Omaha lingers, like a devastating short story — devastating because it’s about a pained father for whom the road ahead only seems to get narrower.

Arctic has the do-or-die chops to affirm Mikkelsen’s rugged allure, as well as its young filmmaker’s sensitive-showman promise.

Censored Voices is a soul debriefing of sorts. The soldiers' tales of killing the captured and uprooting entire villages lead them to question whether the war was more about expansion than survival.

Informally sketched but deeply felt, Bradley Beesley's documentary Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo mingles with the spirited cowgirl inmates who compete in Oklahoma's annual state penitentiary rodeo.

A surprisingly tender and humorous shuffle down a weighty road.

The result is something refined, naturalistic, specific, enigmatic and funny — not unlike an Eisenberg story, for one thing — but also akin to any trip one might make in a reflective yet anxious state of mind, with people you think you know but might be unsure about.

As a first film, it is incredibly accomplished, its influences (French New Wave, Wong Kar-Wai) apparent but integrated.

The movie is practically a textbook about how ravenous corporations and feckless government can strip-mine the souls of workers, and replace them with a political narrative about their problems that keeps reality forever hidden behind a fine, dusty fog.

It’s all a very believable, close-quarters theater of exhaustion and pain, with moments of lightness and warmth that only add to the difficulty of Mickey’s predicament, and all of it captured in alluring fixed images of depth and color by cinematographer Conor Murphy.

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.

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.

The artfully kaleidoscopic nightmare of a collapsed state has rarely been so imaginatively portrayed. The unintentionally awkward moments come from a few of the more overwrought voice-over performances, in conjunction with the often-pinched rendering of human faces.

Summer Pasture has an earthy intimacy and compassion for its subjects that will have you thinking about their plight long after they've packed up and moved on for winter.

Prophet's Prey is a sobering reminder that tyrannical monsters who hide behind religion can be homegrown too.

The result is a sharply assembled multiformat collage of memory and investigation that starts like a trip any of us might make into a what-made-him-tick past, but ends in the present with scattered feelings and tenuous bonds.

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.

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.

In charting that road from disorienting fragility to determined independence, Ebrahimi serves up a memorably nuanced performance.

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.

Sometimes, The Unknown Country may be more a feeling than a movie, but that’s more than satisfactory. Attentive and artful, Maltz is a talent to watch, and in Gladstone, she’s fortunate enough to have a star (and guide) whose presence binds us to all this soulful roaming.

Wang approaches storytelling through the internal weather of his characters and long, fixed takes marked by naturalistic dialogue — blink and you might not catch a time-fracturing, nuanced gesture, or crucial piece of information.

The atmospheric heft of Il Futuro is invariably more bracing than oppressive, and in the complexly stoic Martelli and masterfully craggy, haunted Hauer, an alluringly opaque pas de deux of loss and uncertainty is wonderfully realized.

It’s Klein at his most conservatively verité and least pointedly judgmental — he was a fan of the game and setting, after all — but he still offers up a tapestry of personalities, playing and performing that captures what is ineffably beautiful and edgy about tennis, at a time when it was as popular as it had ever been.

What obviously matters to Stewart is the totality of experience and The Chronology of Water, arty and naturalistic in equal measure, is no toe-dip into directing — it’s deep-end stuff from start to finish.